[00:00:09] Speaker A: So as we get started, maybe you could just give us a bit of background as far as yourself where you're coming from.
[00:00:13] Speaker B: Sure. My name is Liam Martin, currently in my closet, which is very luxurious. But more specifically I'm in Montreal, Canada, which is a very nice town. And I am the co founder of a few different projects. Biggest one that you probably would know me from is Time Doctor, which is a time tracking tool for remote workers. And we've been running that business for more than 15 years. Definitely before it was cool with regards to remote work. And then I'm also running a conference called Running Remote, which is the largest conference on remote work. And two years ago we wrote this book called Running Remote. My publisher wanted. I wanted to call it Async and the publisher wouldn't let me because he said, we bought a book on remote works. It has to have remote in the title. But really what this book is about is about asynchronous management, the ability to be able to manage people without directly interacting with them. And I think that that's really what everyone is missing when it comes to remote work. I'm also a Leo.
[00:01:09] Speaker A: Okay, cool. Same. Yeah, I mean, I think remote work is kind of the hot topic now that we were talking about before we started recording. There's some governmental pressure, some cultural pressure to not do remote work. So I've been remote work my whole life. I will never go back to an office. Never ever. You could not pay me enough to go back to an office.
[00:01:26] Speaker B: I love it.
[00:01:26] Speaker A: Actually, I was talking to a software developer friend of mine not long ago and he was like, hey, you got like a 250k a year off of Amazon, but you have to go to Seattle. Are you taking it? I was like, that's not even close to enough.
You could not pay me enough. So I'm really interested to hear your thoughts kind of to the defense of remote work because I feel like it's sort of under attack. Why should companies allow remote work? Why should workers be pushing for remote work other than like the obvious, like, oh, hey, I don't have to commute for an hour.
[00:01:51] Speaker B: Yeah, well, so there's a lot of new studies and data that's coming out, which is the really cool thing about remote work right now. I was in Stanford six months ago and there was used to be a very, very small conference about remote work from an academic perspective. And now there's, you know, there were like a hundred academics at this event. And the main consensus is the vast majority of situations remote work has a Net increase on productivity. The vast majority of situations, there are some situations in which it has a negative, it has decrease on productivity. But that's actually dependent upon the managerial framework that you're using. I don't want to necessarily get too technical. So essentially the way that you work impacts is a bigger independent variable than or dependent variable than the actual methodology of working, whether it's remote or in person or hybrid. So on average, if you look at all the study and there's a really good meta study that was done in 2024, it's a net 4% increase on productivity. And that's great. But there's another big advantage. And if you're a founder right now, this is the one that you really should pay attention to. On average there is Approximately about a 42% better retention rate for remote work versus in person work. And so that's the piece that's such a huge game changer when you think about where remote work is going. And if you're in San Francisco, if you're in New York, if you're trying to basically go after that top tier talent, having them work remotely is probably the biggest single thing that I could see you do to be able to retain your people.
[00:03:37] Speaker A: And I think we might come back to this in a second, but I'm really curious. So you're saying studies are showing that remote work is more productive and like if you're retaining people, you're, I would guess you're probably more profitable, you're, you're producing more across the company. Like that doesn't surprise me because people just gain expertise. And it's actually, I think it's a great tragedy of the modern world that as soon as someone has like really gained expertise in the company, after they've been there like two years, they're already looking to leave. Maybe that's for salary increases, whatever. But I think it just takes that long to onboard sometimes, you know, especially for more complicated roles to figure out your role in the social hierarchy.
[00:04:12] Speaker B: When I was thinking about the early days of remote work because I've been, we've been doing this since 2010 essentially with time doctor is remote work was the little secret that I knew that everyone else didn't know. So we're bootstrapped. We're a very successful eight figure run rate technology company. We have almost 200 people in 46 different countries all over the world. And I would say outside of the monetization of COVID producing so many more remote workers, which really good for time doctors, bottom line, the Part that was so negative about it was we were having these massive tech companies that were stealing all of our talent. 2021 and 2022 was horrible in terms of talent because we would have an HR headhunter in the company that was getting offered three times as much by Facebook or Google to be able to come and work for them. And I had to go back to them and say, like, you should take it. Like, you should absolutely take that position. Now a lot of them are coming back because it was all bullshit. It was actually a lot like, I'm probably going to get in trouble for saying something like this, but it's probably a lot like DEI when you look at it right now, where it was essentially everyone was kind of just jumping on the bandwagon of remote work. Diversity, equity, inclusion. Does that actually produce a net positive return for your employees? In the vast majority. Majority of cases it does. But the reality is that when you actually look at the mechanics of HR and how HR works, there's very, very little quantitative evidence that anything that people do inside of their work environments actually produce a meaningful output towards dollars and cents inside of the company, particularly inside of tech companies. Right. If it's like if you're horribly run, if you're Uber, as an example, the early days of Uber, from what I've read, were horribly run. The company was. Everyone hated working, there was a really bad organization, and yet they still became a hyperscale company. Right? So, like, it's really, when you think about a tech startup, it is, what kind of business do you want to build at the end of the day? Do you want to be able to work from Montreal in a really nice city that's comfortable and you get to go to lunch with your wife before you come and do a podcast with Brady? Or do you want to work 80 hour weeks and it's up to you. You can do one or the other, but you can't do both.
