DTL 013 | Liam Martin
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This is the Golden Age for Location-Independent Jobs with Liam Martin

Liam is the co-founder and CMO of TimeDoctor.com and Staff.com. He consults on outsourcing and process design and is passionate about how to gain insights into the inner workings of how people work. He also runs the world’s largest remote work conference, Running Remote. In this week’s episode, he discusses how we need to get ready to market ourselves in a completely new way as more companies adopt a remote-first model.

This is the Golden Age for Location-Independent Jobs with Liam Martin

Welcome everybody, I have the great pleasure of interviewing Liam Martin today, I’m going to start with giving you his professional bio. And then we’re going to get into some discussions about remote work, outsourcing, hiring a VA, productivity, any and all of those things. So, here we go. Liam is a serial entrepreneur who runs Time Doctor, and Staff.com. Those are one of the most popular time tracking and productivity software platforms in use by top brands today.

He’s also a co-organizer of the world’s largest remote work conference, and it’s called Running Remote. Liam is an avid proponent of remote work and has been published in just about every big thing, Forbes, Inc, Mashable, TechCrunch, Fast Company, Wired, Wall Street Journal and many others. He specifically is targeting the expansion of remote work. And by the way, he was targeting this before COVID. Liam, way to go to actually be right where you need to be. So how did you become the guru in all things, time tracking and remote work?

Oh, well, that started around 2012. Actually, more specifically, it started in 2008. I was in grad school at McGill University, which is located in Montreal, Canada, I’m Canadian, we discussed that beforehand. And I was going to enter academia, that was actually the entire kind of that was my mission in life was to be able to hopefully teach and got my first class in grad school. For those of you that don’t know, most first year university courses are usually taught by graduate students, they’re not taught by professors, and I started with about 300 students and ended up with a little bit above 150. And some of the worst academic reviews in the history in the department had been running for 121 years. So, not a very good day.

I remember walking into my supervisor’s office, and I said, I don’t think I’m very good at this. And he said, No, you are not. And I said, Okay, so what do you think I should do? He said, Well, you got to do this teaching thing for the next like,10 to 30 years before you get to do anything fun. So, either get better at teaching or figure out something else to do. And I figured out something else to do.

And I started an online tutoring company, ran that for a few years. This was way back in 2009-2010. That was literally jumping on to Skype with tutors and students. And one of the core problems that I had inside of that business was I couldn’t adequately measure how long a student worked with a tutor. So, I billed a student for 10 hours, they would come back to me and they would say, hey, Liam, I only worked with this tutor for five hours, not for 10 hours. And I go to the tutor, and I’d say, Hey, did you work with Jimmy for 10 hours, and the tutor would say, of course, it’s why I billed you for 10 hours. So, I ended up having to refund the student for five hours, and pay the tutor the full 10 hours. And this was really destroying the business.

So basically, that was how we built Time Doctor with my co-founder and the CEO of the company, Rob Rawson. We built that in 2012. And it was fundamentally just a tool to be able to measure how long someone is working for you when they work remotely. And now we have a lot of machine learning and artificial intelligence to predict various actions and productivity metrics connected to remote work. But fundamentally, that’s what we do. And then about three years ago, we also started Running Remote, which was my personal passion in really learning like how to actually build and scale remote organizations. And for those that have not been inside of this, well, six months ago, pre COVID, everyone would have been like, Oh, what a cute little cottage industry remote work is.

And now, I would probably say remote work was probably worth a billion dollars, pre COVID. And it’s probably now worth a trillion dollars post COVID. So, we’ve gone from 5% of the US workforce working remotely in 2018, to now approximately 42% of the US workforce is working full time, remotely. And the other interesting fact is, that doesn’t seem to be changing. The vast majority of people that are now working remotely, one study says 74% are not going back to their previous in-office work agreements, which, if you are in corporate leases, as an example, I would highly suggest you get out because I think this is a ticking time bomb that no one really recognizes, which is an incomplete shift of the way that we work. And that’s what I’m here to talk about today. Is that movement, how that’s moved, my personal passion for it. And what I think is going to be happening over the next couple years, which is going to be some interesting stuff.

