Founding the World's Biggest Remote Work Conference - Running Remote

The Outdoor Biz Podcast

The Outdoor Biz Podcast:    00:00:01    I've been playing outdoors since I was a kid, standing by the front door at around two years old, hollering side side, trying to get my mom to let me go play outside. Now, after 30 plus years working in the outdoor business, I'm dropping insider conversations every week with brand leaders, guides, marketers, CEOs, and others to make the outdoor business a trillion dollar juggernaut that drives product innovation, revenue, and public policy. For everything outdoors, I'm Rick Saez. Welcome to the Outdoor Biz Podcast, available wherever you get your podcasts.  

Introduction: Welcome to Badass Digital Nomads, where we're pushing the boundaries of remote work and travel, all while staying grounded with a little bit of old school philosophy, self-development, and business advice from our guests.

Kristin: You know, critics of remote work say that you need meetings and face-to-face interaction in order to get things done. But we all know that communication and community are two of the most important factors for success in a location independent lifestyle. So every time you listen to an episode of this or any podcast that you find value in, I challenge you to share the wealth. Take a moment to think of one person in your professional or personal network who might benefit from listening in. Then share it with them and tell them why. Doing this will help you absorb and apply the info that most resonated with you from the episode, putting it into practice in your own life while delivering value to someone you care about. And with that, let's get on with today's show.  

Kristin:    00:01:47    Hi everyone, and welcome to another episode of Badass Digital Nomads. My guest today is Liam Martin, who is a serial entrepreneur who runs the website, Staff.com, one of the most popular time tracking and productivity software platforms out there. He's also a co-organizer of the world's largest remote work conference Running Remote. Liam is an avid proponent of remote work and has been published in Forbes, Inc. Mashable, TechCrunch Fast Company, the Wall Street Journal and more. Liam is a strong advocate of the remote work movement and is involved in empowering workers around the world to work where they want when they want. Liam currently lives in Canada, but travels three to six months out of the year due to his ability to work wherever he likes. He chooses a new place to travel a few times a year, but spends most of his time between Austin, Las Vegas and Ubud Bali.  

Kristin:    00:02:54    On today's episode, Liam and I talked about how he got into remote work, how he came up with the idea for the Running Remote conference, who it's for, who should attend, and he shares some of his tips and insights into how prospective remote employees can make themselves more valuable in the remote economy skills that all remote employees should have. And he also shares some of his travel stories and tips with us. Enjoy. I found that a lot of people are really interested in so many aspects of remote work. They're interested in how people become remote, like how they make that transition from a traditional job to a remote job or how they start their own companies. And then they're also interested in how those companies operate and then how people's lifestyles are in this context. So that's what I find also myself. So interesting and dynamic about remote work is that work you as the organizer of this conference, you also have a personal story of how you came to be interested in this field and what, you know, what types of problems you saw and what kind of frustrations that you had. So can you go back a little bit to the beginning as to how you became so passionate about this, this industry?  

Podcast Interview:

Liam:    00:04:19    Yeah, I mean, that can come back to time. Doctor, which is the, the tech company that I co-founded with my, um, my co-founder, Rob. So that tool is specifically built to be able to manage remote teams. And we had actually, or rather I had been running an online tutoring company at that point. And the problem that I had with the online tutoring company was we had a couple dozen tutors throughout North America and Europe, but I would bill a student for 10 hours, but then the student would tell me, well, I only worked with this tutor for five hours. And then I'd go to the tutor and say, did you work with Jimmy for five hours or 10 hours? And the tutor, of course would say I'd worked with him for 10, so I'd end up having to refund the student for five hours and pay the tutor for the full 10.  

Liam:    00:05:08    And this was really destroying the business. So Time Doctor was actually a tool that could perfectly solve that problem for me. And then off of that, I became very passionate about remote work just in general. Uh, we've always started remote. Uh, Time Doctor itself has been running for eight plus years, and before that I probably was working four or five years before that, completely remotely. That actually is pretty long time in terms of remote work years. I knew a time when remote work was just absolutely nuts, and no one thought that that was even remotely an option, but now it's actually becoming a very popular option. I think we're probably just starting to see the real growth of remote work, but that's where I initially got my passion from. It was just understanding that I could work from home and I could create a lot more interesting life for myself. I would have a lot better work life balance than if I was communi commuting in every day to some office somewhere.  

Kristin:    00:06:11    Exactly. We were discussing previously that there's a difference between digital nomads and being location independent and working from home and working remotely. So I think this is a good example of somebody who is running a business remotely but still living in your home country, still having kind of a traditional lifestyle, but you're just eliminating the commute and you're eliminating the fixed nine to five or eight to six or whatever it is the work hours are. So can you speak to that a little bit as to how you see the differences are for, for people listening, what's the difference between a digital nomad and a remote worker and someone who's working from home?  

