Full Show Notes
Scott Mcleod: [00:00:00] Is
Justin Brady: the Justin Brady show. This is the podcast that amplifies ideas, companies, entrepreneurs, And people frequent listeners of the Justin Brady show know that I just work from home is it’s tough for me. I don’t like it. I am not a fan. Obviously, a lot of companies are successful doing it. And we’ve heard in the news.
Justin Brady: A lot of companies have switched over to that work remotely work from home model. And so Scott McLeod, founding member and chief of staff of Resident joins me today because he has a completely different vision on this whole work from home model. Scott, thank you so much for joining [00:01:00] me and the listeners today.
Scott Mcleod: Happy to be here, Justin. Thanks for having me.
Justin Brady: So if you’re not familiar, if anyone’s not familiar with Resident, you make some popular products, which are what?
Scott Mcleod: Yeah, we’re a collection of home goods brands, uh, mainly for mattress brands are a big one. So Nectar Sleep is our largest brand, got DreamCloud Sleep, Allura Sleep, uh, Level Sleep, and then a handful of, uh, smaller living room furniture brands.
Scott Mcleod: Yeah, so
Justin Brady: I think most people are familiar with the, you know, mega popular brand, which saw like, I don’t know. It was like, like 500 percent growth or something in 2019. Nectar.
Scott Mcleod: Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Nectar is definitely our, our big one. Uh, we’ve seen some pretty unprecedented growth the last three, four years.
Scott Mcleod: Um, it’s the largest of them all by significant. Uh, I’d say significant numbers.
Justin Brady: Yeah, so you’re doing this with 99 percent of your staff being remote and generating more than 300 million in gross sales in just three years. So I mean, the big question we [00:02:00] all want to know is, uh, you know, and I should, I should back up a little bit.
Justin Brady: You guys believe this is kind of essential to work from home model is sort of essential. So, you know, work from home’s not it. Maybe it’s the future for business around the globe. My question is
Scott Mcleod: why? Yeah, that’s a good question. I think I also like to kind of, at least from how I perceive it, I think it’s important even before this company, I’ve probably been working remote 80 percent of my like 12 year professional career.
Scott Mcleod: Okay. Most of the time I’ve been remote in some form. So as a consultant or a practitioner. Uh, and I’ve also been in office for places, et cetera, but I’ve generally kind of defaulted there. And I, I think if you look at, uh, remote work and distributed workforce, those are two trends that kind of parallel with each other.
Scott Mcleod: So our earliest days we were distributed
Justin Brady: remote, let me, let me, let me stop. Can you, can you define why those are different really quickly before you go into that? Because I, I’m not sure I know the difference.
Scott Mcleod: Yeah. So the, it’s important that being remote [00:03:00] first, I think is the way in which your organization operates.
Scott Mcleod: Thanks. And. That’s assuming that everyone who’s a stakeholder or decision maker isn’t in the same room. So I think that’s, uh, you have written forms of communication. It’s about taking notes, sharing different types of documents and information. The default is, is that important things are communicated online and they’re recorded and they’re digital.
Scott Mcleod: So that’s kind of the remote first approach where by default, Hey, we’re going to have a meeting. It’s a hangout or it’s a Skype call or the default is that it enables someone from anywhere. So that’s kind of being remote first, right? Like it, it allows your organization to be open to people anywhere. And then a distributed workforce is kind of the notion of people can work anywhere.
Scott Mcleod: Um, and the two of those aren’t always true. So I think a lot of large companies have distributed workforces. They have offices all around the globe, but they aren’t really remote first in the sense of decision making is focused on online and digital, and it’s open for people around the world. I think the sweet spot is the two, right?
Scott Mcleod: You’re remote first, [00:04:00] so your technology, your tools, your processes, your communication styles within an organization are remote first in the sense that they welcome anyone from around the world. And then the distributed piece is kind of You’re hiring all around the world and you’re building these teams.
