Managing Remote Teams & Scaling To 100+ Employees!

Do you want to learn how to scale a remote company from five people or under to more than hundreds of people, this is exactly what I did. And this video is going to teach you everything I learned from building a fully remote company, one of the fastest growing companies in the United States, and everything I learned about scaling this remote team from five people to where it’s at, for hundreds of people. Now, this is an eight figure company, something that us faced and had a combination of us employees, international employees, and everything in between, I’m going to talk about the three main tips that I learned for scaling a remote company, and what you can use to implement whether you’re looking to go from five employees to 10, or 15. And everything in between. Today’s gonna be the video about the top three scaling tips for building a remote company with a strong infrastructure culture, and something that’s going to make money as you scale and grow. So let’s go ahead and dig into number one. So starting off with number one, probably the most important thing with building a fully remote team is company culture. Now, why does company culture matter? When you have things like profit scaling systems, everything like that, company, culture matters, because if you don’t hire the right people, if you don’t build the right culture, you’re gonna have a weak foundation to build off of, and there’s gonna be a misalignment in the employees, the back of your company is not going to see the vision of the company is not going to help your scaling techniques grow and implement all the things that matter like building systems, we’re using the right software, all that stuff’s gonna be negated if you don’t have the right company culture. And if you don’t have the right team, so starting off with your first few hires, this is going to be something that’s detrimental. So your first group of people you get on board are essentially going to make or break your scaling, this is going to be something that you need to spend a lot of time on your first initial hires. And the same couldn’t be more true. 

Hire slowly and fire fast. If somebody’s not going to fit your company culture, your vision, then you need to fire them, because they’re not going to be a good fit for your long term growth. And they’re going to be a hinderance and actually growing and scaling your team. But a lot of this is going to start at the first stage. Before you get to any of this, you need to think about what is your long term vision for your company? And to what type of company culture do you want to build? 

Do you want to build something that’s going to be suit and ties when you’re doing zoom meetings? Or are you going to be okay with people showing up to their their one on one meetings with their bosses in their pajamas? You need to dictate this and you didn’t make sure that company culture is clearly defined from day one. So how do you actually make company culture better one after you’ve already defined a clear definition of the culture, and the vision that you want to build is some of the best ways are doing non work activities, whether that’s in person or remotely, I love the idea of getting people in your company in different departments to have virtual coffees, maybe you’re doing groups of stuff where they’re doing games or non work activities where these calls are virtual, but only 10 to 15% of it should be work related, the other part should be focused on something else. The other essential thing that I’ve seen, you can’t replace the in person meetings, you have to have at least once a year, an in person meeting where the whole team or at least the upper level management is meeting together on site, and you’re doing activities. And this balance should be 50% work stuff 50%, you know, on site fun activities, where you’re just getting to know each other a little bit better. The reason this is so important is because you’re going to feel more comfortable with each other in the work environment. And it’s going to make that communication process when you’re on different sides of the world a lot more streamlined. 

So it’s going to also help reinforce that vision, it’s going to reinforce that company culture that you want to build. I personally recommend people doing remote retreats at least once a quarter. So that way everyone is meeting together in person. And this is going to help build a much more sustainable and strong remote company culture. So internal communication and internal marketing is one of the most important things that you need to have structured and implemented before you start scaling your remote team. Just think about this. If you’re trying to communicate with five people to go to 10 people, it’s not going to be just a 50% increase, the communication lines are actually going to be around three or four times more difficult just because there’s more people in line. Now when you go from 10 people to 100. If you don’t have streamlined communication processes, and internal marketing, it’s going to become extremely more difficult to get communication and to just let everyone know what exactly is going on. 

Now a common example of this, especially with a remote team is different time zones. Now a lot of times when I was helping build this remote company, we would have meetings where there’s people on three or four different time zones, and this alone would make the work process a lot more difficult. So If you’re going to build a world wide remote company, you really need to have a streamlined process for communication, whether that’s with your team by using slack, which is going to cut down on slow response times versus email, utilizing tools like loom, where instead of getting on a phone call, you can just record a short video asking a question and send it over to the individual. That way, they can reply to you right away, without having to have all this back and forth with call bookings. The third thing is having internal meetings, I hate the back and forth, you have to go through with trying to set up a call, because at the end of the day, sometimes you’re gonna have to have some one on one meetings. But a lot of times this can be very frustrating. And a lot of times, the easiest way is to just book a call through a company calling, utilizing Calendly, or HubSpot calls or any of these platforms where you can go in with a little click see the availability for other people on your team and just go ahead and schedule a call. So I love that process for internal communication. But what about internal marketing, essentially, marketing is telling what the company is going on promoting all the cool features all the cool new events, because if you send out an email, even though it’s going to be an internal urgent mark, email, only a small percentage of people are actually going to fully read and understand that email. Maybe it’s 70%. But with 100 people, that’s going to be 70 people and 30 people who aren’t having any idea of what’s actually going on. Maybe a better idea is to send weekly recurring emails and have a weekly update call promoting this in different areas, having a checklist of people who actually watch the full video, that way, you know that at least everyone knows what’s going on inside the company. So you need to really think about this. Anytime you send a message, you got to understand that a small percentage of people aren’t going to thoroughly read that. Now, maybe those are the people that you need to cut from your team. Or maybe you need to implement a system where it’s going to be a little bit easier for them to understand what’s going on.

