Building Culture, Processes, and Accountability as Remote Team

up next we've got Patrick Shaw from Rapid funnel with the revenue north of 3 million all right it's been a long time since I've been nervous in front of a room but my daughter's here and she's a tough cookie um so uh I'm just curious how many people knew first slack event I was just curious yeah it's been um I didn't know anything about SAS I came into this space you know I'm trying to figure it out and how many people are

like came into SAS without any knowledge or understanding of that world really so I'm just curious there too so I go to I'm trying to figure it all out I build a platform for a sales team that I had and the company ended up licensing with us and started paying us a bunch of money they tried to um they paid me to educate them and they were going to build it themselves they spent a million dollars it was a

disaster and they never left the the field sales people never left the platform we were using so you know I'm like well this is I can do this I can build a business around this so I start going to sastra and you know you get there and every person's like well what round are you on and I don't know what they're talking about I'm like what round to what right and and you get all this advice and I'm scratching my head and I can't figure it out and then I got introduced to Latka

and it's amazing to me the difference in the advice the perspective right because there's an agenda that comes with I'm not beating all VC ups I don't think they're all bad but there's a there's a there's an agenda that comes with all that advice and everything you read and so this was just you know to you guys thank you and this community has been unbelievable I love that quote that I think it was Emerson said every man is my Superior and that I can learn of him and it's amazing to me that we

all have our strengths and weaknesses we all lean to those things so I'm going to talk about things that are strengths for us you know I've got plenty of weaknesses and I'm coming here to try to figure out what those are but what we've done whoops what we've done is just so you have a little bit of backstory and I'm going to move really fast and basically talk to you about the the big things that I think we did really really well as a company um and so this is our our growth track I just went to last year's revenues which

was 2.9 Million our goal um this year is just over 4 million and we're just a little bit behind that Target but you know we're having really steady growth we're bootstrapped I did go to a friend of mine and I didn't again I'd knew nothing about SAS so I go to this private Equity guy who's a friend and I think well you invest in companies you've got to be able to help me so I go to them and I'm like well I'll give you 10 of the company for nothing

now turns out he knew nothing about SAS right he just invested in a lot of different kind of companies and billionaire and he's like well I'll give you 300 000 for 20 percent which is you know is a lot Equity but I'm like I'm clueless and I need somebody to guide me through some of this so I'm like okay now now I will tell you in a little bit how I got a million dollars for zero Equity shortly but which was one of the important things for us but sometimes ignorance is bliss like it anyway some

of this worked out but I I gave him that they provided no value um but they're still good friends and and so anyway we just started building and and uh so you know you know our team is 70 people in nine countries which yes is probably a lot of people at at just over 3 million in Revenue now um but I'll share a little bit of that but 70 people and completely remote and I wouldn't have it any other way

I've been I've worked from home my entire life don't have any interest in having an office right or wrong that's how we're building it and so it's required us to do some things differently that when we first started we were Outsourcing developers in India we were doing a little Outsourcing in the Philippines and that didn't work at all what did work is hiring directly and building culture last year we had three percent um turnover total and about the same the

year before now that's probably frankly I mean we don't count letting people go in the turnover and and I probably need to do a little bit more of that frankly you know this idea of anyway that that's my own problem but but we built really good culture so just so you know what we do in short just in case you ever run into this kind of customer if if any Enterprise or leader Has a Field driven sales organization we gamify prospecting and

follow-up so through a mobile app primarily first right we we drive the lead measure so prospecting and follow-up if it's an outbound kind of sales team or they need people to tell the company story we gamify that whole process and that's what I had I had a huge sales or tens of thousands of people that I needed to sell basically a hybrid Insurance product and most of them were part-time the last thing I want them doing is

going and signing up for SurveyMonkey aweber um you know email campaigns or click funnels for capture pages so we build all of that under one umbrella we deliver to the sales person and they can start focusing on prospecting if that makes sense just so you have some context um so these are the three things I'm gonna I'm gonna talk about and you guys if you can keep the questions really short I'm going to go fast and I can answer them really fast so if you you got any questions you can stop me but you know

the three things that were really big for us in as I look back on the history of the businesses one is is building a healthy organization a really healthy culture mattered number two it did it did help a lot when you can get a million dollars no payback no equity right that that was a a piece for us that took some pressure off of only being able to grow by your own Revenue um so that was big so I'll tell that story and and and and maybe you can you

know leverage it and then um three is just avoiding there's a few landmines in there that that I think is is founder CEO that if I can avoid those you're allowed to make a lot of mistakes in this space there's just a few you can't make right and if you can avoid those few the truth is you can weather you know a lot of things so um so first and foremost I'm gonna I'm gonna run through about nine ideas

systems or processes when it comes to a healthy organization that really really matter and and there are there are links um I guess on Nathan's drive for every single one of these things and I think it would save a lot of people a lot of time like to see exactly what the spreadsheet is or what we built in that respect um so one was we we built this Charter and house rules spent a lot of time on it and it specifically geared around a