Scott Mcleod: And particularly for us in our earliest days. We were all just distributed, really small team, three to five of us working from home. Um, and as we continued to scale and build our teams, we ended up having smart people in a lot of the same cities. I don’t think it’s a coincidence now that we’re distributed in the sense we have a lot of people in LA, San Francisco.
Scott Mcleod: New York, London, and Tel Aviv. These like three to five places ended up becoming co locations for us. So we had offices. We allow people to go work in the office. But our default is communication is digital and it’s remote first. Um, and there’s like a considered effort there. The big one is you don’t want all of one team in one office because then they’re having side conversations.
Scott Mcleod: The communication isn’t remote first. [00:05:00] But I think, before I kind of go into why it’s powerful or like what makes it powerful, I think it’s important why I think so. Um, particularly it’s access to talent when we’re looking right now, we’ve got three to four roles open. I am looking anywhere on the planet, right?
Scott Mcleod: So I’m not narrowing my search to a specific geolocation. I’m really looking for people anywhere. Sure. And I think this access to talent is one of the biggest benefits and able to work with really great people around the world. Some of our first key hires were in these random cities around the U. S. and the world.
Scott Mcleod: Um, so I think access to more talent. I also think that the remote first kind of approach is actually good for an organization. It’s all about documentation and automating and using technology to build your, your business. So in my experience, remote first organization, it’s a lot easier to plop new people in and out.
Scott Mcleod: So it’s a lot easier to onboard because everything’s kind of focused on being written communication and recorded. And then like kind of third, I think it helps with company culture. People can live a little bit more of a live work lifestyle. And I think. For some people that’s they wake up at 5 30 and they work [00:06:00] for seven or eight hours or some people sleep in a little bit later and work later.
Scott Mcleod: And I think they think this kind of flexibility allows people to live a truer, happier life and therefore work is more enjoyable. They create better work products. Um, but I don’t think there’s a black and white answer in the sense of. You’re only remote or you’re only distributed. I kind of see it as this grading scale and um, you could have an office and be remote and that’s really back to like reabling the remote first communication styles and things.
Scott Mcleod: So, and I see like COVID’s kind of pushed this all to become more mainstream and I think their answer is not all remote or all office. It’s going to be the sweet spot. And even for us, When we were all remote and distributed, we’d try and get together twice a year at least. You really need to get together in person sometimes because you can’t, you can’t replace the high bandwidth conversation of being in person with someone.
Scott Mcleod: Right,
Justin Brady: right. Yeah, and that that was gonna be one of my questions like how often do you guys get together? You mentioned Distributed [00:07:00] remote. I’m assuming distributed workforces. They get together just you know more often they make the more important decisions face to face So how often do you guys get together?
Justin Brady: And I guess what I should Ask is like the tangible stuff, right? Like when you’re making a new product or doing a marketing thing, so much of us rely, you know, in agencies or whatnot, marketing departments, anywhere you’re picking up swatches and tangible stuff, we rely on like the Pantone book. We rely on, you know, snipping things and, and making little prototypes.
Justin Brady: So how do you guys do all that stuff, um, remotely, or is that part of the get together phase?
Scott Mcleod: That’s a great great question. I mean, I think that’s part of the tools and processes So a lot of those I think collaboration particularly or let’s say brainstorming Those are definitely some of the things that are harder like Three people sitting in front of a whiteboard.
Scott Mcleod: That’s hard to replicate online, but tools like Figma and Canva and there’s online tools that make it easy for us all to be in the same document. I’ll be collaborating at the same time. So when [00:08:00] we’re, you know, I’m, I’m also responsible for helping launch our new brands, that’s a really early stage thing where you kind of have to have.
Scott Mcleod: Yeah. High agility and ability to constantly change the business. Cause you’re learning as you’re in market and that kind of brainstorming launching business ideas. It’s harder. Um, and we don’t wait until we’re in person for that. We just kind of built processes around how do we use tools that allow us to collaborate together?
Scott Mcleod: Um, so a lot of Google sheets and Google docs, we like Figma for a lot of the visual things. Let’s say your example of Pantone and color palettes. Um, Figma lets us all be in there and all be looking at the same document and dragging things around. And, um, I think for most tools and processes in our business, there’s some way we can collaborate digitally.