[00:06:43] Speaker A: So why do you think there is some pressure, say from society, from big institutions, to not do remote work? And I give some context kind of what I'm thinking here. I remember maybe it was a year or two ago, Sam Altman called remote work a failed experiment or something like that? I'm paraphrasing.
[00:07:01] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:07:01] Speaker A: So why do you think that happens?
[00:07:04] Speaker B: Well, do you want me to get my tinfoil hat on or do you want me to give you the PC version?
[00:07:09] Speaker A: Let's do the PC version and then let's put the tinfoil hat on.
[00:07:12] Speaker B: So I think there's a lot of factors connected to remote work. And I think a lot of people don't really understand the core management philosophy underneath remote work. So inside of this book, Running Remote, I talk about asynchronous management, which is what all the companies had in common before the pandemic. So all remote companies actually had a different methodology for operating remotely. And when you think about it, it actually makes perfect sense, which is you need a different management philosophy and methodology in order to be able to run remote work effectively. That's the PC version. The tinfoil hat version is that I believe that there has been a pretty focused propaganda campaign, particularly from the commercial real estate industry over the last four years, to try to dismantle remote work. If you go to Castle Systems Back to Work Index, it's actually the largest think tank on commercial real estate, and they show the truth, which is remote work has actually only rebounded about 50% from the mean. So we are only back into the office, 50% from where we were in 2020. And the other thing that's wild is that number has not budged for the past two and a half years. All of this discussion about getting back into the office. Trump signing his executive order forcing all government employees to get back into the office, which, by the way, ended up costing like, billions and billions of dollars more in terms of, like actually putting them back into offices. They are now purchasing new office buildings because they sold them all off during the pandemic, which is completely separate, wild, separate issue. So you look at this situation right now, and I would say it is almost entirely due to commercial real estate. We did a study with another academic institution about two years ago and looking at sentiment analysis for return to office studies, and we found that the majority of those studies were actually funded by the commercial real estate industry. And then secondarily, that an article about returning to the office and the failure of remote work got on average twice as much traffic than the one saying, oh yeah, remote work is going just fine and no one has an issue. So it was almost like it was a problem of its own success. Right? Like, we basically ended up with a situation where pre Covid, 4.5% of the US workforce was working remotely. One month later, we were at 66% of the US workforce working remotely. That's the biggest shift in work since the Industrial Revolution. We're now sitting at about 22 point. And let me get the number from exactly last week. 22.8% of the U.S. workforce working remote. It's still four times higher than Covid, but that number hasn't moved in the last two and a half years. It's rock solid. It's not moving. And the stories in the media with say the polar opposite. When I ask people where do you think remote work is going? They'll say oh yeah, well remote work is disappearing. Not true.
It has remained steady for the past two and a half years. And if you're a founder right now thinking about building something, the remote technology stack is probably this is the second best opportunity in history to be able to jump in. The best one was December of 2019. So.
[00:10:42] Speaker A: So I mean that makes so much sense. I didn't know those stats, but I had heard that about like the commercial real estate before. Like blackrock contain like just has a ton of commercial real estate and I.
[00:10:51] Speaker B: 8% of their portfolio is commercial real estate.
[00:10:54] Speaker A: Yeah. And like it doesn't seem like this big logical leap for me to be like if they have a ton of commercial real estate, they don't want the value to go down and it's cheaper for them to like get, get all the companies who they own and influence their CEOs maybe just a little bit, maybe a lot and say hey, you should get back in our offices. Like that has to be cheaper than losing, than taking 58% of your portfolio and taking almost a zero.
Way cheaper.
[00:11:19] Speaker B: I would probably say right now it needs to take about a 50% haircut to be rebalanced as a capital allocation on their balance sheet. The thing that's even wilder is commercial real estate is the only form of, it's the only asset that's non collateralized. So this is something that not many people really understand. So like you want to go and buy a house, right. You put 10 to 20% down on a house, you have a 25 year mortgage and then at the end of that 25 years you pay that house down. You pay about three times the amount that you of the initial purchase price. Right. So it's a million dollar house. You pay $3 million and the bank makes the money and, and you get a house. At the end of that transaction you want to buy commercial real estate. It's a completely different game. So commercial real estate usually you put down 5% or 0 and the average from what I've seen is about 2.6%. You want to buy $100 million property, you have 2.6 million. You can do that in the vast majority of cases by the way, that money is borrowed from another bank.