Liam:    00:06:57    So a digital nomad is someone who generally has no set address. So they're traveling constantly. So they might travel somewhere for up to a week to three to four months, but they just continuously move. Uh, remote worker is someone that generally stays in one place and just works from their computer, uh, remotely. So there are a lot of remote workers that could turn into digital nomads, but um, digital nomads generally are both remote workers and digital nomads at the same time, if that makes sense. Uh, so, and then the third one, which is people that are just working from home are people that actually don't even know about this conversation whatsoever and are probably the largest category of the industry, which are people that have just worked from home their entire lives because they just know that that's naturally the way they wanna do it.  

Liam:    00:07:47    Um, most of those people are in developing countries and most of those people are located in Southeast Asia. I would probably say if you were to divide up people that work from their homes, uh, and you added them all up, probably about 80 to 90% would be in developing countries, which is, uh, something that we don't really pay attention to that often because someone who is working from home in a developing country that doesn't have a first world passport, unfortunately can't even access, uh, the opportunities to become a digital nomad because they just can't travel, um, on the passport that they have. So there's all of these multifaceted variables to remote work and um, we just kind of focus on one particular variable, which is the people that work from their computers from home. How do you make that process easier and more efficient for them so that they can enjoy their work and their lives, um, a little bit better.  

Kristin:    00:08:53    What do you think that the resistance is in 2019, 2020 from traditional companies? Because a lot of people want to work remotely because they wanna have flexibility, they wanna save money, they wanna be less stressed out, they wanna have more time with their family and their kids and to work on personal projects. But there's still this kind of, it's almost like a glass ceiling, but it's a glass wall between people and remote work. And the wall is partly knowledge and education about what they can do to work remotely. And then the other part is the just traditional resistance to change of large companies, right. Of corporate culture in general. So even if it's not intentional, even if corporate executives and HR leaders understand the benefits of remote work, it's easier said than done and it's a good sign that they're going to conferences like Running Remote to put that into practice.  

Kristin:    00:09:58    But what would you recommend, having talked to so many different remote team leaders and executives, what would you recommend to people who want to start working remotely but aren't sure how to even convey that they're qualified to have a remote job? Because we kind of find ourselves in this catch 22 situation where remote companies or traditional companies that are hiring remote employees wanna make sure that they're hiring people who can work remotely, who have experience working remotely, and that there's a lot of qualified people who don't necessarily have the experience to back it up on their resumes. So what do you recommend to those people who would love to have the lifestyle that you and I have, but they're just not sure how to get there?  

Liam:    00:10:48    Well, number one, you can come work for us <laugh>. Uh, that's, uh, if you're, if you're a qualified remote worker and you've got really good jobs, come and work for us and we'll take care of you, no problem whatsoever. But then if you wanna keep working for your current employer or you currently don't have a job as of yet, I think probably, well, I'll take the current employer. So if you have an, an employer that is not excited about remote work, generally they're not excited about remote work because they do not know what you're doing while you're working remotely. That is the number one question that uh, every employer has that does not have a remote team. So Time Doctor, as an example, completely solves that problem, and that's why we built it. We really call it the Trojan Horse of remote work. So you can basically go through a pretty standard process with an employer.  

Liam:    00:11:42    You could say, Hey, I would like to work remotely. Uh, I understand that there's probably some resistance points towards me working remotely, but let's very clearly identify what my key responsibility areas are and what metrics I have to meet in order to work remotely. Let's deploy a tool like Time Doctor, if you want to be able to have that type of tool deployed. So you will be able to know how efficiently I'm working, and then let's actually sign a remote work agreement for let's say a one month period. And if I haven't hit the numbers inside of the remote work agreement and my key responsibility areas are not being met, then we can go back to obviously the other way of working, which is totally cool by me. And then secondarily, if that person is still resistant towards it, you can tell them that on average a remote worker is about 22% more productive and more importantly has a 30% higher retention rate than their on-premise counterparts.  

Liam:    00:12:45    And that's something that people don't really recognize when you're on the employee side or on the freelancer side, which is so important. The average cost of a termination, like someone that's going to quit or get fired from their job to replace that person is $42,000. So a 30% increase in retention in, let's say my company of with over a hundred people can add to, we have about 10 termination events per month, so that costs us about half a million dollars to be able to just put those new people back inside of the organization this year. So if you could reduce that by $150,000, that would be fantastic. I would absolutely take that job or I would take that, that particular position. So you have to kind of think about it in terms of dollars and cents, and that will usually allow you to convince your employer to be able to give it a shot. On the secondary side, if you don't have a job and you, or you have a job, but you just wanna work for someone remotely, I would suggest that you check out remote.com. We work remotely, and there's a couple other platforms that are pretty good too that oh, uh, flex Jobs obviously. So FlexJobs, we work remotely and remote. Those are the top three platforms for people that are working remotely. And uh, you can find a whole bunch of different jobs on there, which are pretty easy to get.  