Yeah, so let’s jump right into that. First of all, thank you. That was a great summary of what you do. And I love statistics. You shared about how we were before COVID, how we are after COVID. And you see it on that huge scale, which I love. I can tell you on my much smaller scale of several million dollars instead of several billion dollars. I have seen it happening too. And I’m quite excited about it, as I’m sure you are.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. I think we’ve seen the other thing too, that’s quite interesting, is I come from the tech startup space, obviously. And we’ve gone from probably five Remote First Tech unicorns, that I could have counted pre COVID, to probably a couple dozen, post COVID. And Remote First, or just organizations like myself, we have employees in 47 different countries, all around the world. And we don’t have physical offices. So, we operate without that type of footprint. And probably I could have counted about five if I kind of looked at in pre COVID.

Now there are dozens, and it’s very exciting what we’re seeing. Hometown hero, Shopify, I’m Canadian, they just went completely remote. And not only did they go completely remote, but they actually shut down their offices permanently. So, they’re literally shutting down all of their office staff and which is obviously not good. But the general productivity boost, and even the environmental advantages are going to be absolutely amazing. We’re going to be seeing in the next couple years.

Isn’t that exciting? I mean, they can save money, increase their bottom line and improve the environment.

Yeah, the average Remote First company is approximately about 30% more efficient than an on-premise company. And that’s in terms of costing, so your biggest line item above your staff is actually your office. Apple just built that big ring in Palo Alto, that big ring cost $8 billion. It’s empty right now. Like there’s no one in it. And, they’re very well may not be. I mean, they may never have that up to full capacity ever. Because of the reality that you’re seeing, which is labor, particularly high-priced labor is going remote, you are four times more likely to work remotely if you make more than $100,000 a year. And that’s something that is going to only continue to work its way through the economy in massive ways. I actually think the majority of this is probably bad for the United States. But we can also get into that later if you want to.

Go ahead. Why do you think this is bad for the United States?

So, here’s what I see happening over the next 12 to 24 months. Twitter, Shopify, Google are now saying they’re going to be remote till 2022. Mostly every large tech company, which are some of the highest price jobs in the United States, are all saying they’re going remote. For those that didn’t know, tech companies in the valley that have more than 1000 people, 53% of that workforce is not from the United States. They immigrated to the United States, and particularly were sponsored by those tech companies to come to the United States. Those jobs are no longer going to be U.S. jobs, they’re going to just hire those people directly in their countries.

I’ll give you a case in point, we ended up hiring someone who got a top five finish in the Facebook hackathon A few years ago, global hackathon, they got an offer from Facebook, and Google for mid six figures. And we gave them a mid-five figure job because this person wanted to stay in Indonesia, where they’re from. And so this is going to continue. And this is going to accelerate, where I think you’re going to see probably the next year to two years will be the golden age of location independence for tech workers.

I think, digital nomadism, which is the ability to be able to work from a laptop and work independently in space and time, that’s going to completely explode post COVID. But then after that, you’re actually going to see much more competition going on in those industries, because the labor opportunities and the talent opportunities that you see globally, for me, are going to come to a head in a very interesting way.

Yeah. Liam, I always like to look at the silver lining. So, here’s the silver lining that I see. For those of us in the US who and by the way, I’m not techie at all. I don’t fall in that tech industry. But I have been a virtual assistant. I have worked here. So that’s an aside, but the silver lining I see is there’s a lot of people in the US who would really love to live somewhere else. So now they can be location independent!

Redfin is a real estate aggregator. I think it’s the largest one in the country. They are seeing New York and San Francisco emptying at a speed that they’ve never recorded before. And do you know where they’re going?

Where are they going?

Midwest! They’re almost where he’s in the Midwest. Because yes, for a $4,000 a month, you know, rent lease in San Francisco, you might be able to get a one-bedroom apartment. But you can get like a four-bedroom house that’s awesome in the Midwest for four grand or more. So yeah, the reality is, I would say, any town that has an airport, and a university in it, that has less than half a million people is going to be the new growth center for remote workers, because they’ll be able to get the lifestyle that they really enjoy, which is they can go to their yoga studio and their coffee shop, and they can walk around, they can travel internationally, because they have an airport that’s local, that’s locally available in that university will keep that main strip going.

