Luis:
Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to another episode of the DistantJob Podcast. I am your host, Luis, in this podcast that’s all about building and leading awesome remote teams. My guest today is Dave Schneider. Dave Schneider is the CEO of marketing agency Shortlist.io, which has grown to over 500,000 in revenue in its first year. He previously built and successfully sold two SaaS companies, NinjaOutreach, and LessChurn.io. And both of them had seven-figure exits, and he did it while traveling the world, which is one of the major reasons why he is here. Dave, welcome to the show.
David:
Thanks so much for having me, Luis.
Luis:
Yeah. It’s a pleasure having you. I’m looking forward to knowing about your remote story, your remote leadership and the business building story. But for now let’s focus a bit on the present, and tell me a bit how remote work has helped make Shortlist IO a better company or even possible.
David:
Yeah. Remote work has been the pillar of all the businesses that I’ve run that you mentioned, NinjaOutreach, LessChurn, Shortlist no exception. For me, it honestly makes the business possible. I work primarily in the small business market. I like to work with small businesses and I like to be able to offer services at prices that are not egregious, that are not incredibly high, geared towards enterprises. Having to work with American labor would honestly make that very difficult because the cost to actually provide the services would be too high.
David:
But I also just enjoy the aspect of the team being from other cultures, that it’s a learning opportunity for myself, and that we get to draw talent from all over the world. That I don’t just need to look for someone in Philadelphia to try to find the right candidate, but I can go on a site like Upwork or something like that, put out a proposal, and immediately get dozens of replies of people that are interested in joining our team. So I think the access to the talent, the affordability makes remote work just a big one for us.
Luis:
Yeah, absolutely. That’s a great point. I used to say that we’re also helping make the world a better, more equal place because of what they call geoarbitrage, where that money that you’re saving in not hiring necessarily North American talent, you can actually afford to pay really good salaries for the people in other countries considering those countries. Right? I usually give my in Portugal. Portugal is Western Europe. So, it’s not the particularly cheap country, but definitely much cheaper than the US. So in what would be a low salary in the US, I couldn’t really live in New York, let’s say, I can live really nicely, a really nice, comfortable life in Portugal. So, that’s also helping improve the quality of life of people over the world.
David:
I agree. Yeah. A lot of the people that we work with are in Eastern Europe. They’re in countries like Serbia and Macedonia, where the standard of living is not as high as it is in Western Europe or the US. That allows us to pay them a salary that’s probably above average market rate for what the other opportunities are in their country. Hopefully for them, standard of living that is better. Maybe even build a little bit of a bigger team because you’re not spending so much on one American talent, but instead you may be getting two or even three people in Eastern Europe, which essentially is more jobs for more people. So I do think that, yeah, there’s a geoarbitrage aspect, like you mentioned.
Luis:
Yeah. So now you’ve been doing the remote thing for a while and I doubt you just stumbled… You probably didn’t stumble across this idea just while reading Hacker News or the Huffington Post. So tell me the story of, when did you realize that this could be the pathway to building a solid business that didn’t necessarily have to charge enormous amounts of cash to their clients?
David:
Yeah, the first time I started working remotely with somebody, I was actually traveling with my wife. We were traveling, we were doing a backpacking trip, and we wanted to have… I was reading The 4-hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss’s famous book, and he talked about outsourcing and remote workers and talked about how you could hire a virtual assistant from these other countries. That idea was really appealing to me. We had a lot of admin things that needed to be done like travel planning for the trips, like booking hotels and planning routes and things like that. Although these are normally activities that travel bloggers take on themselves, we wanted to experiment with the idea of having a virtual assistant work with us. So we hired a girl, Maria, from Bulgaria to basically assist us with our travels. I think most likely we found her from Upwork or oDesk or whatever it was at the time. Those two companies I think have since merged.
David:
It was great. It’s so fun to just have this girl working with us from this other country and this other culture. And then it was very affordable because the rates were something like $7 an hour or something like that, which is not a price at all you would be able to find somebody in the US to really do that work. So, that got us used to the concept of remote work. And it got me familiar with the sites that I would go to find remote workers in the process of evaluating somebody and interviewing them, and what’s important what to look for.