Kristin:    00:14:10    Yes, actually that is, well we're recording this at a different time, but the episode of my podcast that came out last week was on finding remote jobs, and we talked about those three. So I definitely highly recommend those sites. There's a lot coming out, but those are the biggest ones, I think, and you really made some good points there because companies that aren't very aware of the benefits of remote work or haven't yet experienced them because they don't have any remote employees yet, they tend to have some fear around the managerial oversight of their employees. Like how can we tell that we're working from the company perspective, they're afraid that they're gonna waste money and that their employees aren't going to be working. But in reality, once people start with a remote work trial, the employee I think is 90% likely to want to work remotely forever. And then the employer gets to find out firsthand all of the different benefits that come with remote work. I mean, of course nothing's perfect, but they typically end up saving money, saving overhead, the employees are more focused, they're more productive, and then it just kind of keeps going. <laugh>, it's like you put this trial into place and then it becomes permanent.  

Liam:    00:15:26    Yeah. If you remove salaries, uh, from the transaction, so let's say you have a hundred thousand employee, a hundred thousand dollars employee on premise, a hundred thousand dollars employee remote, your remote first employee on average is 40% cheaper than your on-premise employee. And that rolls into higher retention, that rolls into more productivity, that rolls into equipment costs, office costs, all these other things. So on average it's about 40, the actual number's about 42% cheaper than an on-premise employee. And once employers kind of understand that and recognize it, it's very exciting for them. But they need to be won over by this process. And also secondarily, at least in large corporate, there are a lot of instances in which the remote employee doesn't actually end up that successful. So there's a lot of psychometric testing that we do anyways as a Time Doctor that, uh, we analyze who is a good remote worker and who isn't.  

Liam:    00:16:32    And one of the strongest signals for us is people that are introverted. So people that are introverted can usually work from home a lot easier than people that are extroverted. I'm slightly on the extroverted scale and I need to go into a coffee shop, let's say once a week just to kind of hear other people or go into a coworking space. I think there's other variables that just kind of add into this problem. The, the amount of data that we're starting to collect now, not just from Time Doctor, but also just from Running Remote, is really starting to build basically the playbook on how to be able to build and scale a remote team. And so we're very excited about that because we're starting to kind of see eight or nine organizations all doing the same thing and seeing the same amount of success with it.  

Liam:    00:17:17    And I think that probably within the next two to three years, there will probably be a really focused understanding of what are the standard practices for hiring a remote employee, scaling a remote organization, and making sure that everyone's happy long term and more importantly that it's actually scaling. Because I know for us, in terms of the tech space, one of the other major problems that we've had is lack of capitalization, lack of venture capital inside of remote first companies. So we've been bootstrapped, one of the ways that we ended up being bootstrapped is after about a year or two of us working on time, doctor, we went to go and raise a series A, which is anywhere between five to 15 million as an example, for about a 30 year business. And we had a whole bunch of term sheets, which are basically just an agreement to be able to proceed with the deal. And in every single term sheet, they said, you must move your entire team to Toronto. Oh  

Kristin:    00:18:22    No,  

Liam:    00:18:23    New York, Boston, Palo Alto. And when we pushed back saying, well, our tool is specifically for remote teams, don't you think that's kind of disingenuous? Don't you think we should be eating our own dog food? And they said, listen, we love the angle of remote work. We love the angle of time, doctor, it's great, but trust us, we're venture capitalists, we know what we're doing. So that is one of those things that is very problematic inside of our space and something that is changing. But at the end of the day, there is unfortunately a, and I'm gonna probably say something a little politically incorrect, but there's a little bit of a bias towards remote first companies being more about people being happy and free versus profitable or versus a high growth company. And when you talk about venture capital, venture capital wants high growth companies, they don't want low growth companies. And I think at the end of the day, you might want to be able to make a decision between do I want reasonable growth? Do I want to grow at 50 to 60% year over year and have a remote first company, or do I want to grow 70% year over year and you know, work in horrible Canada during February where it's minus 45 degrees Celsius?  

