Lessons - How to Grow a Fully Remote Company | Kean Graham, Founder & CEO of MonetizeMore

Hi, it's Scott here. On these lessons, episodes of my podcast, I'll be selecting my favorite lessons from various guests and episodes of success story. Today, you're going to hear from Keen Graham, founder and CEO of monetize more. Keen is a serial entrepreneur. His most recent venture and monetize more, he started it in 2010 with the goal of building a bootstrapped business that would dramatically increase the ad revenues publishers. Over the last 11 years, he's perfected his proprietary ad optimization model and now increases ad revenues for hundreds of publishing networks in more than 40 countries. Today, he's going to teach you nine lessons that he has learned from scaling a startup that's 100% remote to a business with over 200 team members. Hi, my name is Keen Graham and I'm the founder and CEO of monetize more. Over the past 11 years, I've been able to grow monetize more 100% remote team from zero to 200 plus full-time team members. Today, I'll be sharing my nine biggest lessons in scaling a thriving remote business. All right, number one, grant full schedule and location freedom. To get the real juice, the maximum benefit out of remote working is important for employers to offer full schedule freedom where they set their own schedules, they can work during any time of the day that they want and they can live anywhere in the world that they want. As long as they have stable internet, they can work in an optimal fashion, they can work from anywhere. That is what we do at monetize more and that's why so many team members, high caliber team members want to work for monetize more. Because what we found is these other companies, during the pandemic, they're trying to make this whole remote thing work out, they still restrict them to the nine to five, they still require them to work from the same city, even though they work from home. And that takes out the greatest benefits of remote work, which is that freedom. So those team members are not as happy. They won't stay with the company as long. And as a result, the employee turn is going to be higher and employee morale won't be as high as well. You're just not really getting the full benefit of remote work within your team. Number two, tailoring to customer culture and language makes a huge difference. When we were trying to grow internationally, we had some potential customers in Brazil that we were trying to convert into paying customers. And we just couldn't crack that nut. We tried to get on sales calls in English. We kind of approached them like we did for North American and Western European clients. And they just wouldn't convert. And then we hired a Brazilian salesperson. And he went after those same potential customers. And all of a sudden, they started signing up. Because he spoke to them in the local language Portuguese in this case. And he understood the cultural nuances because he's from Brazil. And we were able to sign up these large customers. And as a result, we saw this increase in sales conversions. And we started going after this market more. And we had way more traction by customizing to the culture and the language we approach to these customers completely different. We even hired people in support in our actual ad optimization department. So every step of the way, they would be conversing with someone who spoke the local language and understood the culture. And then we started to do this for other strategic markets. And we saw similar type of traction. So that was an important lesson that it is worth investing and focusing on the particular market by looking at the culture and the language and tailoring to that. And as a result, we've had some great traction in different markets and been able to expand internationally versus the more typical strategy we've seen from other companies where they used just that same approach for all the different markets. Maybe they'll get an office in that country and just use that same strategy. It's really important to tailor to each country. Number three, be border agnostic. This goes for hiring, but it also goes for running the team, promoting. Because what we find is these other companies who are trying to make it with remotes, they have their kind of the city that they're in. You know, maybe they have an office and that is how they see their in-house team. And then when they're trying to do this remote thing, they quote and quote, outsource and they outsource to all these different countries and they consider that the outsource team, like they're at arms length. And that kind of gives the management the idea. It kind of restricts them from promoting those teams for those team members to be in leadership roles, for them to be more involved. It's kind of like the lower priority team and they essentially have a ceiling that they cannot break through. So to have this idea where you're outsourcing any, any of the teams outside of your headquarter country is really limiting their potential and a huge mistake. And monetize more, we are border agnostic, we are in any country and any team member, no matter what country they live in where they're from, they are part of the team. That is our in-house team. There were all team members and they're just as equal whether they're from Canada, US, Philippines, India, Russia, doesn't matter. We are border agnostic and that has allowed us to scale to over 200 team members and significantly grow the company. Number