David:
So just as our business opportunities kind of scaled up from that, and then eventually started NinjaOutreach, I immediately gravitated towards looking for remote workers. Also, I mean to mention, I was traveling at the time, so I was remote in a sense. I didn’t have a home base, so it wouldn’t have made a lot of sense to try to find some people in the US. They wouldn’t even really have been on the time zone that I was on. So everything just essentially kind of spiraled from there.
Luis:
Nice. So what was something that beat your expectations? When you started on that path, what was something that you were expecting to happen that didn’t happen or the reverse? What was something that you didn’t expect was going to happen that surprised you in a positive or in a negative way?
Dave:
Sure. I mean, on the positive side, I think coming from a country where we’re native English speakers, I think that we often have a perception that nobody can really do English like we can because it’s our native language. That’s false, I think, for two reasons. Number one, frankly, there are other countries that do have English as a first language that are cheaper than the US like Canada or South Africa, for example. So even if you could get remote workers, they don’t need to be from Eastern Europe. If English is, excuse me, a really important aspect of the project, you need a native English speaker. There’s still options there.
Dave:
But even outside of that, a lot of the people that I work with have great English. It may not be fluent, they may not be native speakers, but they can get on a call with a client and close a deal, which is something that I think a lot of people would assume is just not really possible. It took me a little bit of time also to get comfortable with the idea of it and let go of the preconceived, maybe notions that I had. But as I did, it’s allowed me to give them even more and more responsibility.
Luis:
Nice. I can see how that surprised you. What about over the years? How long have you been doing the remote thing now?
David:
I think that we started traveling in 2012 and I can’t remember how long it was into that trip that we hired a virtual assistant, but probably something like 2013, definitely before 2014. So it’s been about seven years.
Luis:
What’s a couple of insights, things that you really changed your mind on during those years.
David:
One of the things is that, as a business owner, I think our natural tendency to be very hands-on, to be very micro-managing. Additionally, with remote workers, there’s always issues with trust because you don’t really know this person. You don’t see them day to day. You don’t see them in the office. So you’re thinking like, what exactly is appropriate to give them access to a couple of work, and I have them do. How do I know that they’re working and being productive? Those are all kind of standard, typical questions that come up with remote work.
Dave:
I have to say I’ve been very, I guess, proactive about making sure that I give as much responsibility as I can to these individuals. It has allowed me personally to frankly, take a lot more time off, to be less involved in the business, to be working more, as I say, on the businesses, instead of in the business, and to be able to start other ventures and things like that.
David:
I think that that’s an area where a lot of entrepreneurs struggle. They’re taking on so much themselves, and what they really could use is some additional help and assistant and things like that. And they’re always like, “Oh, well, I can’t afford somebody.” You know? That’s I think where remote work fits in perfectly, because it’s a very affordable option to free up your time. It’s just super valuable. It’s really de-stressed my life, too.
Luis:
Oh, yeah. I want to go a bit deeper on that. You talked a bit about KPI as well. You didn’t use that expression, but keeping track of work. Your current business is a marketing business, and that’s my specialty. What I find is that marketing work is divided in two parts, not necessarily evenly, but there are some very trackable parts like in social impressions or even our ROI, amounts of work done, work delivered per day, et cetera. Some things you can really track and the spreadsheet, nerds can go all out on it and then they have graphs and lists and all of that. But then there’s other parts of marketing that are the creative parts. Let’s say that you’re building an article, let’s say that you want to build a piece of evergreen content or that you want to brainstorm a really good landing page for a certain product.
Luis:
And that work is a bit harder to quantify, right? Sometimes that work can happen, not while you’re sitting at your home office, but when you’re out for a walk. So seeing that you recognize that there is that struggle of are people working, are people producing, et cetera, how do you go about specifically in a marketing context where some of the deliverables are not so tangible because they’re creative deliverables. How do you go about keeping your mind at rest, I guess, knowing that the team is working at their possible best?