Kristin:    00:19:46    Right. Well, actually I have a good case study for you and for anybody listening who's come across similar problems, I heard a podcast, I believe it was how I built this. Mm-Hmm. uh, the Shopify episode. Mm-Hmm. I'm not sure if you've heard that one, but the founder of Shopify had the same situation where he was going to Silicon Valley looking to raise capital and everybody said, okay, here's the caveat, you have to move your team here. And they were based in Canada as well. And so eventually over the years, they found the right VCs Mm-Hmm. who let them be themselves, retain their remote company culture. And now obviously Shopify is a huge success story. Yep. So maybe look up that episode and maybe you can get some ideas and some rebuttals for the next VC meeting that you have. But I, I think that that will change eventually. And I actually just did an episode of Digital Nomad News about a remote office collaboration tool and also Safety Wing, the health insurance and travel insurance company for Digital Nomads. And I think I saw that Y Combinator was invested in a, at least three of the tools that I was researching in the past couple weeks. So once somebody like that goes all in on remote, I think the rest of the people will follow. So I, I think you guys will have better luck with that.  

Liam:    00:21:11    Absolutely. Well, so we're, we're past the venture stage at this point where, and a lot of the companies that at least go to Running Remote are also past that stage as well. And ironically, I'm actually right across the street from Shopify. I think I can look into Toby's office <laugh> from here. And so Marcy, who is their director of support at Shopify, uh, she spoke at Running Remote and she talked about how she went from zero to 3000 remote support reps in two years.  

Kristin:    00:21:46    Wow.  

Liam:    00:21:47    So we're talking massive, massive scale. And I mean, working as a support rep at Shopify probably is a much happier, more carefree life than working the vast majority of jobs on planet Earth. Mm-Hmm. uh, they have fantastic benefits. You get a, you get a MacBook Pro every year. They literally have their own standardized office chairs and office desks that they put into your home office before you start. So there's all of these interesting things that they've done to be able to have an efficient remote workforce. And they do now consider themselves a remote first company because the majority of their workforce work work from home. So you're absolutely right. There are these examples in Vision is another one, which is a fantastic company that just became a tech billionaire unicorn, and they have 750 people and they all work remotely. And the explanation for Envision as to why they went remotely was, well, of course we would go remote.  

Liam:    00:22:55    We're going to get better labor at better prices. So when you're talking about these absolute scale companies, you know, Shopify's 15,000, 20,000 people at this point, finding the best labor actually ends up being really a dollars and cents game. And remote work is perfect for that type of application. But again, when you look at the on-premise world, when you look at these brick and mortar businesses, they still have this very apprehensive feel towards remote work because they just don't see those examples. And Running Remote is a perfect example of us showcasing those types of companies. So if anyone says, oh, well you can't build a multi-thousand remote support team, I can then just show them Marcy's talk from Shopify at Running Remote and show, yes you can. Here's a company that's doing it.  

Kristin:    00:23:52    Exactly. I love that. I actually two days ago, published an article on the startup on Medium about why companies should offer D location packages instead of relocation packages. And I actually broke down how much money companies would save by offering employees an incentive or a stipend, like a $10,000 incentive for them to be able to move wherever they want in the country or even in the world. But this was specifically focused on American companies and showing how much money they could save by letting employees move away from Palo Alto away from New York. And then the employees happier, they're gonna stay with the company longer, they lower their cost of living. And even when the company's give you free furniture, a coworking membership, a MacBook Pro, and all of these other perks, it still costs them less than the overhead of having that employee sitting in the office in Silicon Valley. So I love that you said that  

Liam:    00:24:54    It also doesn't make them happier.  

Kristin:    00:24:56    Right?  

Liam:    00:24:57    It makes them a lot more depressed when you have to commute two and a half hours in every single day to be able to sit in a crappy, you know, office chair sitting in some desk with 50 other people in some big room. Wouldn't you much rather have your own office looking over? I was just on a call yesterday with one of my salespeople, and he lives in Columbia in Mein or out on the outskirts of Mein, and he overlooks this beautiful valley with a waterfall in the background. And I mean, when you see his video on our Zoom calls, it looks epic, it looks iconic, it looks like he's living the dream and he is living the dream because he's making a western salary living in Columbia, doing what he wants to do. And, uh, he's a very productive employee. He's actually probably one of our top salespeople.  