So you've borrowed that money and the value of that asset is not the collateral that you've put down, it is the tenants that exist inside of that building. So that's the big difference. So in 20 years you come back and you say, hey, this hundred million dollar property that I purchased, it's, I've done some upgrades, there's inflation, there's four customers, there's better clients that have come in. I don't think that this commercial real estate Property is worth 100 million anymore. I think it's worth 150. And they say, no problem, totally worth 150 million. Can I get a $50 million loan on this property? Of course you can, tax free. Here's my $50 million. So in 10 to 20 years I can take $100 million asset and I can turn it into $50 million tax free. And that's the part that I think is such a wild misunderstanding of how commercial real estate works. This was the best tool for the ultra wealthy to be able to continue to keep their companies running or sorry, not their companies running, their portfolios balanced. It was the backbone of the vast majority of those portfolios. And now that has broken down fundamentally that is crazy.
[00:13:40] Speaker A: And what you're saying about the news stuff makes total sense. Like it is so much more doom and gloomy to be like, oh, remote work's dead, you have to go back to the office. I think every, you know, not everyone, but like three quarters of people, easy, are less excited about that, less happy about that than they would be about going remote. So like that's by its nature more doomy gloomy than being like, oh yeah, remote works great. Like everyone can stay home, it's awesome, you don't have to commute. So I mean, I didn't know that about the news cycle. That anti remote work pieces got like twice as many views. But when you're laying out this like commercial real estate plus news cycle stuff like that just makes, it just makes total sense. So I want to kind of switch tracks a bit here and talk about the management style that you think does need to happen for remote work to be successful. So you kind of mentioned this before, that remote work can work in most situations, but in some, when your management style is off, then it doesn't work. So what are those and kind of how people, how do people need to manage remote workers?
[00:14:33] Speaker B: That's an interesting question. I think the fundamentals of the question that you asked is actually the problem.
So during COVID we had what I like to call emergency remote work. So it was just recreating the same office environment and dynamics from home. And that really fundamentally wasn't remote work. So when you look at remote work, there was a massive community of remote workers. And I would say the vast majority of them actually started inside of the tech industry. WordPress, GitLab, being huge remote first companies, which have been very, very successful up until today. And they all had one single singular thing in common, which was asynchronous management, which is the ability to be able to manage people without actually directly interacting. And I like to use the analogy of old school TV versus Netflix. I don't know how old you are, but in school I would listen to or watch the TV show Friends. So every Friday night you'd have to watch Friends, and Friends would be on at 8:30 or something like that. And if you didn't watch it, if you showed up at 8:55 and you only got the last five minutes of friends, you would have to wait an entire season to figure out what the hell happened in that episode. And you'd also be cut out of all, all of the social interactions on Monday at school because everyone would be talking about what, I don't know, what the characters are. And Friends. Asynchronous management is a completely different kind of animal. So asynchronous managers like Netflix, the information is available for you when you want to be able to consume it, and that's the big differentiator. So I, as an example, have a project management system. We use Asana, you can use Trello, we also use Jira. We use all of these systems to be able to document everything that happens inside of the organization. So Brady, if I put you inside of the company and I asked you a question like, why did we put in the benchmarking AI feature inside of Time doctor Two years ago, you'd be able to find out why because you would go back into the documentation, you actually figure out why that actually occurred because we don't have any, what I like to call water cooler conversations because they just fundamentally don't exist inside of remote companies. Everything is documented and measured. And that's the real big differentiator between asynchronous organizations and essentially what everyone else is doing inside of remote work. And it's a little bit of a different difficult framework to be able to overcome. I do talk a lot about that in the book and have that methodology in place for people if they're interested in checking it out in a deeper way. But fundamentally, if you think that spending 62% of your workday in meetings is working, it's not True. It's actually just preparing you for work. And that's the thing that I try to get rid of inside of. Remote work is. Remote work is not meetings. Remote work is actual work. You want to minimize everything else other than that.
[00:17:40] Speaker A: So do you have any sort of baseline recommendations for companies who are doing remote work? Because in my experience, I've been to places that require almost zero meetings and places that require a lot of meetings. And I mean, you can guess what my different productivity levels were when I had one or zero meetings. So what is the right balance? Because I think a lot of managers in my experience are super scared of no meetings. Even though I was actually having this conversation not long ago with a friend of mine who, he's a boss, and he was asking me like, how often should I meet with my direct reports? He's like, well, I want to start having weekly meetings with them. So I was asking him, have you been having weekly meetings with this direct report? He's like, no. How long has he been here? Six months. Is he doing a good job? It's like, oh, yeah, he's been our best hire this year. So I was like, why do you want to start doing weekly meetings?
What are you trying to do? So do you have any guidelines as far as what should people strive for, try to expect?
[00:18:30] Speaker B: So I tell middle managers a lot and even executives, your job is to remove distractions for your direct reports. And the vast majority of the time, you are their primary distraction. So that's the piece that they have to overcome. Number one, they are not unique. Snowflake. Right. Like, they're not going to completely blow everyone's productivity out of the water just because you do a weekly one on one with them. What you instead do is you set up a system of documentation when it goes to goals. So we use a version of POS Entrepreneur operating system, which basically boils down to yearly rocks, quarterly rocks, tasks, and particular projects. And so as a remote worker, I.