Scott Mcleod: Sure. Um, we generally don’t get in. So like we went from being everyone all over the planet slowly. Oh, there’s a few people here, a few people there, a few people here. And, um, up until COVID happened, our New York office was pretty active. We would go into the office three to five [00:09:00] days a week. And that was still just a small piece of the whole organization.
Scott Mcleod: Same thing in San Francisco, New York, London and Tel Aviv, those four places. A little bit of planning, but also I think it’s not it’s a byproduct of a lot of great talented people in those cities And we continue to hire great people Eventually create some gravitas. There’s enough so like la and boston are two of the next ones ups where We almost have enough people to justify having an office because I think again you can get together with people.
Scott Mcleod: It’s not a bad thing it’s great to be able to bring everybody together, but Being very active or proactive about making sure that your hires are not concentrated, right? So I think even though we have four offices in four or five cities. We’re making sure it’s not all of one team there. Um, There’s a lot here, but like, time zone coverage is very important as a piece of that.
Scott Mcleod: Right. Uh,
Justin Brady: So there is, so you do have, so you do have offices. You do have some offices. Um, when, when you guys say 99 percent of your staff is remote, then that means 99 [00:10:00] percent of your staff has the option of being remote at any time, but they can come to the office if they want to? Is that kind of how that works?
Scott Mcleod: Um, really it’s just because those four offices. Yeah. I mean everyone can be remote 100 percent of 90 like 99 percent of the people do not need to be in an office or a building. Um, and we provide the offices as, yeah, a perk in some ways, right? Cause I think even, even when I was not running this company and working as a consultant remote, you want to get out there.
Scott Mcleod: You need to be around people and I’d go work at WeWorks or coffee shops or getting out there is an important piece of, even if you work remote and distributed, just being around people and. Even when I’m a remote consultant, get a subscription at a coworking space. Just being around people a few times a week, I think is important.
Scott Mcleod: So we, once there’s enough people in a certain city, we’ll end up, you know, getting a WeWork or a small office. And then it’s kind of open office policy, right? If you want to be there enough, kind of have a little rule. If you’re there enough, like. Three plus days a week, you get a desk, you get the monitor, the keyboards, the whole setup, if you’re coming once a week, twice a week.
Scott Mcleod: And a lot of that is [00:11:00] even here in New York, not everyone lives close enough. So some people who live an hour away, it’s not really fair for me to expect you to come in when I could walk to the office in 10 minutes. Um, so I think by having it, it provides the choice for
Justin Brady: people. And that’s what’s fascinating.
Justin Brady: I’m glad you differentiated or I’m glad you, uh, kind of drew a little line between remote work and work from home because it sounds like all your staff can work from home, but would you, would you agree that many are choosing not to? They’re like co locating, they’re finding co working spaces and they’re trying to at least in some way replicate an office kind of feel.
Scott Mcleod: I’d say at least, uh, most people need to do that at least a couple of times a week. I think so. I think you said it. It’s less about not being in an office and it’s less about you have to work from home and more about your company doesn’t need to be in your local, your local area. Like you don’t need to be near your headquarters in some way.
Scott Mcleod: Right. So I think most people seek it out a couple of times a week. We literally, it’s like really work from anywhere less than work from home. And I think, sure, I’m sure you’ve [00:12:00] maybe experienced this yourself, but as everyone gets propelled into work from home, your home’s not set up for that. Right. Right.
Scott Mcleod: Cause me, I’ve been doing this 10 years. When I move, I always have another bedroom. It’s the office. I always make sure I have space. That you create for it. And that’s the recommendation we make for our employees. Like if you’re going to work from home, there’s no working from the kitchen table or the couch.
Scott Mcleod: We actually have a rule around it, right? It’s like, you need dedicated space. You need the monitors, you need the keyboards. Like you need to create space for your work. Right. Um, yeah, we, every once in a while have a fun, like we’ll have everyone share their space, right. And share it into Slack and kind of show everyone like where you work, but it’s very important for us.