We’ve gone from 5% of the U.S. workforce working remotely in 2018 to 42% of U.S. workers working full-time remotely. Click To Tweet

That kind of urban environment activated. Boulder, is a perfect example of that. Boulder, Colorado, there’s probably going to be another 10 Boulder, Colorado’s that are going to be popping up in the United States, which is going to be ultra-cool. And everyone’s going to want to move there. And Austin, Texas.

Yeah. Another great example.

Right? It’s just like, they’re really nice places that have very cheap cost per square foot. In terms of real estate, that’s where it’s all gonna be.

Like Chattanooga, Tennessee. They have the fastest internet speed, at least they did in the US. And it’s one of those kind of places that you’re talking about.

Absolutely. There’s other stuff that’s happening, too, that kind of connects to this as well. Ilan musk just deployed his first iteration of his global Internet satellite network. And he’s launching another 24,000 of these satellites within the next two years. That’s going to be a huge game changer, because you’re going to be able to get one gigabit internet which is, I guarantee, better than your internet or my internet right now.

Oh, my God, anything’s better than mine.

We’re gonna be able to get that anywhere on planet Earth. You’re going to be able to sit in the moon, I can’t wait, you know, the Egyptian desert. And you’re going to be able to get one gigabit internet out of a tent. And this is something that I think a lot of people are not really recognizing that these technological forces are really coming together. And honestly, COVID was just the trigger to accelerate these movements.

I kind of call it the digitization of the economy. This is my new investment philosophy is anything that serves the digitization of the economy, I want to invest in. Anything that doesn’t, I get my money out of it as quickly as possible. And I think that that’s a really good rule of thumb over the next couple years.

I totally agree with you. And let’s talk a little bit more about those people who are right now. Because I talk to them every day, Liam, you probably don’t talk to these kind of people as much as I do. But there are people who have not seen what’s coming, what is here, really, and how this is going to stay here. They’re still thinking things are going to go back the way they were, they’re going to go back into that office, earn what they used to earn, have all the opportunities they used to, and here’s the term they use that secure job, I need that secure job. So, what do you tell people like that?

Well, I have a lot of bad news for them. Like, there’s no other way to end it really, truly is not very good news.

We like the truth here.

Yeah. So, we’re seeing the global digitization of the economy. I get almost everything right now from Amazon Prime, most of that stuff, I can click Buy, and it’s delivered to my house before the end of day. I travel six months out of the year, because I have a laptop like this. And I have these types of devices, where I can literally interact with anyone that I want to and run a nine-figure tech company from basically anywhere.

The reality is that those are the forces that are going to be able to better basically the next chapter of our economy. And so what I would suggest that they do is recognize, number one, you are a company of one. I think that that’s one of the things that is really important, whether you work for someone or not, you have to think of yourself more as a company, as opposed to an individual. You need to take care of your own retirement, you need to take care of your own pension plan. I do, even as someone who hopefully our company gets sold in the future, and I have nothing to worry about for the rest of my life. But fundamentally, that’s not something that I know is coming or not coming. So, I prepare for my 65-year-old self to be able to say, Yeah, okay, I want to be able to make sure that I’m financially viable.

At that time, I learned the skills that you really need to learn to be successful in this economy, which is, how do you use zoom? How do you use these remote work stack tools that are really going to be the absolute core tools of the future? It’s very difficult to be able to kind of talk about those types of things, because particularly for people that have been living that type of life for, let’s say, 10, 20, 30 years, they just fundamentally don’t think that that’s going to change. But in reality, actually, we’ve been in a state of extreme stability over the last couple years, in terms of the economy, and I just don’t think that that reality is going to happen. One of the things that I always like to tell people is, there are more PhDs graduating out of India, than there are university students in the United States. And these are not bad schools.

These are really, really good schools, you need to stop thinking about how am I going to compete against people in my local city, state country, and you need to start thinking about how can I be the absolute top 1% of my particular industry, and also figuring out how if I can’t be the top 1% of marketers, maybe I can be the top 1% of Facebook marketers for software as a service businesses, or maybe I could be the top 1% of app developers for Russian speaking. You know, women, as an example, you have to figure out what your particular niche is and then once you get down to that point, you have that portfolio and you’d say I’m best in class at this. This is what I offer to the market. And you’ll see those jobs pile up, but if you don’t think about it in that way, you’re going to get left behind.