[00:19:14] Speaker A: Really enjoy that framework, by the way.
[00:19:16] Speaker B: Yeah. So I really like everything that EOS has, except for their focus on meetings. So we do something called asynchronous meetings, and we break down all of our issues. So we'll have an ASANA doc open and we'll write down a whole bunch of issues and we discuss them asynchronously. So we write them in the comments. It's like, hey, I want to do A, but possibly I should do B. Someone comes in and says, you should do A. Someone else comes in and says, you should do B. And then you come to a conclusion and you add that conclusion to the top of the ticket, clear the ticket. So if we don't have any tickets, we don't have any issues, we don't have the meeting. And that's just a beautiful way to be able to run a meeting and run a business. The only things that we see that stay on that docket are usually HR related. It's when emotions come in. And that's the part that I think that everyone needs to focus all of their energy on. So if you're going to focus your energy on synchronous communication, make sure it's the emotional communication. So what we do, kind of long story short, is we have green, yellow, red, all of the metrics. Everyone has a quantifiable longitudinal metric. So it might be how many podcasts did I do? What is the traffic on those podcasts, how often are they shared? What kind of traction are we getting? How many leads did we get from it? And then we measure all of that and we measure green, yellow, red. I spend no time paying attention to greens. I spend maybe 20% of my time paying attention to yellows and 80% of my time paying attention to reds. That's it, right? It's just like if people are doing a good job, the best thing you can do is leave them alone and allow them to continue to do a good job. And that's the part that I think that not many people really recognize. And then as an additional kind of cherry on top, we usually try to data mine why they're so good at their job. We have a new salesperson that's been killing it and just been, I mean, it's like 3x his quota for the last two quarters. And so we used Time Doctor to be able to figure out what is he doing that everyone else isn't doing. We actually discovered why he has put in the most of OMA watch time of any employee in the company. And Avoma is basically our tool that looks at sales calls. So he is consuming 10 times the amount of sales calls than the average AE is, and that's why he's winning. So now we're changing our strategy to be able to say, guess what, guys, on Fridays you don't call. You just sit down and you watch sales calls all day long and the numbers are going up. So understanding that data is also a really important part of asynchronous management that not many people really understand or are scared of. A lot of remote companies are scared of measurement, and most of the successful remote Companies that I see embrace measurement.
[00:22:17] Speaker A: So I'm curious about what kind of measurements, but first I want to clarify. So you guys are basically having zero synchronous meetings. You guys aren't hopping on teams that often. Google meetings.
[00:22:26] Speaker B: Last week we had 19% of our time was spent on internal synchronous communication. So my definition of an asynchronous organization is an organization that has less than 20% of their work week being internal synchronous meetings. We do see organizations that have way less than that. So GitLab has 0 to 5% essentially. There are some other companies that, you know, WordPress as an example, has essentially no synchronous meetings. But it just depends on what you sell and how you're, you're making money. So for us we do need some form of synchronous meetings and we think that that's a really good middle ground. About 20%. The average, by the way, remote company post Covid in that emergency category was 65% of their time was spent in synchronous, like on Zoom. No one does work on Zoom. Or if you're being completely honest, you're watching the call while you're actually answering your emails, which is what the vast majority of people are doing. In which case, why are you doing that? You could just get the recording at 2x speed and be done. And that's the part that really frustrates me when I see all of this kind of, I'll call it office theater that currently happens inside of large organizations like that.
[00:23:48] Speaker A: Yes. So with that being said, let's go back to the tracking itself because I'm super curious about this. So when you're looking at your say red, yellow, green metrics, what sort of metrics do you try to track? Are they say leading indicators versus lagging indicators? I know this is obviously different by role, but just some sort of general guidelines. What are you looking for?
[00:24:07] Speaker B: So on our side, and I'm just going to bring them right up because that's going to be an easier way to kind of do, to do this because I can get super nerdy in that direction, we have MLQs that are unassisted versus MLQs that are assisted. We have activations, we have the amount of deals that are created pipeline. So how many deals are actually in that pipeline that are going to be generated? We have strategic meetings with CS managed reps. So how many actual customers do we communicate with per month? Add on releases? So that's primarily through our product team. And then Sprint completions which is our engineering team. And then we have lagging indicators, which is new revenue, net churn and net growth. You only have those three as lagging. Lagging for me is like, you can get simpler on those. I don't think you need to kind of get into the nitty gritty of it. It's really just those leading indicators turn into lagging indicators for a SaaS business within 90 days.
[00:25:05] Speaker A: Yeah. So you basically, it sounds like two or three times as many leadings as you do laggings. And do all of those have like one person who's responsible for them or is it a team that's responsible? How do you organize that?