Liam:    00:25:50    That's really what we want to communicate when we talk about the future of remote work, which is people being able to work from very nice, comfortable locations. I actually have a theory that within the next 20 years, towns, large towns and small cities with at least one university in them, we'll probably be the best place to be on planet Earth. Because up until this point, they've been beautiful places with fantastic environments and coffee shops and they have fun energy in them. But you really wouldn't have the jobs in that particular location, but you would have the energy. Now with remote work, there's a huge exodus towards those types of places, which are maybe a fifth of the cost of working out of New York or working out of San Francisco or Toronto in my case. But they offer fantastic work life balances and just a really happy lifestyle. So I see that as the future, at least for me. I am already living that, so I've already been in that head space for such a long time. But I'd love to be able to see a billion people on planet Earth be able to do that into the future  

Kristin:    00:27:09    Completely. It, to me, it just feels like a really natural way to live. That is a long time coming because working conditions for human beings have not been ideal for a very long time. <laugh> Mm-hmm. probably for thousands of years. Mm-Hmm. you know, if you go back in history, and this is a really unprecedented time to be able to live the lifestyle that works for you and to be able to work in something that you're interested in or even passionate about, but at least something that you're good at. And to be able to do it from anywhere in the world is something that's really, truly special. And of course we see all of the photos on Instagram of people with their laptops posing in a certain landscape. But it's actually true. I mean, I lived in Costa Rica for almost 10 years and I lived in this suburb called Es Kazoo, which is really similar climate to Meine.  

Kristin:    00:28:03    Actually. Meine is a city of eternal Spring and Es kazoo and the central valley of Costa Rica has one of the best climates in the world. I would be on phone calls with my clients and they're like, are those birds chirping <laugh> in the background? And I would say, yeah, because I lived alongside a rainforest corridor, so I had a panoramic view of the Central Valley. It was really quiet except we had tropical birds and like the sound of a waterfall outside of my window and my, my desk just faced these floor to ceiling windows and I would leave them open all day. And that was just, that was it. That was my home office. And so when the naysayers or the devil's advocates say, we can't let people work from home because how will we motivate them? I'm pretty sure there's already a motivation problem in traditional companies because employees don't wanna commute and go sit in a, you know, in a boring uninspiring office.  

Kristin:    00:28:59    They wanna have a different kind of environment. So I think just being able to take people out of that, it kind of solves the motivation problem on itself. But then also it gives employees who would work well and diligently in a traditional company, it gives them the opportunity to shine on their own in a remote context as well. That's my hunch that I think that good employees are good employees, especially if they're in the right job role. So whether they work in the office or at home, they're going to do their best. And then some people might be problem employees in the office and also not the right fit for a remote job.  

Liam:    00:29:41    Yep. Yeah, I would completely agree with you. It's just, it's got a few unique challenges, but once you overcome those, you're going to see huge advantages. And I actually think just inside of the tech space, within the next five years, I, and you can go back to this podcast within five years from now, which is we're in 2019, by 2024, at least in the tech space, there will be more remote first billion dollar tech startups that are popping up than on-premise.  

Kristin:    00:30:16    I agree. Because tech is where it's starting first, and tech workers are the first ones to demand remote work. And then it's such a competitive space that if you can hire from anywhere in the world, your company is going to compete better.  

Liam:    00:30:32    Well, and and more specifically, if you have employees that are 40% more cost effective. Mm-hmm if you put a thousand businesses that are all equal and you give 500 of them a 40% drop in their labor costs and that equates to higher efficiency, lower costs of offices, all that kind of stuff, those companies will succeed. And that's the critical advantage that we're trying to communicate to a lot of remote employers and saying, Hey, you know what? Remote work, it's not just an option. You are going to be left out within the next two to three years. If you do not understand how to do this and how to build companies like this, you will be at a tactical disadvantage. It's almost like, you know the difference between a typewriter and a computer. Well, would you like to have computers in your office or typewriters? Well, there was a point in which everyone had typewriters and then they started bringing in these computer things like, ah, you know what? Typewriters are more reliable. You know? Yeah. Theoretically maybe they're a little bit more productive, but at the end of the day, we've got all of these typewriters. I think that's in essence what's happening right now is all those typewriters are being replaced by computers. Fundamental shift to the way that we do work  

Kristin:    00:31:47    Right now, I think that there's actually a gap. I think that people have kind of a first mover advantage. So companies that can get on board with this remote concept, they're going to have an advantage over their competitors who are still brick and mortar. And so that timeline is very short, it's going to run out. But right now I think that people still have a slight advantage because there hasn't been a complete uniform adoption of remote work throughout industries. So if anyone's listening, you know, hurry up because time is running out. It's like Facebook ads eight years ago or <laugh>. I wanted to talk a little bit more about what people will learn at Running Remote, because this is the biggest remote work conference in the world, is that correct?  

Liam:    00:32:38    We haven't found a bigger one. We had about 450 people for the last one in Bali.  

Kristin:    00:32:44    So this one will be in April of 2020 and it will be in Austin, Texas. So what type of people should consider going to this conference and what can they expect to learn?  