Dave:
Yeah. It’s an important question. I think that firstly, I should mention, I know that this kind of comes up in the context of remote work, but I think a lot of people, maybe they missed the fact that many people that are not working remote, you could also question their productivity and how much work is being done. There’s quite a lot of people that go into the office and sit around and don’t do that much. They don’t have enough work to do, for example. It’s not that they’re necessarily being lazy or that they’re avoiding work, it’s that they don’t actually have work to do. So, I just figured it’s worth mentioning because I don’t want to further the stereotype of remote work and how do we know if people are working and things like that. It’s an issue everywhere, in my opinion.
David:
I think that one of the things that is critical to making sure that people are being productive is number one, do they have enough work is what I just mentioned. If people don’t have enough work, they’re going to be sitting around doing nothing because what else would they do? That is a very common thing, I think, for managers to bring on individuals. They don’t actually delegate enough work to them, and these people don’t have enough work, and so, they’re not being very productive. If you’re paying someone a fixed salary every month and they don’t actually have a work to do, that’s not so good. Often with remote workers in other countries, they’re more comfortable working hourly, which means if they have work to do, then they basically have a time tracker like Hubstaff and they turn it on and they do the work. And then when they’re done, they turn it off.
David:
So in that way, even if they don’t have the work, you’re only paying for when that’s being done, and that’s one benefit there. The other thing is deadlines. You know? So with each individual task, we have to, as a manager or as a entrepreneur business owner, when you give somebody a task, you have to have an idea of when you’d like it done by what’s reasonable. Some things you need that minute, some things you need tomorrow, some things you’re fine with being done next week. But if you don’t give people deadlines, then you’re opening the door for them to just sort of put it wherever they want it. I think that that’s a mistake.
David:
So for us, to make sure that things are moving at the pace that we want, one of the things we do is at the beginning of each quarter, we come over the 90-day plan, where each department essentially says, these are our goals for the year. They’re not usually things like KPIs and stuff like that, although KPIs are important and they’re part of other conversations, but they’re actually like the hard, tangible things that we want people to get done because a KPI is important to have, but you only have so much control over the results, right? But you definitely have control over whether or not you create a standardized template of a client proposal or a client contract or something like that. Those are just hard deliverables.
David:
And so making sure that in our 90-day plan that each department aligns what they plan to get done, and by what date they plan to get it done. So everything has kind of a deadline. And then when we meet with the department heads, every week, we go over what’s in progress like, okay, so this last week, you were supposed to have done this and this week you’re supposed to do this. So how are we doing on that? Is it in progress? Is it not started? Is it done already? That gives us an idea about whether or not we’re essentially progressing towards completing what we set out for at the beginning of the quarter.
Luis:
Yeah. That’s a really nice segue into the next thing that I was wondering where you… So you just defined what you do in a quarter, but let’s micro it down a bit more. When managing your remote team, what does your week look like? Within the week, what does your day, your usual day leadership daily routine look like?
David:
Yeah. I think that there are similarities with every day, but then there are also obviously differences. There are things that come up that are unexpected. So I would say typical things is I try to limit my direct interaction with the clients. I like to be more focused internally on the team and the processes and things like that. Occasionally, I might have a call that I could be involved in with a proposal or a sales call or something like that. But the main areas that I would say I focus on now is number one, I am, in certain cases, the final person to say, review or edit something. So if a proposal is going to go out to a client or an analysis or something like that, I like it to go through me, even if I just look at it for a couple minutes, just to kind of say, give it a sign off or send it back and say, “Hey, I think we need additional information here or there.”
Dave:
So I’m doing the majority of those works, but I am usually part of the review process before it goes directly from some individual to a client. That can take some time because you can imagine at a marketing agency, there can be a number of analyses and proposals and things of that nature. Other things are, I may be working specifically with a couple individuals or department to see what I can do to improve their flow, their processes, optimize the way they work.
David:
Right now, I’m very focused on business development. For example, this morning, I was listening to call recordings of our sales guys with clients. And I gave them some feedback on areas that I thought we could do to improve. That was kind of a new thing. I haven’t been doing much lately, but like I said, I’m focused on Biz Dev. So that’s where my head’s at now. Those are some of the main things I would say. Like I say, it’s a lot of internal process-oriented type stuff.