[00:25:16] Speaker B: It's one person that's responsible for it from an executive perspective. But then that obviously falls down to VPs and departments and everything else. So in the executive team, every single executive is responsible for one of those metrics, but then that falls into VPs. So our marketing, our CRO is responsible for unassisted and assisted MQLs marketing, qualified leads. But really our CRO is actually a very good salesperson, so he manages the sales team. So he's much more focused on the assisted MLQs as opposed to the unassisted MLQs, which is really more in the hands of our VP of marketing. So it just depends on how all of these things are sliced up. But at the end of the day, if I need to kind of go after, shout out to Dwayne, who's our CRO? Dwayne, what the hell is up with unassisted MOQs? Why are they not hitting target like he's the person that's on the chopping block for that?
[00:26:14] Speaker A: Gotcha. And then do managers assign to their direct reports or are they kind of like the ones. Are they the throat to choke?
[00:26:21] Speaker B: So we usually will go after the executives and really just say, it's your fundamental responsibility. And a lot of these things as well. When you're at, you know, the run rate that we're currently at, you can start to see changes happen pretty easily in the data. So if you, you know, if you drop off 1 or 2% off target, you can start to see that's going to turn into 6, 7, 8% if nothing's truly done. And the beauty of SaaS is that like SaaS actually moves quite slowly in terms of revenue changes. Right. Like when you look at the amount of brand impressions. As an example for time doctor.com, that number last year was actually only up 15% month over month or, sorry, year over year. So for us That's a really good indicator of like, hey, more people are talking about us in general. All of our other marketing activities are producing this particular result. And that's actually a marketing lagging indicator. The other part of this too is that our marketing department has their own set of leading and lagging indicators. So any of these core metrics, I can click on it inside of the spreadsheet that I have, and then it goes into the marketing pipeline documentation and metrics scorecard so that I can basically, it's like a whole bunch of nesting dolls so I can tunnel down into, oh, it was John that screwed up this deal and that's why we lost half a million dollars as an example. I don't. We don't have a John. That's why I specifically said that.
[00:27:52] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah, okay. That's super interesting. So in far. In terms of this, like, as far as you mentioned, you guys are at a pretty significant run rate right now. And you've got sort of multiple levels. How should people, or sort of. What are some pitfalls, red flags, traps people fall into when they're working on scaling their remote workforce. So business is growing. Need more people hiring remote. Should they be concerned at all about geography, about ports, tracking, how should they think about pay? Just, I mean, anything that you can offer here, as far as advice for, say, a growing remote business.
[00:28:29] Speaker B: So I would say there's three major stages. There's zero to one million. There's one to one to ten, I'll probably say. And then there's like ten to a hundred. And so one zero to one. You're just trying to figure stuff out. Don't forget about HR. Forget about how everything's happening. Like it should be 10 people just kind of all getting together in a room max to be able to do that. Actually, when I think about it, even more specifically, less than eight people to a million dollars. Because that to me, gives everyone direct responsibility and they're on that founding team. 1 to 10 is really where you're trying to figure out how to develop that small amount of traction into reliable traction, so into consistency. So that's when you start to build out reporting. You know, like the CEO actually is something like, you know, it's like if you're the CEO of three people, you're not the CEO of anything.
You're. You're the guy that's in charge of marketing and making sure that we don't run out of money. Like that's basically what you know, or whatever it is, you know, like, I hate those bullshit Titles of like VP of XYZ of seven people. It's like you're not a VP of anything. Let me just make that super clear to you. Because it's like you go and get a VP at Google, that's a completely different game than a VP in your fuckboy little seven person tech company.
[00:29:55] Speaker A: Liam here.
[00:29:56] Speaker B: Throw up Hot takes exactly the thing that once you get from 10 to 100, that's when you really are building what I like to call a steamroller.
[00:30:06] Speaker A: So also, so let me interrupt for a second. I think if someone is in the 10 to 100 range, I really appreciate you watching this show. Go ahead, Liam.
[00:30:15] Speaker B: For sure, for sure. No, it's not, it's not that. Yeah, I don't want to. I mean, like everyone's doing their own thing, right? Run your own race, but at the end of the day, just be true to who you truly are deep down inside. I find it very frustrating when people are pretending to be something that they're not. And most people, by the way, you may trick about 90% of people, but you don't trick the 10% that really matter. And that's even worse. So you want to only focus on the 10% that matter and forget about the other 90% that are full of shit. But 10 to a hundred, you are building a steamroller. So you figured out your product, you figured out where you're going to go, you figure out your core icp and you're saying, I am going to go hammer away at this particular group people because I know that I have the right solution for them. And at that stage you actually surpass what's called the Dunbar number, which is something I talk about a lot. It's approximately 100 to 150 people. So there's this sociological term called the Dunbar number, which is we only have about 100 to 150 close friends. And a close friend would be someone that if you saw them at a restaurant, you might actually just go and sit down with them and have dinner with them. Right?