Liam:    00:32:56    Sure. So I think, and this is something that uh, one of my business mentors has taught me, which is when you look at building something, you have to figure out who your customer is not. That's sometimes a lot more important than who your customer is. So I'll tell you who it is not for. If you don't have a remote team, this conference is probably not for you. If you do have a remote team, then this conference is definitely for you. And if you have a company and you are thinking about going remotely, then this conference is also for you. So what we learn is basically everything that you could possibly think of about how to build and scale a remote team. Just last week we had Edmund Lael who runs a company called Flag Theory, and he basically gave a talk on how to structure a remote corporation.  

Liam:    00:33:49    So all of the tax implications, is it a contractor, is it an employee relationship? Where do you put all of these different people? How do you pay your taxes? We have employees in 32 different countries. Do you set up 32 corporate subsidiaries or do you not do that? You know, he basically covers all that kind of stuff. We had Andreas Clinger, he is the ex CTO of Product Hunt and the current head of remote at AngelList, which is also, by the way, one of the largest job boards for remote work. And he talked about how he managed Product Hunt on 20 developers and basically built a website that was a top 100 website on planet Earth for Product Hunt. So we basically talk about all those things. Marcy from Shopify, we've had, uh, Joel Gas going from Buffer. We've had Amir from Todoist, which is a task management app that's pretty big in the industry.  

Liam:    00:34:50    Basically everything that you could possibly think of to scaling remote teams, we've covered it or we will hopefully be covering it. Uh, we don't just want to talk about, well this is how we built our remote team and isn't this great? Because unfortunately on a lot of these podcasts that I go on to, not many people know about remote work, so I have to kind of explain it to them. But for what I call the true believers, we go very deep. So we're very specifically talking about different verticals connected to remote work and also just what is the future of remote work? What opportunities are there for remote work? One of the biggest ones that I'm very excited about is, and it sounds like a very boring idea, but employee payroll issues for remote workers. So this is, I would probably say a multi-trillion dollar problem that's currently being tackled.  

Liam:    00:35:43    And it's been very interesting to see the space because literally within the last 18 months there's been 20 companies that have popped up to try to solve this problem because they now know that it's such a serious issue. And those are some of the things that we just never really had tools. Like, well I know when Skype was the primary way that we communicated with our remote team for messaging back and forth, now it's Slack. So there's all of these like pieces that need to come together. So we also talk about that quite a bit. What are the different pieces that are coming together? How does that technology stack look and how can you again, make your process just a little bit more efficient to be able to build and scale your remote team?  

Kristin:    00:36:25    I think it's important to note that a lot of the remote solutions are being created by remote companies because you kind of have to be in it to recognize all of the problems or let's say areas for improvement in making processes more efficient and payroll for example. And so I, it's been really interesting to follow the way that the remote ecosystem has developed. And a lot of it is through companies that were trying to achieve something internally and they didn't have a tool for it, so they made it. And I just did a piece about a company called Tandem that was actually a cryptocurrency management platform or like a portfolio platform. And they had so many problems with the remote operations of their distributed startup that they actually left the crypto space and went into the remote workspace, which I thought was great. And so now they've created this collaboration software and I know that you have Time Doctor, which is, so for people who don't know, uh, can you explain some of the features of Time Doctor?  

Liam:    00:37:41    Sure. So it's basically a task management system that allows you to be able to measure how long you worked on a particular task. So we integrate with pretty much everything that you could possibly think of, that's a project management system, and then we can push those tasks into your desktop app and then you would go through and basically figure out how you're going to structure your time to be more efficient. So as an example, right now I am on podcast call with Kristin, and then I'll be able to bring that back into the podcast category that I have this under and I can see the other 387 other podcasts that I've done over the last three years. I'm looking at my dashboard right now and seeing how long each podcast takes, what the average metrics are that are connected to it. I believe Vai was the person that introduced us initially, and VAI works for me.  

Liam:    00:38:41    And then we also add in how much time she took to be able to basically schedule the podcast as an example. So we know everything down to the penny, exactly where my time is being spent, how efficiently I'm deploying my time. And then we use a lot of machine learning and artificial intelligence to be able to improve that overall time. So I know as an example that me booking and getting out the details of these podcasts is an inefficient use of my time. And for VII who specializes in this, it's a much better expenditure of her time. So we optimize for that and basically Time Doctor gives us the ability to be able to have a lens and look at all that data  

Kristin:    00:39:27    And then you end up with this database of how your company operates and you can really search that data and find where you can be more efficient or where you can scale more and where you can save money, which is I think a huge plus compared to traditional organizations. When you have peoples talking at their desks or by the water cooler or in the hallway or at impromptu meetings, you're losing a lot of what happened there, <laugh>, you know, what, what occurred, what, what transpired. And when you have a remote organization, when you're using a platform or like Time Doctor or a remote collaboration tool that's tracking everything, it's like you build your own library of how your organization operates.  