Absolutely, I totally 100% agree with you. I love that you went into the narrowing the niche because you can that the narrower you go, the more money you can make, the more easily you can make money, because you’re speaking directly to that very specific individual.

We talked about this before we jumped on for the call, but my partner, she is a professional mermaid. She has 15 locations throughout the United States and Europe, where she teaches people how to swim like a mermaid. And you think that that’s a very small niche. And it is. But you know, she makes a very nice six figure salary from teaching people how to swim like mermaids. Figure out what your small niche is, if you’re happy with it, you know, if it’s something that you get up in the morning, every single day, and you’re happy to be able to continue to go to work. That’s more than 90% of people. And you also could really be at the top level of your game. So, figure out what that niches go as small as possible, as long as you’re happy. I say that’s the way to do it.

Hey, that’s exactly my philosophy. Liam, thank you so much for sharing that. So, if you are in, as you can probably tell, I’m not a youngster. In fact, I didn’t start my first business until I was 44. And now I’m 63. And so, I talked with a lot of people that were like me, and I think a lot of people that are going to be like I was hearing this go, What do I do? They’ve been a professional employee, done quite well, been quite secure for all these years, they’re 45 to 55. What should they do? What’s the first three steps?

I would say, understand technology. Go to YouTube, type in how to work remotely. Step one, you’d be blown away at how many people were currently using a tool called zoom to be able to do a video call right now. And I talked to so many people, particularly in large corporate, where they run classes on how to actually sit down and use zoom. And for me, that just blew my mind, because I’ve had so intuitive. But you know, to the average, to the average 55-year-old woman that doesn’t own a cell phone, that’s worked for GE for the past 25 years, they don’t really care about learning that type of technology, you do need to care about that type of technology. That’s the technology. That is the new office, right? This is this is the reality is that this is the new way for you to be able to work with coworkers and collaborate.

Seventy-four percent of people are not going to go back to their previous in-office work agreements. Click To Tweet

So, learn that technology stack forwards and backwards. The second thing would be build your online portfolio. One of the things that we do, all the time when we’re looking at talent, is we put their names into Google. And we find out what pops up. And I gotta tell you, I can definitely tell the difference between people who are really good at their jobs and really bad at their jobs. Because if you google me, you’ll probably be able to find a lot of information about me and know everything about my history. If I can’t find any of that, that’s probably a strike against you.

So, build your personal portfolio, put it out there and make sure that you’re crafting that messaging. And then I think the third point would be agnostic about where work comes from. Maybe you don’t want to work for a US company, maybe that’s crazy. Maybe you work for a Canadian company, or a UK company or somewhere that’s International, or a little bit more international than what you think. Stop thinking about your local market as being the market because it’s not, it’s the international market. And that’s something that once you’ve had that click, the ability for you to get access to jobs is just going to be monumental. While an honorable mint actually even make it more specific, go to remoteiv.io and go to flex jobs, calm and just put together a profile. Those are two of the biggest job boards for remote workers go and check out some of the jobs, you’d be surprised at the salaries that they’re putting out there.

Great tip, and we’ll include those links in the show notes. Gosh, Liam, I could interview you all day long. I have a million questions. I think I’m going to shift topics here. Because that we have given lots of great advice for what people need to do in this new economy in this future economy, which is all happening right now and super exciting. And I want people just instead of getting scared about this, go do this because as a woman I was so scared of technology I can’t even tell you. And it’s still not my favorite thing.

I’m not a tech. I’m just gonna say this. I’m laughing because I’m going to say I’m not a tech geek and everybody that knows me will be laughing at the same time. And I will tell you, it’s not hard to do those things that Liam just said, It is not difficult at all. And all of you can do it. Everyone can do it. And if you want a good teacher, if you’re a grandma like I am, just ask your grandchild. They’ll get you up and running and teach you really fast, right, Liam?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that that’s the thing that it’s just also don’t be afraid to make mistakes, right? So particularly people that let’s say, your average 65-year-old woman, maybe they have a bit of an ego, maybe they don’t want to be the student anymore. Because the majority of the time, they are the teacher.

Don’t be afraid of that. Like, I still, one of the biggest things that I do throughout my day right now is I surround myself, most everyone that works for me is way smarter than I am. And I just ask questions. And like, that is a very humbling experience where you can put yourself into that state. It’s an environment, that’s very, very humbling, but is so much better for growth than pretending that you’re the smartest person in the room.