So another important thing for building a remote company is setting clear expectations and KPIs. Now what is a KPI, a KPI is a key performance indicator. And these can be things like if an email is sent from a customer, you need to be replying to them within 24 hours, maybe for internal communication, any slack messages should be responded to within four hours if they’re sent during the working hours of your company. So you need to outline and clearly set all these expectations from day one before you start scaling your remote team. And the reason is, if these are not clear that people are going to have a different approach to communication, one individual on your team, I think it’s acceptable to respond to emails within two to three days, while another person might think it’s acceptable to send a reply within four to five days. So if you don’t have a clear expectation of what’s required, and you don’t have any system to monitor this, then it’s going to be really difficult to really scale because everything is going to need that strong foundation to build off of. So have all these clear expectations and guidelines clearly documented and have a process for if people aren’t meeting these, for example, sometimes people aren’t going to show up to meetings that are important. And that they should be, there should be some sort of consequence process for this. Maybe the first one is a warning, the second one has some sort of official consequences. And then the third one, they’re potentially getting fired. 

Or there’s some other process that they need to go through retraining, and why it’s so important to show up to meetings on time and ahead of schedule. So you need to make sure that you have all these KPIs and expectations from day one. Because if you don’t have it set from day one, things are gonna get really messy. So the third and final thing with building and scaling a row team is profit sharing or figuring out a financial incentive to keep people motivated. So profit sharing is essentially paying somebody a base salary, let’s say 50% is coming from a base salary, and then 50% of their profit, or their income is coming from some type of profit sharing. So if the company is doing very well, you can set certain metrics that everything above that they’re getting a percentage of that. So that way the company is very invested in fully growing because their salary is going to be tied to the company growth. Now I think this structure works very well for these kind of low to mid size companies meaning 20 to 50 people, after that, it becomes a little bit hard to have such a huge impact where you can actually impact your profit sharing amount. Now at a company of 1000s of people, it’s going to be much harder for an individual employee to feel like they have an impact on the company’s growth, where a smaller company is going to have a much bigger impact per employee. So I think the structure works very well and the 50 employees and below but above that become a little bit complicated. So profit sharing can be a great way to align that stick and carrot to make sure that your team is growing at the same growth rate of the company. 

So some of the upsides of profit sharing is one it’s going to really align that motivation. as the company grows, it’s going to incentivize people to continue growing, to continue putting in more work and effort, because their direct payment is tied to that profit share. And essentially, this is going to really align the sentence for the entire company to continue growing and making the company as profitable as possible. So some of the downsides to profit sharing is not every quarter or every year is going to be a growth year, I’ve seen some years where there’s downturn, and this is going to result in massive churn. So let’s imagine a scenario where the company doesn’t hit their profit sharing quotas, and they’re only getting that base salary. In this example, alone, a lot of times people aren’t gonna stick around because they can lead to other companies that are going to pay them a much higher salary than what they’re getting at their base salary. 

So a lot of times profit sharing works when there’s growth years and growth quarters. But a lot of times, it can backfire when you don’t have a system set up for these down months or downward trends, so if they’re not getting a good base salary, you have to be prepared for potentially, these individuals not sticking around in those tough times. So you can potentially expect to lose some of your best employees because they’re not going to stick around for a low paycheck. In conclusion, it’s extremely important to build these three foundations, because that’s gonna give you a much sturdy foundation to build and scale remote team pass 100 People pass 1000 people. If you really want to learn more about scaling remote teams, leave a comment below. Maybe you utilize some software systems, which are extremely important to growing a remote team. Let me know what some of your favorite software or tricks are for growing your own personal team. And don’t forget to subscribe. I’m putting out new videos pretty much every day. And make sure you tap that bell notification icon to learn when new videos are being posted and publish take care and have a wonderful rest of your day.

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