remote team like what we found to be really important in building a remote team and be clear and we use house rules tongue-in-cheek because our thing is freedom and responsibility and so you know it's a lot of contract labor essentially but you've got to get people to commit to the job and be really responsible but the truth is in in my estimation putting your thumb on them doesn't do any good because you can't see them they're not in an office

and people are like do you have all this tracking software do you know how many hours they're on their computer a day I'm like no I just want them to get the job done when it's all said and done I don't care if somebody works 25 hours for a 40 hour work week if they get the job done right and if you have a great you know EOS entrepreneurial operating system and you can see what the rocks are what their to-do's are and did they get those things accomplished isn't that what we

really all care about right so anyway the link is there it's 30 some slides and then we repurpose this in a ton of ways we have as I run through the slides you'll see we have like once a month we have an Ahad meeting all hands on deck and it's the first Monday of every month and every single month we take I have somebody on the team take some portion of this slide deck and they train on it right so now

they got to own it learn knowledge modeling knowledge teaching knowledge I mean they're learning in different modalities so so all of these things I'll talk about I'm always trying to repurpose them in some other way we have CCC calls and there's a spreadsheet it's it's really functional it works really well but CCC calls our culture collaboration communication and every single person on the team has to book one a month which means somebody else books with them as well so they're on two calls a month

they're 30 minutes each and they're connecting with somebody else on the team and then we tell them you know and a lot of times they completely go off script but we give them an outline if they're new to the company or they don't know what to talk about there's an outline there to say hey here are things that you can talk about and when you're completely remote right the thing you don't have in a remote team is you don't have a water cooler and I read I read once that the I just

got a nod a nod off from my daughter like of what you know you know what what's it called what's it called uh I gave her one run through what is it called okay well you know what I mean like one of those you know where you get what whatever right so so um prox the number one law of collaboration is proximity right I read that once and it's so true

like we tend to collaborate with people that were around but in a remote team you don't have that so how are you going to make up for those things and that's the thing that struck me and right we lean to our strengths so I had built massive teams in my previous business I was really good at building culture and relationships so that's a strength but I got plenty of weaknesses I'm trying to figure out but but you don't have proximity so what do you do about it well you got to drive it

you got to create it through trips together through things like CCC calls right so and it's been it's been powerful I mean we've been doing this for more than three years and the relationships that get built across departments and people start chatting about stuff and common hobbies and all those things it's it's really really cool that's a slide I did not put in um the the um anybody use traction in here

dude it's so powerful I mean I I really don't know how we would have built the business so I'm reading all this stuff about gazelles and you know different methodologies and 4dx and you know all the SAS principles um out of the valley and all that about how to build a SAS business and I've got all these different sheets that I'm trying to build culture and create processes and systems and then a buddy gives me Gino wickman's book traction

and I read it and it simplified all of it and then I'm thinking about paying consultants in that space and then none of these Consultants mentioned that there's a couple vendors out there we use one that I don't particularly love but it's too difficult it's too much pain to switch I hear the other one maybe is better but it's a cloud-based software platform and it's five bucks a month is what I pay and every single weekly meeting of every

division in the company so the grow team the launch Team the sales team the support team they all work out of traction so there's a Segway IDs ideas discussion solution there are rocks get created so it's really powerful but one of the functions in traction is they have this concept of rocks and I think we took it a step further but it's been so incredibly powerful in

the beginning each division leader would come up with rocks for people on the team and the rock is a goal for that quarter right pretty simple really and then there's Milestones under the goal and then there's to do's but and I think we misinterpreted it and it was one you know Blissful things that come out of some misunderstanding of how rocks were supposed to be but long story

short what ended up happening is it become it became unmanageable for the leaders to give everybody rocks because it became too much of a workload every quarter and so I got to a point where I'm just saying like look I want you to take five to maybe 15 percent of your time I want you to come up with one good idea one thing that you can do based on our company goals or whatever it may be that you can execute on that's going to help us improve as a company

right and I went so far as to say I don't care if it's improve your relationship now in traction you have to you have to read that rock say what you need help with and and the progress you made last week and you do it every single week you following me so I'm telling them I don't care if it's your rela if your relationship's a disaster and it's affecting your ability to work from home then then fix it and

that'll actually benefit the company now most the time they tend to come up with some idea that is more direct to our bottom line but it is amazing to me when you get 70 people and you get a rock every quarter right you go do the math on that over over a period of a year and a third of them aren't that great right a third of them are like huh and a third are like okay I kind of get it that made sense

and the third of them are unbelievable all right you take 70 people times for 280 280 rocks and you take a third of those and the other thing it did is it told you it tells us who the superstars are and I have to remind the executive team all the time like don't get fixated on being control freaks over their Rock part of it is you're figuring out who the superstars are on the team you're