Yeah, when I left my corporate job, I did have that ego. And it very quickly got smashed. Because I have a really good degree from a good school, and I had all that corporate experience, and I had a big ego. And within a month, I was like, Oh, my gosh, I know nothing. I have learned all of this.

One of the other things that we do for hiring, we don’t look at what schools you go to. It’s the seventh most important factor with regards to hiring. The way that we do hiring, which is maybe a little bit different from other companies, but a lot of remote companies do this, we remove your location from your CV, we remove your name, or any sort of variables that would connect to your gender, or your racial background.

So, we’re just literally or your age. We remove those variables. And we also remove your educational background, what we look at primarily is your experience. That is by far the most important factor that impacts whether or not you are right for the job. Plenty of other companies have proven this. There’s a really great book about how Google hires just like Google hiring book, you’ll find it. And they’ve basically, at this point, done exactly the same thing. They have removed any type of educational points from a CD, because they’ve realized they’re completely redundant towards a hiring decision, they’ve realized that it’s experience.

So, you need to get that experience. If you’re very young, how do you get that experience when you work for someone for free? I actually right now would probably suggest to people don’t go to a university, even though I came to the University System. If you’re 19, right now, go work for someone for free for three months, and work really, really hard, have a lot more energy than anyone else, at the end of those three months, say, Hey, can you hire me? Right?

That’s, you probably are going to do that two or three times, before you get a job. And a job that you’ll probably find really interesting, because choose the position that’s really interesting to you. Because remember, you’re doing it for free. So, you might as well choose the most interesting position that you can possibly get.

And I actually recommend that Liam, even for older individuals, to do an internship to get that education, get the testimonials. Get the pings. Next step paying, if you can, and if you can’t move on to the next one that you can learn from get another testimonial. build your portfolio online, like you’re talking about, Liam, and they’re also going to learn what they like and don’t like.

Yeah, I think that that’s something that I’ve never directly done that. But we have hired a lot of people. And we’ve taken that route with them. And we started people in one position. And then by the end of that three months, they realized that they want to do something completely different. And either we move them because they have the right culture fit, but maybe they don’t have the right position. Or we have said, Hey, you know what, you really hate everything about this work, you should probably choose something else and not work here anymore. They’ll usually be the first ones that present that to you.

Yeah, so I have helped thousands of small business owners, entrepreneurs, find virtual assistants and hire virtual assistants over the last since 2001. And they never want to know what their education is. They never want to know how old they are, what race they are, what sexual preference they have, they asked none of those questions. In fact, when I first started, I didn’t realize this, I would tell people my education, and it wouldn’t help me, it would hurt me, because the positions that I wanted that I was interested in, that I love doing. I had an MBA and they’d say, Well, no, this is ridiculous, you’re gonna get bored really fast. And I’m like, no, this is what I want to do. I learned really quickly, don’t share your education.

And again, I have not been in that particular position. But also, and this is maybe just my own personal bias coming from Ivy League-esque type of university background. When I talk to other people that oh, well, you know, I went to Yale or I went to Harvard, or I went to MIT. A lot of the times, they believe some of the jobs are below them. It’s probably not the right, particularly if you’re in that 55 to 65-year-old range. There’s plenty of jobs that are below you. You’re absolutely right. But you’re getting into a completely new industry, what you need to do is just absorb as much of that information as you can as quickly as possible.

The average remote-first company is approximately 34% more efficient than an on-premise company in terms of costing. Click To Tweet

And so nothing should be below you fundamentally, and then, after you’ve proven your value, within 90 days, and I actually suggest it be a very short period of time. So, it’s either the right fit, or it isn’t, then the leader hires you and says, yeah, we want to hire you. And we probably don’t want to hire you for the position. But we initially thought about what we want to hire you for this other thing, because we’ve gotten to know you really well. Or you know, they’re going to hire you directly for that position, or they’re not, it’s been, we’ve done that dozens of times, inside of the company, particularly for people that have been really, you know, we’ve said, Man, you fit perfectly culture wise, but you have no experience.