Scott Mcleod: No one’s like working from a kitchen table or a couch. It’s not acceptable. It’s like, you need dedicated space for your work. Um, in an ideal world, it’s a separated room,
Justin Brady: but So this brings me into a good question because I, I’ve wanted to know that. You, you kind of hinted something there. You didn’t just say, oh, people You used strong language there.
Justin Brady: You didn’t say, oh, people don’t prefer to work on their couch. You actually said working from your couch is like, not good. That’s, that’s not a cool thing. Or working [00:13:00] from, or working from your kitchen table is not good. So I’m assuming you guys have some best practices wrapped around this remote work, um, structure?
Scott Mcleod: Yeah, exactly. I think, and those things are fine in fractions, right? Yeah, for one day, like two hours of the day, you’re on the couch, whatever, but it’s about creating space for yourself to take work serious, right? And I think my biggest is, yeah, kitchen table’s bad because that’s your family time, and that’s where, you know, you have dinner and it’s supposed to be for that, not work too, right?
Scott Mcleod: And I think it is important. Um, and yeah, actually for us, I think it’s also like we were lucky enough that senior employees, you can kind of like someone who’s had more experience in the world, you can give them this list of best practices and hope they follow them. Right. And I think when new people join, we generally are looking for people who have remote experience.
Scott Mcleod: That’s like definitely one of the first filters and those who don’t. Yeah. I think we have a We have a document with best practices when we do our onboarding, part of that is where are you going to work? Like, where’s your dedicated space? Do you have a keyboard? Do you have a mouse? What’s that [00:14:00] setup look like?
Scott Mcleod: So part of our onboarding is really understanding what’s your setup going to be? And for some people, it’s they need to get an office or they need to get a remote workspace for some period of time. Um, but we definitely have best practices that we kind of help push everybody into. I wouldn’t say rules in some cases, but it’s definitely strongly suggested you follow some of them.
Scott Mcleod: Right. And I think it just leads to better quality work. Yeah.
Justin Brady: So you, you mentioned a few like, um, having a actual office space that’s separate. Are there any other best practices you have outlined that you like your management team and your leaders to follow? Like any, any you could list out? Cause I know that a lot of people are transitioning to this and they don’t have those best practices.
Justin Brady: So they’re going to basically go down, you know, two months from now and say, Oh crap, maybe we should, you know, maybe we should do that as a best practice. So are there, are there a
Scott Mcleod: short list? Yeah, I mean, the dedicated space is like the biggest in a lot of ways, right? And then I think I’m, I’m a big proponent of some, I don’t want to say command center, but having the keyboard, the [00:15:00] mouse and the monitor, something that really takes, because most of us are using laptops or iPads, right?
Scott Mcleod: Making sure that the place you dedicate to work, you also have the tools for work, right? So all of our customer service agents almost have second monitors, right? Because we see the additional benefits to these productivities or productivity boosters. When you’re in the office and you’re chatting with people, you’ve got whiteboards and things.
Scott Mcleod: When you’re online, I’ve got slack and chats. True. I put that in one window and your other windows you’re working. Right. So our big one there is like two monitors is a big productivity booster because one can be for your communication and one can be for your first, uh, your focused work. Um, the other is like, I think particularly you have to schedule breaks.
Scott Mcleod: I think it’s important when you work from home that it’s very easy that it starts to blur across your whole day. Right. So I encourage people. Take, actually schedule your lunch break in your day. Schedule the end of your day Google Calendar. Set your working hours is really important. Particularly for, like for us, we have people across almost every time zone in the world.
Scott Mcleod: And you need to be very [00:16:00] mindful of other people’s schedules, right? So, being smart and strong about how you can block off your time. But the additional thing with that is like also being accommodating. Sometimes you should be the one who wakes up early and they stay up late. Or you have to stay up a little bit later and they have to wake up early.