Liam:    00:40:15    Yeah. For us, I mean we know what I'm going to do before I do it. So as an example, I know when I'm going to not be productive. So Tuesday afternoons I usually take off because as I was looking at the data and Time Doctor was coming back saying, Hey, you're really unproductive. Tuesday afternoons, what's going on? And then I analyzed the data and I discovered that, I don't know if it's the same thing in the US as it is in Canada, but we have cheap movie nights on Tuesday afternoons and it just happens to be a Tuesday afternoon. Uh, I think you're my last call before I go off and basically take the rest of the day off. And so I discovered that as I was working through Tuesday afternoons. I would get constant pings from different people. I would, you know, my girlfriend would be calling me saying, Hey, do you wanna see Batman or Superman? I'd say, I wanna see Superman. She'd say, well, Suzanne wants to see Batman, you know, do you want to talk to Suzanne about it? And it would just be this ridiculous back and forth. And I realized that it was more efficient for me to not work two afternoons than it was to even try. So that's an example of how we would gain deeper insights into work with Time. Doctor,  

Kristin:    00:41:29    I've done the same thing and I'm currently at a co-living space in Norway for a month documenting the lifestyle here, working and interviewing some of the other remote entrepreneurs that are here. And I talked with a developer yesterday and he was saying he doesn't believe in days of the week. And that really resonated with me because we can take off on a Tuesday afternoon if we want on a Thursday morning. It's a personal choice. It's like we can work all day on Sunday, but you know, when you're working globally in all different time zones and you have a global team and you know, you just wanna work during your most productive times of the day and and the hours that you need to be accessible. And that's that. And that's why I always say that I think this is a very grownup way to live because each person can make those individual decisions and then in this case you can have the data to back it up. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with taking off on a Tuesday afternoon, but that would be unheard of 10 years ago in corporate America, for example.  

Liam:    00:42:32    Right. Absolutely.  

Kristin:    00:42:33    Love it. Well, I wanna let you get to your movie. That sounds great. We're having a movie night here as well. <laugh> a movie night in Norway up in the Arctic Circle. So great. Actually wanted to ask you a couple lightning round questions. Sure. What is your remote morning routine?  

Liam:    00:42:51    Boy? Um, do you want me to give you the real version or the politically incorrect one?  

Kristin:    00:42:56    Oh, the real version because Okay. We're trying to bust down some myths and stereotypes here.  

Liam:    00:43:03    So first thing I do, which I'm not supposed to do, which I try to not do every day, but I almost do every day, is I check my dashboards. That's probably the first thing that I do in the morning, which is like, how many more customers did I get today? Uh, what was churn today? I have a messaging system inside of Slack called Emergency Chat. So I look at that and I figure out, well, what's going on? So I look at all of those metrics. That's probably the first thing that I do in the morning. Then the second thing is I wake up and I try to do as many pushups as humanly possible. Uh, that's just one of the things that I've always done. And usually I can knock out about 75, 76 before I kind of drop off and die. Wow. And then I have some chai tea that I get from a tea place in San Francisco called VARs and it's got the best chai tea on planet Earth. So I have chai tea and then I usually sit down and I'll watch, kinda like an overview of the news. I have a CNN app that allows me to give me like basically what happened within 10 minutes. And then I usually take a walk and I, and I go to the office.  

Kristin:    00:44:18    Love it. Actually, I just read an article about how slow mornings are really productive for tech executives because there's just so much pressure during the day that people are taking some time to savor their chai tea or coffee or whatever it is, do their pushups, and then going to the office after that. Which leads me to my next question. What is your ideal remote work setup? Do you have a home office? Do you go to a coworking space coffee shop? What is that like?  

Liam:    00:44:52    I have a home office and it really depends on whether I am working from, you know, my own city or whether I'm working remotely, remotely, like digital nomad type remotely. So generally from my home office, I have a 34 inch USBC monitor and I just plug in my MacBook to that monitor. And then I have Bluetooth mouses and all that kind of stuff. So I just generally work from that big one. And that's my, that's my perfect setup. I'm in a really beautiful loft space that we rented about five years ago and I've just kept this entire time kind of like a studio. It's very creative for me. There's open brick everywhere. I, I enjoy these types of places. I feel they help with my overall creativity. And then when I'm uh, traveling I usually have a MacBook and then I'll have an iPad and I have uh, like a 12 inch iPad, which you can use as a secondary monitor.  