And if I’m not prepared to spend $80,000 worth of management hours to be able to get you up to snuff because someone else here is willing to do it that maybe doesn’t have the same cultural fit. That’s where you should jump in, as the employee should say, you know what, let me make this easy for you. How about we work for free for 30 days? Or how about I work for you for $1 for 30 days, and we see where we’re at at the end of that whatever you can afford, fundamentally, and just get to that point. Worst case scenario, you’ve learned a whole bunch.

And, yeah, it’s free education. It’s free education and experience. That is priceless.

This is the thing. I’m in marketing, and the marketing playbook changes every 18 months. Like what I what I was doing, I think it changes faster than that now. What I was doing even a year ago, is not what I’m currently doing now. And so it moves so quickly. And it’s so dynamic, that, for you to be able to even get into that there is no course there is no university education that you can get to be able to get to that particular point, which is incredibly frustrating to a lot of people that are probably watching this right now say to themselves, Man, I wish I could get this type of education, it’s only available through mentorship. That’s where it’s at right now until we end up getting a more stable model, which I don’t actually think is ever going to be coming. The only way to really learn this stuff is through mentorship and through coworkers. You need to plug yourself into that system.

Just do it. Like Nike says just do it. It’s so interesting because the old model was go to school, learn it, and then go out and be doing it. And I never personally felt that that was a great way to do it. Because when they you then go out into the workforce and try all you’ve learned is theory, not really how to do the work. And in the model, you’re talking about. We’re not talking about theory, we’re talking about actually learning as you’re doing the work. And I think that is a much faster way to learn.

Yeah, just this morning, my VP of Marketing said, Well, we’ve got to come up with this new ebook on this aspect of remote work, and we need to write the ebook, we need to create us a squeeze page a landing page, and then we need to be able to run Facebook ads to it. If I gave that project to someone right off the bat, I’d have to spend $5-10,000 of Facebook advertising before we could even test that. So right up like, step one, I’m putting $10,000 on the line to have you learn, right? You can’t do that in any university. Right?

You can’t just be like, Oh, well, we’re gonna take a course here. And we’re gonna have the theoretical framework of how to be able to do this. And this is very exciting. For me, it’s just like, you need to get this ebook written. You need to create all of the tracking and targeting pixels, you need to be able to learn how to run these Facebook ads. And then I’m going to put $10,000 in that account. And you better have $10,001 in return on investment by the end of those 90 days. And if you do, yes, you’re hired, if you don’t you’re fired, man, that’s a fantastic education.

Yeah. That you didn’t have to spend that $10,000 on the Facebook ads to learn, right?

Exactly. Yeah.

Yeah. And by the way, Liam, that’s exactly how I do it, too. I can’t believe how much we have in common. You’re so much younger, your business is so much further ahead. I’m feeling really good about myself right now. I gotta tell ya, you’ve given me a lot of validation. And I appreciate that.

I think that’s ABCs. I think it’s the tiara, that really kind of helps you along. It has to be this year.

Well, I would love if you would, and I’m just going to ask you on air here, you don’t have to answer. But I want to have you back. Because I want to talk about how to run a remote workforce. Well, the productivity and that kind of stuff. So, you don’t have to say yes now, but I’m going to reach out to you again. Because I am in love with you.

Well, I know. So if you’re listening right now to this podcast and you go to your youtube.com/runningremote, which is our YouTube channel where we teach everyone everything you could possibly need to know about remote work. And all of our conference talks are up there for free. Go on there, and you just write a comment “Kathy sent me”. And I’ll see how many of those we get more than we get more than five, I would be very happy to come back.

Oh my gosh, I can get you five in five seconds. I think we should go a little bit higher than that.

Then how about we go for 20? Does that sound good?

Yes, that sounds really good.

Once you go in and say “Kathy sent me” just write in the comments, I’d be more than happy to come back. And we can do a deep dive into the logistics of remote work, how you do it, how you get started, how you scale it, because this is what I know forwards and backwards.

That would be fabulous. Liam, thank you so very much. I just want to give you an opportunity now to tell people that are listening to this if they want to know more about Time Doctor, about Staff.com, about Running Remote. What’s the best way for them to do that?