Scott Mcleod: So, I think it’s. It’s figuring out what’s best for you and your organization, but the important thing there is scheduling when you’re not working is just as important as the time you schedule to work. Sure. Um, I think that’s an easy one for people to skip as a best practice is like, Oh great. I’ve got my office.
Scott Mcleod: I’m set. I’m ready. And you’re going to end up working 11 hours a day sometimes on accident and that’s actually not okay in the long run.
Justin Brady: Oh, okay. So there’s that. That would maybe be another best practices. Don’t like just endlessly work wall to wall day.
Scott Mcleod: Yeah. Try and schedule the time where you have your breaks.
Scott Mcleod: Right. And if that’s taking the kids to school or going for a run or making lunch, or this is when I make dinner, or this is when I do yoga, or I think it’s more important for you to schedule out your empty time or not empty, but your non work time. And especially so, uh, the person who’s waking up on the West coast, let’s say, you know, in an hour now, [00:17:00] There are days starting and someone else’s is ending.
Scott Mcleod: And I think that’s where it’s important for you to schedule in those, those holds and those breaks. So yeah, the common ones, I think, which is part of the benefit is people can take their kids to school in the morning, for example, right. And come back and then get into it. Well, I mean, yeah, COVID right.
Scott Mcleod: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense in your life that are important for you. And I think if you don’t do that, Work from home or remote work really can start to take over. Um, and that’s where I think work from home and remote work are slightly different. I think we started to say that of like, working from home I think is only good if you can really have a big space and dedicated room.
Scott Mcleod: If you don’t have that, I think it’s great for you to find any one of the co working spaces to be able to go and work from. But it’s still about scheduling your
Justin Brady: time. So I want to, I want to move on to another thing is why this whole thing started. In the beginning, why did Resident decide to go work from home?
Justin Brady: And I should say, like in the beginning, how many people did you have? And how many people do you have now? So there are two questions there. Why did you do it? [00:18:00] And how many people did you have when you start? And how many do you have now?
Scott Mcleod: Good question. When we started, there was really three to five of us, I’d say.
Scott Mcleod: Eric, Ron, Craig, and then myself and Sharon. And we started remote because we were all not in the same city. So even for the first few months, Eric and I were in San Francisco, Ron and Craig were down in the South Bay. I think we sold a few million dollars worth of mattresses before I met anyone else but Eric.
Scott Mcleod: And it was just because we were able to get it done from home. Yeah, it’s crazy. I mean, like We can do all of it ourselves. Like you can just do it all digitally. There was not other than a couple of meetings I had with Eric in person, there’s not a lot more than that. It was phone calls, conference calls, chatting and email, and then just letting good people do their work.
Scott Mcleod: Right. In my case, I’m like, cool, what do you guys need? Give me two weeks. It’s like, it’s very much following these processes and things. It’s not a lot of innovation as it comes to, well, there’s a lot of innovation, but. It’s following playbooks and technology. So we did it because everyone that we wanted to work on this [00:19:00] project was distributed in remote.
Scott Mcleod: So, so it was just kind of necessity. The talent was. Out of necessity. Exactly. Like from day one, Eric, Eric and Ron had found good people and those good people were not all in San Francisco. Right. So Ron was from Tel Aviv, spent a lot of time out there. That’s where Sharon is. Who’s our CTO. Um, so he was already over there already.
Scott Mcleod: From day one, the guy who’s helping me build the website is over in Tel Aviv. Right. That already forces this, uh, communication and remote first. Um, so that was like when there’s three or four of us hacking around, there was a couple of us in San Francisco, but we were all working from home. I actually worked from coworking space on and off there in San Francisco.
Scott Mcleod: Um, and then fast forward, we’re 200 something employees. Um, the biggest office is in San Francisco or here in New York. Probably like 30, 40 ish people in the New York area. So on a busy day, our office would have 20 or 30 people. Okay. Um, I think now with COVID we’re, we’re enabling and pushing for more like, you know, enjoying [00:20:00] the remote work and work from home.