four, have in-person company retreats. While we work very well remotely, meeting in-person is still important. We've had several in-person company retreats in Philippines, in the Republic of Georgia, in Canada and we found that these in-person meetings you still have a lot of benefit that you get from them because you have those non-data-data discussions. We've had a lot of breakthroughs and we've really bonded as teams. So having those in-person retreats where you get together and really get to know each other at a different level and then these great ideas and motivation come out of it, those are important. They don't have to happen every day, but once a year, at least once a year, they're definitely worth it. There's a lot of positives that come out of it. Number five, don't limit people to virtual assistant roles. I see this in so many different companies, even 100% remote companies. And what you're doing when you're putting someone in a virtual assistant role is you're putting a ceiling over their head that they won't be able to break through. They're only a virtual assistant. This is something we haven't done and monetized throughout our whole history. We gave people specific roles. And if they thrive, if they're great examples of the culture, if they perform really well according to our key performing indicators, then they have the opportunity to be promoted and to continue to be promoted and thrive. Nobody is designated to a virtual assistant role because that will prevent them from reaching their potential. Number six, commit to remotes, be an inoffice company or a remote company. We find when these companies, they try to do this kind of like hybrid, it usually doesn't really work out that well. And if you try to do this, it's just really important to commit to the actual remote communication to push projects forward. What we've seen is other companies, they will delay certain conversations, certain communications, certain projects because until they actually need in person. None of this has to happen in person, whether it's a project conversation, even the tough ones, performance reviews, sure that might be a little bit easier in person, but they can all be conducted in an effective manner being remote. So don't hold back on anything just because you're not in person. It can all be done very well remotely. Number seven, track everything. And one that says more, we are very data driven and we found the more data driven we become, the faster we grow, the more success that we garner. It's so important to track everything, especially when you're remotes because you can't leverage being in an office and just seeing people, you know, ask them, type on the shoulder and ask them a question. If they're actually showing up at work, you have to rely on the key performance indicators. Otherwise known as KPIs. We track everything. We have KPIs for every single team, for the company. We track them every day. We have colors attributed to them. Everybody knows the KPIs and it is transparent to everyone. We find this very important and it gets our team members to be driven towards actually achieving results. This is a big part of our culture. Speaking of culture, number eight, live, breathe and eat your culture. As a leader, as the founder and CEO, I have to be the best example of our culture and something I think about every day. Our top three pillars are reliability, enterprising, and Kaiser. And that's something that I embody. It's something that I exemplify. So if I'm not reliable, I do whatever I can to address it and make sure it doesn't happen again. I always make sure that I'm enterprising in any new project, any opportunity to be innovative, to be really utilize that entrepreneurial spirit and for Kaiser to focus on improving. I want to improve myself, the other people around me and our systems. I have to be the best example. And I want to encourage everyone to be the best example of the culture. And we reward those who are the best example of the culture through promotions. If they are very counter-culture, then we use those to make decisions for terminations. And the other team know why we did that. And we give shout-outs. We give recognition for people who are a great example of the culture. And we say what particular aspects of the culture they exemplify. So keep that top of mind. And the last one. Number nine, remote companies are more resilient. The pandemic was the best example of that. As you saw, companies were having a heck of a time trying to move forward, trying to figure out this whole remote thing when they're in office. And that's how they used to conducting business. As a remote business, monetize more was able to thrive during the pandemic. We've received our highest growth we've ever seen. And it's because we've been able to continue as business as usual. However, remote businesses are resilient and more flexible in other potential issues. Our labor force is diversified across the globe. So if something bad happens in one country, say it happens in the country that we have our head office in Canada, we still have the majority of our team outside of Canada. We are anti-fragile with his diversification. We have resilience in our DNA. When something bad happens, we're able to bounce off of it and start talking about what the next steps are going to be. That's a really important part. And to be remote adds that level of flexibility to allow our team members to rally past it and be able to come up with the next steps and move forward.