That's his definition of upfront. And so at 10 million, you're probably past the Dunbar number. Unless you're an AI company that has like three people that have just kind of completely and utterly exploded, in which case I think you're actually going to completely implode. We'll see that where that goes in the next two years. You need to start making everybody out to be a number. You cannot escape it. So what you need to do is communicate culture to your hiring team and then that hiring Team needs to give you the candidates that have the right culture fit to be able to build out that organization long term. And if you cannot accomplish that, you will never get to 100 million. It will not happen because you just fundamentally don't. You are not hiring the right people that are drinking the right Kool Aid inside of your organization to really get you to the next level. Because another big part of EOS is, is mission, vision and values. And if you don't have a team that knows why they're there and why they're making less where they are right now versus making more at Amazon or Google as an example, then you just will not build a business that will hit that.
[00:32:38] Speaker A: And I imagine that as your business gets grow like stronger and stronger, you're hiring people who you know less and less intimately. I think the amount of trust that you need to have in your environment increases. And I was saying before the show, I think I've always been in sort of high trust environments as far as my work, where I've always been remote. So people just kind of trust me to get my job done. I have some tracking, of course, some meetings, but by and large it's been high trust. They just give me work and they know that I'm going to do it and then I give it back or I report hopefully more than they ask for. And then it sort of goes both ways. So I'm interested hear your thoughts. As far as someone's building a business, what are the sort of things they need to think about as far as building a high trust environment for their workers versus low trust?
[00:33:24] Speaker B: I think you need to balance it. If you think about this very pragmatically, everyone wants to be in a high trust environment. I want to be in a high trust environment. But the reality is that that's probably about 10, 10 to 20% of the population. So the question that you should ask yourself is if there were no impact whatsoever of you doing your work or not doing your work. So if all of a sudden you could. There's a big movement now called the overemployment movement. I don't know if you've heard about this.
[00:33:58] Speaker A: Yeah, a friend.
[00:33:59] Speaker B: So they're people that are basically like job hacking. So they'll get 3, 4, 5, 8 jobs and they just won't tell their employers that they're actually working all of those jobs at the same time. And I don't necessarily.
[00:34:13] Speaker A: That's crazy, by the way.
[00:34:15] Speaker B: Well, so it just, it just reinforces that like those people are just there for A check. They do not have mission vision values. They don't care. Right. It's like, do you care? Do you care about what you're doing? Which goes back to my original point. You've got to get those mission vision values locked in. If you do, then you're going to have that 10 to 20% of the population that will work until the job is done. And you don't necessarily need to babysit them in order to get that job done. But the reality is that that's about 10ish percent of the population. The other 90%, you need to babysit them in some context and there needs to be some type of repercussions. And this is actually, I think the biggest problem that we've had with regards to remote work and why we're seeing this pushback from remote work is we've seen. I don't know if you know what this is.
[00:35:09] Speaker A: No, it's. I don't know what that is, maybe.
[00:35:11] Speaker B: And people that are listening, I'm holding up a little device with a little tiny dial in the middle that has a whole bunch of colors. And this is what's called a mouse jiggler.
So what you do, I've heard of.
[00:35:24] Speaker A: These, I've never seen one.
[00:35:26] Speaker B: So what you do, I thought it.
[00:35:27] Speaker A: Was like a mouse jig is you.
[00:35:27] Speaker B: Put a little mouse on. You put a mouse on it like that and it spins and it will make people pretend that you're at work. So your slack bubble will stay on or your time doctor will still be running, or your Microsoft Teams will still be running. And you think to yourself, oh, this is just a very small use case.
This is 5 million of these were sold post Covid in the last five years.
[00:35:56] Speaker A: Crazy.
[00:35:57] Speaker B: Our estimates is that about 5% of the workforce use these when working remotely. That's a small minority, but it's just enough to totally screw over remote work. Because if an employer sees that 5% of your workforce are using these things and pretending to work when they're not actually working, well, everyone's coming back into the office and we'll figure it out later on. And that's the problem is trust needs to be a two way street. It needs to be employer to employee and employee to employer. And the moment that an employer sees this type of stuff happen, they're out. And that's the part that really frustrates me, which is you need measurement. You need what I like to call pragmatic remote work in order to be able to make remote work work. And it's Something that very few people talk about. Because when we've, and we've seen this the last six months, I would call what's happened to remote work the last six months essentially the polititization of remote work. It's Elon and Trump saying everyone needs to go back to the office.
Remote work is morally wrong. It's an exact quote from Elon. And it's not true. It's just that you need to actually have measurement and management inside of remote work work, which we have seen very little evidence of in the last five years from what I would call a very left leaning agenda as it applies to remote work. And that's a conversation for a completely different day. But it is something that I find incredibly frustrating and it is probably the biggest unspoken way that remote work is, and I'm trying to choose my words carefully here because I don't want to piss off a whole bunch of other people. It's how remote work is, how people are ruining remote work fundamentally is that type of mechanic of that 5% of the population that ruins it for the other 95%.
