4 Steps To Build A Successful Remote Company

You don’t need an office

Photo by Yasmina H on Unsplash

Remote work became popular because of the quarantine. People couldn’t leave their houses to go to work then they should work from home. All of a sudden, business owners and professionals had to find ways to work without an office.

I grew my company working remotely since 2014. Many people told me it wasn’t possible to grow a company without an office, but my story shows the opposite. However, I didn’t start with remote work because I wanted to. I had to make some changes at my company at some point, and getting rid of the office was one of the things I did.

I founded my first company in 2012. I believed I should have an office to make my company successful. After one month of looking for working spaces, we found a small room. Unfortunately, it wasn’t near where I lived. It took me one hour from my home to the office. I had to take two buses.

I remember that the first month without an office was very unproductive. We were four people, and none of us knew how to work from home. All of us believed that things would improve as we get an office. Now with the office, we started working hard. Long hours. Nights. Weekends. You name it.

I tried to work 100 hours per week

However, our results were poor. We were not making enough money to survive. After two years, all of my three business partners decide to leave the company. They were giving up. All of a sudden, I was the sole partner of the company. I didn’t want to give up.

In order to keep the company alive, I should make some changes. One of them was getting rid of the office. I needed to save as much money as possible. I had two employees at the time, and they were already spending more time working from home than from the office. It was time for me to start working home now.

As you can see, I didn’t start working from home because I wanted to. I had to improvise. That’s part of the entrepreneur’s life. But now that my team and I were working from home, I wanted to make it happen the right way. Thus, I started looking for ways to be more efficient and effective in working without an office.

I’ll now share four steps that helped me to build a successful remote company.

#1 Have a self-managed team

“Great people are self-managed. They don’t need to be managed. Once they know what to do they will figure out how to do.” — Steve Jobs

I never wanted to be the kind of boss that needs to keep pushing people all the time to do their work. I wanted people figuring out how to solve the problems by themselves. We believed that management is everyone’s job. To make that happen, people should:

• Be organized and have ownership of their work
• Figure out the best way to get things done
• Step up when in need for help from the team

4 steps to interview candidates

#2 Have clear goals

“Your job is not what you do, but the goal you pursue.” — Fred Kofman

If your employees don’t know the company’s goal, they will not know how to help it. The best way to get somewhere is to know where to go, otherwise, you will have people wasting time at home.

It’s important to remember how a task can help a specific goal. If what someone is doing is not going to allow that, they should stop doing what they’re doing. It was vital for me to keep reminding the team of our goals and sharing our performance so they could see how their work was helping the company.

Stop calling people from your team this way if you want them to perform

#3 Have an effective communication

“This Zoom meeting could have been an email”.

I never allowed space for selfishness at my company. I wanted people willing to help one another to make something great. And for that to happen, we would need to have excellent communication. I believe this is the trickiest part of building a remote company.

We used Slack to chat, but it is tough to solve everything through text. We incentivized people to talk via video (we used Zoom) to solve problems faster. It was like talking to a coworker in the office.

We also focused on having effective meetings. That is something people usually hate to join but is something necessary for a company. You need to know how to run those meetings.

We had a bunch of different meetings during the week that helped us to work better from home. All of them were productive and didn’t waste the time of people. Some of the meetings we had were:

• Daily meeting to share how is everybody is doing related to their work
• Weekly meeting to review the week and plan for the next one
• Monthly meeting to review goals

All of our meetings were fast. We used the free version of Zoom, which allows for sessions of 40 minutes maximum. We tried never to pass that time, which helped us be more focused and goal-oriented during the meetings. It’s not because you can use video to talk that you should be using it all the time. Be smart about that. Don’t waste people’s time. You can do a lot using Slack. Combine both worlds of text and video.

3 things a leader needs to have on his communication

#4 Have outside events

It’s not because you don’t have an office that you should never get together. I had employees all around Brazil and for a while two in Germany. People usually like to socialize.

We had an official encounter every semester, where we brought all the people from the company to a specific place. It was an opportunity for many of us to get to know each other in person.

Besides that, once in a while, we did online meetings at night to play, drink, or just talk. We tried to emulate the real world into the online world as much as possible. That also helped in building a better team.

In short, the four steps that helped me to build a successful remote company are:

1. Have a self-managed team
2. Have clear goals
3. Have an effective communication
4. Have outside events

I talked to many people who started working from home about what they were thinking of that. Many people liked the new experience. Many people don’t. I, for example, can’t see myself working at an office again.

Remote work is not something for everybody. I understand that there are people that do work better from an office. The important thing is to know that you don’t need an office to have a successful company. You can build either with or without it. Choosing to build a remote company is a different path than choosing to have an office.

The day I fired 60% of my company

Join my email list here.