Luis:
Got it. So tell me a bit more about that relationship of yours with Biz Dev. One thing that I’ve noticed, and I mean, we’ve been on the fully remote business since the company was born. The company was always fully remote and we always tried to get our clients remote. That’s our business model, right? We deliver, we are a recruitment agency, but we work exclusively with remote placements. One area that was always found that the clients struggle with is sales, right? Remote sales are hard. Well, maybe hard is the wrong way to say it. Maybe that’s a pretty loaded term, but they’re different.
Luis:
I’ve met incredible in-person ground show floor salesman that really struggled with doing it remotely. So what do you think that… Because it requires a special connection, a special way of speaking body language, et cetera, what do you think is needed for a successful transition from in-person sales and in-person business development to the remote space that now we are all virtually forced into these days?
Dave:
Yeah. Yeah. I can say what worked for us in the direction that we’ve gone with BizDev, because it has changed recently, and I think for the positive. Before, a standard approach would be that a client would maybe, or sorry, a lead would schedule a call with us. We’d have a chat. They’d talk about what they needed. And we’d send over a proposal, which was a written document that outlined our game plan and the costs and stuff like that. We send it over to them in an email, and then we’d follow up and see what they thought, and we’d hope for the best. That would work sometimes, but in order to level things up, what we’ve been doing is firstly, we’ll do the call with the lead, Like I mentioned.
David:
That hasn’t changed necessarily that much, but then prior to writing the proposal, what we’d like to do is a little bit of a customer analysis to really understand what is really important to this customer. Are they coming to us because the competition is beating them and they feel like they’re losing ground, or are they working with some other agencies, but they’re missing this one particular piece. What’s kind of the motivation behind them, and making sure that the proposal addresses specifically that. So while there are similarities, while there may be slides that we leverage across multiple proposals, there’s always something custom about it based on our understanding of the customer and where they’re at in their journey, what’s important to them. And then we’ve shifted away from long written documents that we would send out via email to visual presentations done on Google slides, which we prefer to do on a secondary call.
David:
I feel that this is good because people, especially, like you said, meeting virtually, they do better responding visually to things, as opposed to reading a lot of texts. It allows us to essentially communicate and shape the story, whereas written documents, I feel like they can sometimes struggle to have a cohesive story. Visual presentations with headlines can often have a really nice story. So we’ve kind of shifted more towards doing that. And then being on the call with them allows us another opportunity, another touch point to present ourselves, to show ourselves as real people, to read their body language and tone and go from there.
David:
You know, I can only really comment in our case what’s worked well. I think the introduction of more visual materials over written materials has been a win making sure that everybody’s on a phone call with the video turned on, I think helps bridge the gap between the remote aspect of things, and then really planning, strategizing, and treating the customer as an individual with individual motivations and making sure that those are being addressed in the proposal. Those are the things that have worked for us.
Luis:
Got it. Got it. So let’s talk a bit about hiring. When you’re hiring people for this position, it could be sales. I mean, yeah, I guess we can go with sales as an example. What are the traits that you think you need to look for apart from the usual business development traits, the traits that are needed for a person to be good at sales? But what are the extra trades that you look for, for people who are doing the work remotely?
David:
Yeah. When it comes to remote work at my company, I’m looking for people that are very independent because I don’t really have the time or the energy to individually manage every single person. While we do have an org structure that has departments and managers and things like that, it still has a degree of looseness to it in that people really have to be able to be given a task and then to be able to sort of run with it and then come back with the results. So being able to be independent, I think is one of the more important ones. The other is communication. I think that, I mean, communication serves you well in any setting, but particularly in a remote setting where, as we mentioned before, you don’t always know what is somebody doing that day. But if they communicate to you at the end of the day and say, “Hey, Dave, you gave me this task yesterday. And so I went and I did this work, and here’s the document. I’d love you to take a look,” that lets me know definitely what this person has done.
David:
I don’t really want to be having to follow up with somebody and check on their work and stuff like that. I like them to be communicating to me. I prefer over-communication. I think the newer someone is to your organization, the more important it is that they communicate and build that trust, and build that relationship so that you can continue to work with them and give them more responsibility in the future.
Luis:
Got it. That makes a lot of sense. Let’s talk a bit more about… Let’s get a bit more into the details of your virtual office, right? The space that you use, not the physical space, but the virtual space that you use to create your work. In the mornings, or whenever you choose to start working, when you open your laptop or turn on your desktop PC, what are the apps that you dive into? And when you go to your browser, what are the browser tabs that you have immediately opened?