[00:37:58] Speaker A: And what do you think the role of AI is in remote work? How is it changing remote work? Are there opportunities there? Is it all negative?
[00:38:05] Speaker B: I think it's mostly negative for employees. Like, I wish I could sugarcoat this and tell you that everything's going to be just fine. It's not. When you think about the AI of work, a lot of those jobs are going away.
And I think everyone that understands this, like if you work with ChatGPT a couple hours a week, I think you fundamentally understand that as well. It's just, it's going to change. I was speaking to one of our designers on our research and development team and the new GPT4O image model had, when we were recording this, I think it came out about a month and a half ago. And he's like, shit, what, what do I do? And I said, not design. You're still gonna like, you still have a job here, obviously, and we're gonna try to keep you as long as humanly possible. But if you're smart, figure out where the puck is going. That's Wayne Gretzky, the great one. And his perspective is you got to figure out where the puck is going, not where it is right now. And with AI, this movement has just been, I mean, I am taken aback how quick technology is moving. And I'm a technologist.
So where we're going to be in the next 36 months, I think it's going to Be a pretty negative place when you think about employment. And I think even more importantly, the next economic correction, the next time that we have the stock market really collapse, goes down 30 to 40%, everyone's gotta fire a whole bunch of people. Those jobs will never come back. Because it's easy right now to do it with AI. I mean, fundamentally, Brady, I don't know if you. It's April 24th when we recorded this. I don't know if you did your taxes.
[00:39:51] Speaker A: Unfortunately, my taxes did me.
[00:39:55] Speaker B: Yeah. So I, I had my accountants put together all of my taxes for all the different companies and all this kind of stuff. And then I had, I had an AI model run the same numbers, same exact result. Like the AI did my taxes, just my personal taxes cost me 40 grand this year.
[00:40:18] Speaker A: Jeez.
[00:40:19] Speaker B: Should I get rid of the tax? Should I get rid of them?
No, because I'm too scared. Right. But it's going to happen, right? It's an inevitability. I would say if it's not next year, it's the year after that. And I really wish I could tell people something different because I think there's going to be a ton of pain in the next few years and we need to be able to control for it because I don't think people even understand how fast it's coming.
[00:40:45] Speaker A: That's interesting, especially the experience about your taxes. I have tried several times, like integrate AI more into my workflow and it's just not been a net positive as far as like increasing value of my work or even speed of my work. I was actually doing something fairly simple. I was making like basically a vision document for one side of something. I was doing something to explain to stakeholders kind of what we're doing and how we want to get there, tools we'll need, dev, resources we'll need, so on. I didn't. I basically gave ChatGPT, hey, here's what I want to do. This is kind of what I think I'm going to need and so on. Like, can you just make basically a notion doc and make it pretty and even that it was not a value add.
What it had there, even like pretty. I mean, it was fairly detailed when I gave it, it was about a quarter of the length. The actual doc itself with the kind of instructions there. And yeah, it just wasn't a value add. It was nice that it like organized things in bullet points. That was great. You know, I really appreciated that. But other than that, it was not a value add. And I think that's been the case for many things I do, I think development is different. I think it, it has been a value add for me in development, but it's definitely been. Well, it's been a short term value add, but it remains to be seen if it's a long term value add in a sense of maintaining AI code.
[00:42:02] Speaker B: So yeah, I think if you want to get down into the kind of details of it, there's a really good article called AI 2027. Just go AI. Just type in AI 2027. It's a bunch of AI futurists and academics that have come up with a month by month projection of where AI is going. I think it's probably the best definition of where AI will be. And their perspective is beginning of 2026 going to replace some jobs and then by 2027, half of jobs. So like that's kind of the, the estimate that they have. But I would. If you're thinking about how to navigate out of this coming wave that's going to hit number one, spend two hours, work on working on AI per day. Don't do anything other than AI. Like to me that is where you're going to get the next wave of value. And then the other part of it is work on stuff that requires a lot of multitasking. So humans are really, really good at multitasking. Whereas like something like engineering, meaning like produce this result, like write this code and produce this application as an example, is relatively simple for an AI to understand. You just look at Firebase, new Firebase platform that just popped up from Gemini or from Google and it's amazing. It's such a huge game changer and I'm trying to adapt to Windsurf and all of these other tools that are these AI copilots that are literally a year old, generating a couple hundred million dollars a year and yet you have another application that comes up that's completely free and about two to three times better. That's just happening every single year. Speed of evolution is an escape velocity that I don't really have, that I don't feel comfortable with. But multitasking, by far the best thing that you can possibly figure out. AIs haven't figured that out yet. Until AI agents are truly good at it. The concept of like doing a podcast with, with you Brady and then going to turnkey and checking out the website and then trying to figure out maybe there is some type of partnership that time Dr. And Chernky could have, like an AI can't put all of those pieces together as of yet. And Humans can do that very, very well. So that's where I would focus my energy. That's where I'm currently focusing my energy. And I have completely. We were absolute masters at SEO. If you
[email protected], we're down about 50% organic traffic, which sucks. Like we had a team of 20 people that were doing organic search. We now have a team of four that are doing it because it's just fundamentally not where the value is any longer. And if you look at HubSpot, which really invented inbound marketing, they're down 85% on their blog and just completely and utterly obliterated. So where does it go from here? It doesn't go to a lot of good places. And I and everyone else is almost telling you the exact opposite. But I feel like they're pandering to the vast majority of people that are like, everything will be okay, everything will be all right. How, like if you, you know, if you challenge someone to say specifically how, how do you think that that's going to happen? They have very existential perspectives of how everything is going to be okay. But in terms of dollars and cents, man, if you're a marketer right now, I would probably say the absolute best job that you can do. The job that I would learn in the tech industry right now would be product marketer.