Scott Mcleod: Uh, approach, but yeah, we went from three and it was out of necessity. That’s, that’s where the talent was. And then as we scaled, I think it’s important to know, like over these last, it’s been four years as of April. Um, over four years, it took a lot of learning in terms of what’s right. And my biggest learning is like, be conscious of time zones.
Scott Mcleod: So making sure you don’t have all of one type of person in one time zone, the benefit for us. And I think I didn’t really clue into this or like push on it, but. We have almost a 24 hour working schedule and six days of the week. So if you look at one of my competitors who works nine to five. Um, you know, they end, they pick it up the next morning for us.
Scott Mcleod: When my day is ending, I’m passing the baton to someone else and they’re running with it and it’s kind of almost 24 hour working culture allows us to get, my joke is like, I’m going to get, you know, six months of work done in two or three months, right? Just because my team is working 24 hours and the most expensive thing is cycle times.
Scott Mcleod: [00:21:00] So the time for me to go from, you know, project a to B takes way more time if there’s no one. Picking it up at night. Um, so we almost have two full work days in a day, right? And that kind of culture works really well. And particularly as it relates to our engineers are when they’re waking up, our, uh, furthest West coast team is going to sleep.
Scott Mcleod: So let’s say they found a bug at the end of the day, or they just finished their design. I’m finished my design. I sent it to the engineers. By the time that person on the West coast wakes up, that stuff’s done. And those guys are finishing their day. So this notion of like, we have very fast response times because.
Scott Mcleod: We have almost a 24 hour working schedule. Sure. And really quickly, that was the reason I moved to New York. We had West Coast and Tel Aviv. About an 11 to 12 hour difference depending on the time change. Not very conducive to productivity. New York and the East Coast is really great because now I’m significantly closer to Europe and the Middle East in terms of time zone.
Scott Mcleod: Sure. Um, and that’s actually why East, you know, I moved to the East Coast and set up headquarters here, or one of our headquarters, [00:22:00] because it enabled us to have a better straddle on time zone. Yeah. Um, But that’s probably one of the most important of being very conscious of you not having all your team in one place because it ends up making it you don’t get the benefit of this past the baton on every day.
Justin Brady: I didn’t even think of the time zone advantage. I didn’t even think of that. But that is interesting because you know, the customer service lines, you know, people have to sleep. So eight to five, maybe your customer service person is going home. So you have to wait till the next day to get to people. But you guys don’t have to do that.
Justin Brady: You guys can just have this seamless handoff that just keeps going. Um, on forever, which is kind of interesting. Uh, one of the things that I know a lot of listeners deal with in the work remote work from home scenario, and this is probably like the most famous, uh, irritating part of remote work is the whole edit and it.
Justin Brady: And you can’t hear and you have to do it again. At first you’re probably like, what the heck is happening? So that’s but that’s what people are used to, right? And by the way, just just to know, I was not muting my mic. I can [00:23:00] do that on command. It’s a it’s a it’s a stupid human trick I have. So I think that’s what a lot of people are used to, though.
Justin Brady: When their phones break up and when people mute, you know, Hey, you’re on mute, that kind of thing. So Do the first question is Has your staff at this point been trained where they don’t do those rookie mistakes? Like do you do we ever get used to that? That’s
Scott Mcleod: I mean naturally that’s back to the early part of like making sure your work from home or your remote work setup is Good and a big piece of that is internet connection and phone connection, right?
Scott Mcleod: So, uh, yeah I mean just talking to someone yesterday. She’s you know remote right now and doesn’t have the best internet. So I had to get her Wi Fi puck to make sure she can have better service. It’s part of showing up to do the job. And if your phone’s breaking up like that, it’s, you know, it’s, you’re showing up, not ready to do the job for the day.
Scott Mcleod: Oh, got it. Most of the time it’s. It’s, you’re on old technology or your internet sucks. Those are kind of the two it comes down to, right? And both of them are very solvable problems. I think it’s back to, you’ve been working [00:24:00] from home or the only time you use the internet is to check email or watch Netflix here and there.