Dave:
Yeah, there are a couple of browser tabs that I realize I open every day. So I’ve just kind of default setted the browser to open those tabs whenever I log on. You’ve probably heard these before, but one is Slack and maybe it will be actually multiple Slack channels for the different businesses that I’m involved in. But certainly for Shortlist, that’s really the heartbeat of the organization. All the communication runs through Slack. The other is Google Calendar. I have to know obviously what my commitments are for the day, what meetings I have, kind of plan out just to how the day is going to flow.
David:
Another is Trello. I like to have a personal to-do list, and I do that on Trello. For me, it just works very easily. I’m very comfortable with it. Just creating a card with the list, and the card just says my to-do list for the day and it kind of prioritizes the things that I want to get done. So those three are probably the most important ones that I’m going to have.
Luis:
Okay, cool. Let’s talk a bit about things that you would… Well, things that you would give to your employees. Let’s say that you had 100 euros or $100 to spend on each of your employees and you need to get the same thing for everyone, what would you give them?
David:
Sure. Well, it certainly depends what they need, but a recent one that we did, that was actually about a hundred euros, so the price point is very relevant, was monitors, basically computer monitors. It’s one of those things that I didn’t think of. I have a monitor at my workstation and it’s great. It’s great to have a big screen that I look at, and I didn’t realize that… I just wasn’t thinking about it basically. And then one day, somebody was in the office and they took a picture of everybody working there, like, “Hey, we’re all at the office” because we have an office in Macedonia.
David:
And I just saw everybody and they were hunched over on their laptops. I said, “Oh, that’s not very comfortable.” It’s not a good ergonomic workstation for one thing to be kind of very forward arching, looking downward with your neck. And it’s also not super comfortable sometimes to work off of maybe your laptop keyboard or a laptop screen because it’s limited in size and things like that. So I said, “Hey, why don’t we get everybody monitors?” They’re about a hundred dollars or $120 each. And so that was what we spent it on initially.
Luis:
Nice. So what about yourself? What was the purchase that you made, let’s say, in the last year that improved your work-life balance or work productivity?
David:
A new laptop, to be honest.
Luis:
Really? What did you get?
David:
Yeah. I got a Dell XPS 15. I have been a Dell user for a while. I had a Dell Latitude that I got three or four years ago, and I’ve always been happy with Dell with their support and the warranty and the performance of the computer. But I just felt that it was taking a long time for things to load and stuff seemed sluggish. I did some work to clear the computer and deleted unnecessary programs and did some scans, and those types of things, but I just wasn’t really able to get a really great performance. I wasn’t sure if it’s my internet or something like that.
David:
So I did a little research and it looks like Dell came out with a new model, the XPS 15. It was rated really highly with… You know, on parity with your MacBook and stuff like that. So I got that about a month or so ago, and it is just lightning fast just in the way that it loads browser tabs and stuff like that, the way it starts up. So all of that I feel like has… I mean, I literally did a video side-by-side of like loading the browser to really kind see if it was instantaneous versus, say, five seconds or something like that. Those five seconds, I mean, when you think about loading, how many browsers you load a day, how many programs you load a day, it does add up. It could be 10 minutes a day or something like that. 10 minutes a day is… You know, that’s like five hours a month [crosstalk 00:28:02] stuff.
Luis:
Yeah, yeah. Definitely. It’s like a squeaky wheel on a car, right? Or on a bike. It’s grinds on you. It might not be meaningfully impacting your experience, but at the end of the day, you’re just getting crazy.
Luis:
So, Dave, I wanted to ask you about books. What books have… Well, it can be business books, but it can also be more broad and have influenced you the most and influenced your journey the most.
David:
Yeah. I definitely have read a lot of business books in my time as an entrepreneur, although I haven’t been reading lately, I’ll acknowledge that. But early on, the ones that had the biggest impact on me were things like The 4-hour Workweek, which I mentioned, really introduced me to remote work and virtual assistants. How to Win Friends and Influence People was a good one just about communicating and how to interact with people in a favorable way. I really like the Millionaire Fastlane. Frankly, he makes great points about which businesses frankly, do well and which ones don’t, and where you should invest your time. Those were some of the ones I read very early on that I liked a lot.