Well, I don’t know if you notice, Kathy, but I snuck that in 30 seconds ago. Running Remote is the best place to be able to learn about anything connected to remote work. If you want to try out a trial at Time Doctor just go to Timedoctor.com 14-day free trial. And if you want to go to staff.com and test out a trial staff.com as well just go there. And if you want to actually go to our online events that we run for running remote, obviously we can’t run in-person events during COVID. Just go to Running Real calm sign up. And you will be in the running for the next Running Remote event, which we run every couple months.

That’s great. And I actually I think I’m on your list right now for that. But if I’m not, I’m going to double check and make sure because I really want to attend one of those events. Just a couple more questions for you here to make sure that people go to the places that they should for what they’re looking for Time Doctor. I saw that you have a lot of really big companies that use that. Yeah, can smaller companies, one person companies benefit from it too?

Absolutely. We have thousands and thousands of companies that just have one seat per Time Doctor. And then we have governments that run on Time Doctor so it’s actually everyone. Good to be able to get access to it and you won’t get bugged by salespeople or anything. If you want help, we are absolutely available to do it. But fundamentally, for us, it’s a sign up, try the product, if you like it, you can buy it, if you don’t like it, you don’t have to buy it.

And, as a plug, I will tell you that I have looked at, I can’t even tell you the number of time tracking systems keeping track of your time systems I have used, and I highly recommend checking this one out, because most of them do not do what you need to do. You struggle to use them and they just don’t work as well as you hope. Check out Time Doctor. Staff.com, who’s your ideal client for that?

That’s for bigger clients. So, staff.com is entirely about predicting large companies, things that are important to them. So if you want to know whether someone is going to be the right fit for your organization, you would use staff.com. And we would be able to use a lot of artificial intelligence to be able to show you specifically is this person going to be a really good salesperson for you in the future? Or do they have some productivity issues that maybe you need to deal with? That’s fundamentally Staff.com.

And then Running Remote, obviously, is just the conference itself, which is my passion project and where I now spend the majority of my time. To be completely honest with you, as I said, I just talked to people that are smarter than me, on the Time Doctor and staff.com departments. Running Remote is the one that I’m quite passionate about. I call it my weekend business. It’s where I like to spend those extra couple hours a week where I can just say, Yeah, okay, I really need a little bit of a pick me up because I just spent nine hours sitting in meetings all day long. Let’s do some reading the road stuff.

I hear you and Running Remote, who is going to benefit the most from attending that event?

If you manage road employees Running Remote is the place for you. If you are an employee, I wouldn’t necessarily suggest Running Remote as the place for you. I would suggest Nomad Summit, Nomad City. These are really great places for remote workers that just want to learn how to work remotely well or want to become location-independent workers. So, if you’ve got employees running around is absolutely the best place because we specifically target the ability for companies to be able to build and scale their organizations remotely.

Okay, and how about a company like mine? I’m assuming it’s going to be a yes. I don’t have any employees other than me. But I have a staff of 24 totally remote employees.

No, that’s totally up your alley. I mean, this is this is exactly what I know for specifically. Yeah, we want to be able to really teach you Remote Management at scale. Right. So how do you know, I don’t have it in front of me. But we just ended up buying Oculus VR goggles for everyone. You know, how do you manage and do team days better? How do you do company retreats? How do you measure productivity instead of remote organizations? How do you manage people instead of remote organizations? What’s different between on-premise organizations and remote first organizations, it’s all in there. Again, all available on the YouTube channel for free.

Fabulous. Liam, thank you so very much, everybody, please go to youtube.com/runningremote and put “Kathy sent me” and I want to hear more from Liam, again.

And if you put that in the comments. I’ll definitely jump into the comments with you as well. Thanks a lot, Kathy, really appreciated your time. And this was a ton of fun, and

You’re very welcome. I appreciate you so much.

 

About Liam Martin

Liam Martin | Dare to Leap

Liam is a serial entrepreneur who runs Time Doctor and Staff.com — one of the most popular time tracking and productivity software platforms in use by top brands today. He is also a co-organizer of the world’s largest remote work conference — Running Remote.

Liam is an avid proponent of remote work and has been published in Forbes, Inc, Mashable, TechCrunch, Fast Company, Wired, The Wall Street Journal, The Next Web, The Huffington Post, Venturebeat and many other publications specifically targeting the expansion of remote work. The mission statement that feeds all the products and services that Liam is involved with stem from empowering workers to work wherever they want, whenever they want.

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