Scott Mcleod: You’re maybe not catching these issues with your home network, for example. Right. I think it puts the importance on like. When you come to work, you show up with your tools and your tools are, you know, you better have headphones, noise cancelling headphones, a microphone, you better have a, you know, all the things that allow you to actually connect.
Scott Mcleod: Um, and yeah, the bummer is you still run into that, like you’re on mute, can’t hear you, can’t see your screen, like this stuff I hope continues to get better, particularly as we’re all stress testing remote work right now, and these are remote work tools. Um, but as bandwidth improves, you know, everyone moving to gigabit connections, let’s say, or something.
Scott Mcleod: I just should. It should start to fade away in some way. Sure.
Justin Brady: So even, so that, that does lead into what problems do you guys run into? And uh, what, what problems did you run into at the beginning? And what problems are you still running into? And then of course, how did you fix those?
Scott Mcleod: Great question. I can, I kind of alluded, one of the first ones was not being conscious of time [00:25:00] zone differences.
Scott Mcleod: So we were just hiring the best people anywhere, not really thinking through, Oh, wow, there’s no one on the west coast. This will be difficult when 9 p. m. PST comes around, right? So time zone was a difficult problem we encountered. We overcame that by being more conscious of like, no more of this type of person in this time zone.
Scott Mcleod: We need this type of person in these time zones. So being very conscious about time zones, that was a stress and a pain point. Um, mostly because, like, some of us would have to catch the slack there, right, being up late or getting up early. It’s not really a sustainable thing. Um, I think, I mean, there’s probably a long list of actual problems we ran into.
Scott Mcleod: Device management, it’s pretty hard for an organization as you scale. How do you get your laptop back when someone bought it and lives somewhere far away from you, right? Oh, sure. Processes, I think we’ve, you know, how much do you let them expense when they’re moving into a place? What’s the standard we allow someone to expense?
Scott Mcleod: So, I think, You kind of run into a couple of these. I think device management, it’s being mindful, making sure they sign documents and information that like clearly they’re going to give devices back and ship them back. It’s a lot different than when, you [00:26:00] know, when they check out for the day and give their badge.
Scott Mcleod: It’s not really the same. So be smart about device management and making sure you’re managing that in some way. Um, I’d say today, one of the problems we still encounter is, Making sure we can have the talent distributed still. So I think time zone is not a problem anymore, but we’re very conscious of it as we’re recruiting.
Scott Mcleod: Um, that just makes the search a little bit harder, but I think it’s, you know, it’s a problem we encounter. I think the other is, is as we got bigger. Everyone getting together becomes significantly harder. Um, and I think early it was easier to get 20 people together, 30 people together, 15 people together.
Scott Mcleod: But as we became 100, 200 people, it’s been a lot harder to get everyone together, right? And I think we’re still trying to figure out what’s the best way to do that, right? We have all hands and we do things digitally, but how do we really get together for a summit or a convention together? Um, Um, and it’s, it’s frankly, it’s hard to make that work from a financial sense, right?
Scott Mcleod: It’s very expensive to fly a bunch of people around the world, right? So I think today we’re still trying to figure out how do we scale this portion of the [00:27:00] business? Like how do we create more in person space and the people who are in the hubs, New York, San Francisco, Tel Aviv, where there’s a bundle of people, you get this in person culture every once in a while, right?
Scott Mcleod: Right. At least when you want it. The challenge we have is, what about the person in San Diego all by themselves, right? Or Chicago? We have no one there. Those people are generally by themselves, right? I think for a lot of them it’s figuring out, maybe they do need to fly to a hub once a quarter or once every six months.
Scott Mcleod: Or the people who aren’t in the hubs need to figure out a way to like actually be in person with someone because I think particularly earlier in, you know, earlier in our history when we hired someone we made it a really big point to get them into one of the cities with somebody. And that means like a lot of my first hires, I’d just fly them to San Francisco, right.
Scott Mcleod: For 80 bucks or 160 bucks, I could fly you into the city before we like get started. Really great way to like kick off working with someone. So I think that’s been a hard and difficult thing to scale as the organization gets much larger. It’s easier when your team’s small. Um, so replacing in person is a short way.