figuring who Rises up and takes some ownership and execute it on the thing that they committed to does that make sense any questions on it it's been it's been really really powerful though again like generally 10 of people's time every every once in a while somebody comes up with a rock and it's going to take like half of all their time right so um and that's okay there's a lot of flexibility in it but there's structure too um rapid shares was was really important

and then I've got ideas it's not Brenda it's Bridget darn it Bridget but Bridget like I was super helpful talking about like her talk on profit I mean we've got it we've got to focus more on profit we focus on growth and so I spend all the money all the time right instead of focusing on on profit but we're gonna so we're gonna adjust this a little bit but we have an intranet and in the back of the internet they can go

in and their rapid shares which are vested and non-invested the rapid Shares are 50 based on the company's growth and 50 percent based on their commitment to the quarterly Rock not the execution or completing the rock on writing a proper Rock and in the link you'll see under rocks there are eight criteria for writing a proper Rock and the last step is you have to get the

sign off of the executive that's it and then they read it every week we never have to worry about execution because they're verbally committing every single week over the quarter to here's my rock here are the Milestones here's what I commit to and then rapid Shares are tied to it which is literally a it's just a bonus program but it's literally tied to the value of a share and they know it because they can see the growth of the company they know how many outstanding shares they are we multiply that number by two

and we we um we divide by the by the outstanding shares and they know so every shares like right now we're seven bucks and you know depending on where they are in the world and what they're doing they they receive shares so anyway that's a explanation of it

Shares are impossible really for us true Equity because we're in nine countries I don't even know how I would begin like real Equity so they trust the company anyway and we pool it and we escrow money to make sure we can they can cash out so twice a year anytime they need to cash out of shares that are vested they can do that anytime and they see how it's growing now they don't like to cash out because the company's growing at least 30 percent a year you know so they look at that and they're like well I don't really want to

cash out and I completely trust the company again culture matters right so anyway we have newsletters which is a real once a month the newsletter comes out birthdays holidays I mean uh birthdays babies weddings all that kind of stuff rapid star so lots of recognition built into the monthly newsletter that kind of thing yes no no we just called it bamboo because I

love the concept of the bamboo and all that but I can look at it if it's a good idea um but um but anyway so so that's big um I won't spend any time here except that we've spent an enormous a Time creating this yearly review and look if it is you go hey you could do better on that I mean come up to me afterwards I love to learn if there's something better but we we spent an enormous amount of time creating this rapid Road review so

people not only recognition what are your objectives your appraisal of your work people want to know where they stand the the greatest reward in life is living up to the expectation we have of ourselves but a lot of people don't even know what the expectation is for themselves because they haven't talked to leadership they haven't said any clear goals it's important to figure out where do you want to go and how far along this path are you right and so this has been a really powerful tool

and there's all kind of rating in there um ratings in there of course we have you know rapid Vision when you don't have offices to pay for and all that there's a lot you can do around those Retreats and most of like you know covid messed a lot of that up but otherwise would be in the Philippines once or twice a year in India and doing really fun stuff where 60 percent of it is culture building you know um

invest in hiring better I learned something incredible from Andre and I do these group meetings now and there's a link in there that shows one of the recordings but Andre who's just on the other stage it was it was awesome um and then there's a there's a dock in there about you know how we go about this interviewing process and I do do the last interview of every single employee and I and I can't imagine not doing that at least for a while

uh raising Capital I'll just tell you I have one minute so raising capital is we I went back to the group and I basically told my friend Tom I'm like look your valuation's about 6 million and and I said it very politely and thoughtfully and all that but yeah y'all haven't done squat for this for this group that Yen done squat six million dollars if you invest a million dollars I'm not going to give you any Equity then then

here's how we're going to grow the company you say Patrick that's not how private Equity works and I was like yeah nobody offers you 10 for nothing either like nobody does that in private Equity either right and I made a really compelling argument put a whole slide deck together and they literally gave us a million dollars of sitting in the bank and we're using it to obviously to grow the company which is cool and I think it has a lot to do with the culture so I put the actual addendum in there and all that kind of stuff um which is a pretty unique thing you

probably won't hear and then and then the last thing I'll just tell you is you know your your job as CEO there were two books that I've read recently that had a real profound impact and one was the four obsessions of an extraordinary executive and it really documented why a healthy organization is so important and I don't think we'd you know we we do focus on spreadsheets and all those things in the business but I'm telling you if the organization's healthy you don't spend so much time with problems

and culture conflict and and compensation problem it just I can't imagine doing it another way it makes it fun to build and I think we're all here to build something that's fun and then the other book was who and not how and um by Dan Sullivan and so often try to solve a problem with how instead of just like who like what is it I'm trying to solve why is it important educate The Who on the why and the what

and then let them go figure out the how you can be there to consult them but don't micromanage the thing like go put good people in good seats and let them go fail forward so that's it thank you guys [Applause]