[00:45:48] Speaker A: Hey, that's me.
[00:45:49] Speaker B: Because a product marketer can actually.
Soon product marketers will actually be able to build products. They won't need engineers in order to be able to do it. And then they can get that product to market because that's what they're fundamentally good at through a lot of other AI tools, I think these teams are just compressing. And when you see all of the super successful SaaS businesses that have popped up over the last year, they're, you know, there's like a hundred million dollar companies running on seven people. It's because they've just been able to figure out how to use AI effectively.
[00:46:21] Speaker A: Yeah. And I will say I do agree with your sentiment there that AI seems to be more scary from engineers perspective than from a marketing perspective. So I have a bit of a weird background. I have a tech background, sales and marketing, so I can kind of see like both ends of it. And I think you are right in the sense that like product marketers are going to have a very strong advantage in the future because if you're building a product like you can pretty much do the same thing for product to product in a lot of situations. Not all of them no one at me. But in a lot of situations, like you just upload data, you read data and then you do stuff with it. Whereas marketing, like, if you're doing the same thing as everyone else, then almost by definition you're not going to get seen. So, yep, I do think AI is almost sort of weaker in that way.
[00:47:04] Speaker B: Yeah. And one of the other things that I'm doing, I don't even want to tell people about this, but because I just think it's such a huge advantage over the next 24 months.
[00:47:14] Speaker A: Exclusive here we go.
[00:47:17] Speaker B: Is I'm buying up brand equity. So if you can buy a URL that has brand equity for a particular demographic, buy it. The reason why I have a MacBook that I'm currently working on and a $2,000 iPhone is not because it's better, it's because of the brand. It's brand equity fundamentally. At the end of the day. And when you think about everyone having perfect search, I can now write 10,000 blog posts a day if I really want, want to and get them up on the block at the end of the day. Right. And who's going to blogs anyways? Because you just go to chat GPT and you ask a question and you get an answer that's way better than, you know, you searching on Google for 20 minutes to actually find an article. So searches out paid advertising, creative development. Now you can run 17,000 different iterations of a creative and you can test that creative way more effectively using AI than you can with a human being.
[00:48:17] Speaker A: So paid ads, paid ads are never going away. There will always be a market to pay someone for eyeballs.
[00:48:22] Speaker B: Absolutely. But what I'm saying is the optimization of those ad sets is going to be. And there may be at one point be someone that's the creative director that's saying, here's the creative flow, here's the taste that we want to be able to implement. But that could be the product marketer's job, in my opinion. Fundamentally, it could be one of those jobs that they're kind of doing an hour a week as an example. But the actual management, like we, we have people in the company that just look at all of our ad campaigns almost every hour to be able to make sure that it's running properly. And we're adjusting all that. So that'll all be AI. And it actually already is. Now if we really. I really was super serious and I wanted to go and figure out a solution to it. It's just that the proof people that we have in there are work right. So the numbers work right now. So all of these different user acquisition strategies are going to be a non advantage for everyone except for brand equity community. So that's where I'm focusing on is brand equity community and then also just fundamentally being able to connect with human beings face to face. So that's why I'm going to the running remote conference in in four days. And I know that this probably this podcast, this podcast will not get out at that point, but I'm going there in four days because I so believe that community is actually the biggest single driver over the next five years for us, is creating that intimate connection with customers to be able to either turn them into customers or to sell them more stuff.
[00:49:48] Speaker A: Liam, thanks so much for your time. I know we're, we're out of time here, but if you want to learn more about you, what you're doing remote work, where should they go?
[00:49:55] Speaker B: YouTube.com running remote so all of our talks are up there for free and I also have a whole bunch of videos about how remote remote work works. And if you're interested in checking out time doctor go to timedoctor.com and the conference running remote.com awesome.
[00:50:10] Speaker A: Well, thanks so much Liam. I appreciate you being on here and yeah, fun show. See you guys.
[00:50:14] Speaker B: Thank.