Scott Mcleod: Like how do we create that [00:28:00] at scale? Now it was easy when the company’s small and it’s getting harder as we’re bigger. It
Justin Brady: is cool to see though, that you guys do see, you still see that value for in person, which is, which is interesting to hear the. So you mentioned hubs. I’m just assuming that’s like your, your remote offices cause you have offices in some of the bigger cities where you have more than one employee.
Justin Brady: That’s what you mean. Yeah. I’d say if there’s
Scott Mcleod: more than three to five people in a city we’ve pushed to get space and that may just be a, we work for three people, right? Yeah. Whatever it is, but any city that had more than three to five people in close distance, and if we ask them and they want it, we’d find them some small coworking space for them to co locate in and that’s back to like, we believe in, and I think it’s important, like.
Scott Mcleod: It’s about the trade offs, right? So you losing the in person, that’s totally not good. It’s better to be in person with someone I’m collaborating. Um, there’s distractions, like all the negatives of remote work and work from home are true. It’s just that, at least in my opinion, they don’t outweigh the benefits and the benefit is like better quality of life.
Scott Mcleod: Better [00:29:00] access to talent and then this like constant work schedule which allows your organization to move faster Those three are just more of a benefit than losing the in person and these others Because we still see the value in yeah in person and some of these other more traditional ways of working How do we work them into remote work?
Scott Mcleod: And it’s definitely, uh, yeah, we really value the in person time and it’s been hard. Now the organization grew so significantly. It’s do you just get groups together? Like maybe the marketing team gets together for a summit or the CS team or the sales team and that works, but then they’re still not getting this like camaraderie, right?
Scott Mcleod: Like when you’re all together and you’re all across collaboration, camaraderie gets hard.
Justin Brady: Yeah. And work culture probably, you know, like that people talk about work culture, taking a hit and work, work remotely. And, you know, we’re wrapping up here, but you know, do you guys see that too?
Scott Mcleod: Yeah, I think that’s an important one where it takes, where it takes active investment.
Scott Mcleod: So making sure you’re conscious of we need to create it. It doesn’t happen as naturally with the water cooler. So our organization, we have a bunch of fun Slack channels that kind of keep [00:30:00] people active with trivia and, you know, sharing things and making sure there’s places in which you can still recreate the water cooler is important.
Scott Mcleod: How do you have games? We’ve done all sorts of stuff playing, you know, games over Google Hangouts and things like that. So how do you foster? Yeah, some fun time between people, right? And I think that’s generally where you create friendships and longer lasting relationships. But, uh, we’ve been, we’ve tried a lot of random things with Slack.
Scott Mcleod: There’s something called donut and snack time. And how do you get people to chat who usually wouldn’t chat? Um, and I, I don’t know if there’s the The final answer, other than like being conscious that you need to create the culture and it takes a little bit more work than when you’re all in the same office.
Justin Brady: I think the most important question is how do you steal each other’s lunch out of the company fridge? If you’re not working together, do you guys just probably send an email or call people’s spouses and ask them to ship it to you? That’s probably That’s, you know, that’s what everybody, that’s the next evolution of working remotely.
Justin Brady: How do you pull office shenanigans? So Scott, when you do figure that [00:31:00] out, let’s get you back on the show. We can do office remote work office shenanigans with Scott McLeod, founding member and chief of staff of resident Scott. Thank you so much for joining me in the listeners today. How do people reach out to you or how do they learn more about your company?
Justin Brady: What’s the easiest way to do that?
Scott Mcleod: You can go residenthome. com or uh, real Scott McLeod on Twitter myself. And that was real
Justin Brady: Scott McLeod?
Scott Mcleod: Yeah.
Justin Brady: Cool. Scott, thank you so much.
Scott Mcleod: Yeah. Thank you so much Justin. It was a lot of fun. And
Justin Brady: obviously thank you to you for listening to the Justin Brady show.