Liam:    00:45:55    And that's my usual workflow. Uh, and also to, I'll usually have Bose earbuds or I just recently upgraded to the Bose seven hundreds, which are very expensive, but they're absolutely amazing because they have best in class noise canceling and they have really good microphones. So I'm talking to you on this right now and I find that microphones are kind of always an afterthought for headsets and this one is pretty good. Also, one other honorable mention is a, a tool that I've recently been using, which I actually haven't turned on right now, but it, 'cause it doesn't work very well for podcasts, but it does work beautifully for everything else is Crisp K-R-I-S-P. And what CRISP does is it's an AI that will scrub your audio and remove all background noise. So when you're doing a phone call and you really have to kind of test it to see how amazing it is, uh, you can, like I have a cellophane bag that's right next to me. I could crinkle the cellophane bag in front of my mic and you wouldn't hear it because it would be able to sample that sound so quickly and immediately deletes it and knows the difference between my voice, which is what you want to hear versus the cellophane bag that you don't wanna hear. It's absolutely amazing if you have a remote team because you can work from some of the busiest areas on planet Earth. And it sounds like you're on a sound stage.  

Kristin:    00:47:27    That is amazing. I actually just looked it up and I have heard of it, but I had never looked into it. And I'm definitely going to use it because I do so many calls and obviously the podcast and mm-Hmm. and things like that, that's really, really useful. And I completely relate to your remote work setup. I really miss having my Apple display when I'm on the road, but when I'm at home, I like to work from my home office and then while I'm on the road, I just try to use a separate external monitor,  

Liam:    00:47:57    Get the Apple iPad Pro because the newest update just allowed you to have it as a secondary monitor, like as an extended display.  

Kristin:    00:48:07    So does it connect by Bluetooth?  

Liam:    00:48:09    Connects through Bluetooth one button and it says, do you want to mirror or extend your display? And that's it.  

Kristin:    00:48:16    Love it.  

Liam:    00:48:16    It's genius. And then it's also really cool because it's a touch screen, so you could run everything literally through a touch screen right there. So if you wanna even kind of like do a little bit of design work, you know, mark up a document or something like that that's on your MacBook, you can do it with the Apple iPad.  

Kristin:    00:48:33    That's great. I'm convinced and I'm actually listening to you on B'S, noise canceling headphones. So <laugh> we're, it's because we're, we're pros at this by now. We've been doing this for a decade. We know what we need. And my last lightning round question is, what has been your favorite remote work travel destination and what is your favorite destination to just relax in?  

Liam:    00:48:57    Oh boy. Um, I was gonna say the same one for both, but I think I'm gonna choose something different. So I would say my favorite remote work destination to just get work done is probably, I would probably say, um, what's it south of Cancun? Um, Plato, Carmen  

Kristin:    00:49:21    Playa. Mm-Hmm.  

Liam:    00:49:21    Playa. Yeah. And the reason why I like that is you get a really cool singular street where you can have fun and there's a whole bunch of different types of food. It's very multicultural. And then secondarily, you can go two blocks further north and it's very quiet and there's coworking spaces all around that you can get access to. It's, it's really great in terms of just relaxation, hands down on planet Earth. It's Ed in Bali, it is the best place on planet earth just to chill out. It does have good internet ed, which is really the first coworking space in Southeast Asia. They really started kind of the remote work movement. They're located there and great place to relax, very lush, very green. Definitely a place where you can go and three months can kind of snap by and it feels like a week.  

Kristin:    00:50:20    I agree. Playa Del Carmen is such a convenient place for remote workers because like you said, everything is accessible within walking distance. You can get everything you need, your food, your water entertainment and things are open really late. There's good delivery services so you can even have uh, your food express delivered and there's lots of coworking spaces and they're actually expanding their fiber optic internet. So that's good. And I spent one month there just on vacation, which is probably the only one month vacation I've ever taken <laugh> in my life. And it was like the best month of my life. So those are two really good choices for anybody out there looking for a place to post up and work or just relax. So. Alright. If people wanna connect with you, they can find you at runningremote.com and TimeDoctor.com.  

Liam:    00:51:12    Yep. Yep. Those are probably the best two spots.  

Kristin:    00:51:15    Okay. Great. Thank you so much, Liam, for coming on and sharing some of your predictions and insights into remote work and the future of work. And I hope to see you next year at Running Remote.  

Liam:    00:51:28    Cool. Thanks for having me.

Kristin:    00:51:31    <laugh>. Bye-Bye. Thanks for listening. Remember to leave a review and share this episode with someone in your network. And if you want more tips and advice on working remotely, make sure to sign up for my insider list at TravelingwithKristin.com/subscribe, where you can find links to download free resources like My Digital Nomad Starter guide. Of course, also subscribe to youtube.com/digitalnomad so you don't miss any of our weekly videos, Digital Nomad News or Live Streams. See you there.