Ep 15: How To Scale Your Business If You Are Completely Remote with GQ Fu

About GQ FU’s background and LTVplus

Together with partners David and Mark, GQ has been running LTVplus for two years. He was lucky enough to have found his passion after landing a job in customer success prior to LTVplus. 

What is Customer Success?

At the core, this business doesn’t focus on your success but rather, your desire to make sure that your customers are successful. Your success in this field is dependant on that. Customer success entails different things depending on what kind of services or products the customer or client offers. 

For LTVplus, GQ knows that they are successful in focusing on their client’s success, if they can do at least one of two things for their clients:

1. Their clients’ sales increase
2. LTVplus can increase their client’s customer satisfaction ratings

In order to determine what they need to do for their clients, GQ asks them one question, right off the bat: 

What does success look like to you?

Knowing the answer to this question will determine what they can do for their clients.

How do you scale your business if you are completely remote?

GQ says the first step is to understand what the core positions or the core roles in your business are. Because there are so many options with remote workers, you need to narrow down the candidates based on what you need from them:

• What time zone do you work in?
• What language(s) do you want these remote workers to speak?
• What positions do you want to fill?
• What skills do you need them to have?
• Do you have a client-facing role you need to fill?
• Do you need 24-hour coverage?
• What is your budget for remote workers?

With LTVplus, GQ has partners and team members based in Turkey, Portugal, LA, Serbia, and the Philippines. 

How do you find the right people for these roles?

GQ suggests understanding exactly what type of business you are running and who the key essential roles you need to fill the first time around.

For example, when LTVplus begins the recruiting process for themselves, GQ and his partners first assess that, since they are an outsourcing company (the type of business they run), they will need an operations manager (the essential role to fill) to help with processes and to help run and recruit some of the operations. Since these processes are at the core of their business, filling that role can allow the ops manager to help grow their business.

Write down your mission and core values. These act as your compass when you’re driving your business.

It is also important to hire people who embody your core values to ensure that everyone is on the right page when it comes to your company’s mission and goals. You want to make sure that your team builds and grows the culture you want within your company.

How to get over the fear of hiring online?

There is a lot of trust involved when hiring someone who is working remotely, especially if you are a new business owner and haven’t hired anyone before. GQ suggests you take a moment to really understand what the recruitment process is like and put in the time to interview enough candidates. 

GQ also encourages you to set a probationary period with your new workers to ensure that you both know what the expectations are, and so you can both work together to earn each other’s trust, as well as learn about your work ethics and build a healthy work relationship. 

Finding people with experience with remote work can also help with the anxiety of hiring someone you’ve never physically met.

The technical aspect of it is so crucial that some people might have a tendency to forget [about it].

What are healthy expectations for someone working remotely?

Ensuring that your remote staff has the necessary hardware to get the job done, is one of the most basic and often forgotten about expectations. In addition to the components they will need for the tasks at hand, they should also have a working mic and/or webcam for meetings. Having a webcam is best to be able to connect with your staff, since everyone is working so far away from one another. Building and maintaining that connection and rapport is important.

You want to build that rapport as best as you can.

GQ urges you to set boundaries for yourself as a business owner (and for the staff). What tends to happen is that people who work from home, might have a tendency of working longer hours and they shouldn’t be expected to work more than necessary. Setting those work-hour boundaries and expectations ahead of time can eliminate this problem for both you and your staff.

Tools and Methodologies to Maximize Your Utilization of Your Remote Team

In order to make the most of your (and your staff’s) time and money, GQ suggests you have a list of fall-back tasks. It is up to you to decide what your staff should be doing beforehand. You also need to make sure you know what you are hiring people for. If you want to hire someone who is both a thinker and a go-getter, make sure your candidate has both of those characteristics. At an entry-level position, you need to make sure you are clear with your expectations and your tasks.

You have to overcommunicate excessively in a remote set-up.

GQ ensures that there are plenty of tools out there that serve as time managers to ensure that your staff is working. A couple he suggests are TimeDoctor, or HubStaff. These time monitors and managers aren’t just for business owners to see that their staff is working when they should be. These managers are also there for business owners to see which tasks are taking too long and why.

Depending on the field, these time monitors aren’t too overbearing or creepy. If remote workers are experienced, they have probably worked with software like this before.

How do you manage your remote team?

LTVplus started out with the EOS system (the entrepreneurial operating system). This system (and the modified version that GQ works with now) employs:

• Goal-setting techniques
• Weekly meetings to check-in with everyone (Level 10 Meetings)
• Good News and Gratitude minutes (to set and lift the mood)

In addition to chat tools (like Slack, Bitrix24, or GoogleChat), try to do things visually. Send a video instead of just an image or an email. GQ also suggests having interactive communications: ask interesting questions, give shoutouts, ask your team about themselves, etc. This helps you create a strong culture, which is so crucial to driving your business forward.

Overcommunication is important to management solutions as well. This should go both ways, from the business owner to his or her staff and vice versa.