Luis:
Nice, nice. Those are all books that I own, but I haven’t read the Millionaire Fastlane yet. The other two, I love.
David:
Yeah. It’s good.
Luis:
In fact, How to Win Friends and Influence People has… That title has not aged well, right?
David:
Yeah.
Luis:
Today, it sounds kind of a scammy thing-
David:
It does.
Luis:
… but it’s actually such a great book. It does. Mine is actually falling apart just from use, just from me reading it and re-reading it over the week. So definitely an incredible recommendation. Thank you for that.
Luis:
Let’s jump to the final question. Here’s the setup. Let’s say that you are hosting a dinner where people from the top tech companies from all around the world are attending. We’re talking about decision makers, the CEOs, CTOs, et cetera. And the topic for discussion in the night is remote work and the future of work. The twist is that the dinner is happening in a Chinese restaurant. And as the host, you get to pick the message that comes inside the fortune cookie. So when these people open their fortune cookies, what is the, obviously, I always have to say this to marketing people, non-promotional message that you’re going to give these people?
David:
Yeah. It’s interesting because a fortune cookie, you usually don’t have a lot of text to utilize.
Luis:
It can be a fortune pie if you would like.
David:
Yeah, sure, sure. Okay. Yeah. I think what I would probably try to convey, and the copywriting could vary, but it would be something to the degree of the cost savings that one can have by transitioning to remote basically. I don’t just mean outsourced labor, but what I mean is literally in people not having to go into the office, to not have to sustain office buildings and provide everybody with office products and all those different things.
David:
There’s definitely data out there that I’ve read that says that companies that transition remote save a lot of money. While there’s also a lot of other benefits for people working remote, a lot of people indicate that they’re happier with their life and they the flexibility and the autonomy and things like that. Just thinking about the motivations of a business owner, I often think it’s related to profitability and saving money. So I would probably approach them from that angle.
Luis:
Nice. Yeah. That’s a good fortune cookie. Like you said, it’s probably more like a fortune cookie pie, but I’ll take it. It’s a good advice.
David:
Yeah, it’s a little long.
Luis:
It’s a good advice regardless. So, okay. We’ve reached the end of our show. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for having this conversation with me. Now, if the listeners want to continue the conversation with you, where can they find you and where can they learn more about your business or businesses?
David:
Yeah. They can check us out at shortlist.io or send me an email at [email protected] if they want to get in touch.
Luis:
Okay. Well, thank you so much, Dave. It was a pleasure having you on the show. Thank you for coming.
David:
Thank you so much, Luis. Yeah, it’s my pleasure.
Luis:
Yeah, well, let’s do this again. Let me know next time you’re in Portugal.
David:
I will do. Thank you.
Luis:
Okay, ladies and gentlemen, this was the DistantJob podcast, your podcast about building and leading awesome remote teams. My guest today was Dave Schneider, the CEO of marketing agency, shortlist.io. See you next week.
Luis:
And so we close another episode of the DistantJob podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please, you can help us out by sharing it on social media. That would be great. It’s how we reach more listeners. The more listeners we have, the more awesome guests I can get in touch and convince to participate in these conversations that are a joy to have for me, and I hope they’re a joy for you to listen to as well.
Luis:
You can also help a lot leaving reviews on iTunes or your podcast syndication service of choice. Reviews are surprisingly helpful in helping the podcast guests to have more listeners. Now, another thing that you might want to do is go to distantjob.com/blog/podcast. Click on your favorite episode and any episode really, and subscribe. By subscribing, you will get a notification whenever a new episode is up and whenever we get the transcripts of the episode up, so you can actually peruse the conversations in text form.
Luis:
Of course, if you need to find a great employee for your team, a great remote employee, you should take the whole world into consideration and not just look to hire locally, not just look to hire in your country. Look around the whole world because that’s the talent pool that contains the best talent. And to help you with that, again, distantjob.com is the perfect place to start. You will tell us who we need, and we will make sure that you get the best possible candidate, 40% faster than the industry standard. With that, I bid you adieu.
