Speaker 1: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the channel. I am your host, Neil Winteregg with Matterhorn Business Development. And today I am joined by our good friend and CEO and founder of Metapulse.com, Michael Linzar. And he is here all the way from Australia to talk to you guys today. Awesome. It's a long flight, man. I'm sure you need to do some other business too. But yeah, we're going to make it sound special.

Speaker 2: I'm only here for this. Flying back straight up tomorrow. So he is here and as you probably know,

Speaker 1: Metapulse.com is the channel sponsor here at Matterhorn Business Development. We use their platform with all of our clients for organization, KPIs, staff training. And with Michael being in town, we wanted to sit down and talk about a couple of subjects that he has a lot of experience in. And in this one, we are here to talk about how to manage remote teams or remote employees and groups of people scattered around, because that is actually something Michael has been doing for how many years?

Speaker 2: Well, we started my businesses in 2010 and we've always been 100% remote. Like even to the point we don't have an office. And so, yeah, well, that's pretty interesting. So now do you work with people? Are they all in Australia, your team? Are they all over the world? All over the world. So I think across all of my companies right now, we have about 60 something staff in nine time zones. Okay. Yeah. So, and all around the world, quite factually, the sun actually never sets on our company, right? Because there's always someone waking up to do something. And that's had all sorts of amazing and interesting challenges and problems. I'm sure it has. So tell us then Michael, how do you manage a remote team? Oh, what? In like 30 seconds? No. I mean, it's actually not that hard if you get the basics right. And there are a few sort of key things that you need to track with to really make sure the team is cohesive. So when you look at a remote team, before I even go into how we manage it, the probably the reason why I would even do something as crazy as that. The number one thing is it opens up where we can hire from to literally the entire world. And that means we can pick the right stuff, not the available stuff. So quite often when you're trying to find an employee, certain number of people live near you, they'll come in, then a subset of that and a subset of that and subset of that. And you finally get two choices. When we hire, we quite often get 10, 20 really good applicants. And then we're not constrained by where they live. Right. And it really opens up. For you, you can hire based off of that person. Yeah. And not. Their skill and how far away they live and their fit and all that. Obviously sometimes you still need to be in the same time zone or generally the same area. But the other thing it does for our staff, they love it because it means, well, if they need to stop work at three to go pick up the kid and come back, they can, you know, because we trust them to do their job because we give them the responsibility and the training to do their job so they know what they're doing. So how do we manage remote teams? Well, the number one thing that we've found that we had to do, all I had to do was I need to have a very clearly defined purpose of the organization and make sure that I repeat that again and again and again and again and again, the number of times as a CEO that you have to tell your team what it is you do and why you're doing it defies comprehension. And it's not even that people don't know you're getting new staff on or different things happen where you have to shift your focus slightly in the business and you need to make sure that everyone understands that why we're doing this. Otherwise they're like, well, this isn't what I signed up for. So the amount of communication you need to do about your purpose of the company, the goals that you've got happening, like these are the senior senior data of your organization. So the goals, the purposes, you know, your company policy, what is it you're going to get out there and do? What are your plans for the year? All of this stuff is critical. And the first thing that we have is an absolute does not move unless there's a natural disaster somewhere. And even then we try and make it go right, is a weekly team meeting at a fixed time that everyone can attend. And if you don't attend that meeting, it's required that you watch it within 24 to 48 hours. I mean, obviously if you're sick or something, but you watch it as soon as you can. So the team meeting, I know you guys have a really good video on team meetings on what to cover. We've done a couple. Yeah. Yeah. So definitely check out those, but that team meeting is critical to the success because it gets everyone on the same page. And there's things that you need to go over in the team meeting, you know, wins what have happened in the previous week. We go over those, any successful actions that someone's done that we should tell the other team members about. We go over all of our KPIs. So how many sales did we do? How many new clients did we get? How much usage is on the platform? All these sorts of things. So people get an idea of how their work fits in and what's needed to be done. Any objectives and key results that we're after. So, Hey, we want to reach this much by this time. And we're on track for there and we're getting there by doing this. We're a little down on this one. We're a little over on this one, however that works out. And then we go over also things like the broad plans for the new week. And when you do this religiously every week and you keep it in, it sets a cadence of the business. And it's just like a car engine. If you're not constantly turning that thing over, you're not going anywhere. Right? So you've got to keep that cadence going so that you can track with what's happening and where it's going in the, in the company. And I think, you know, people think, well, this must take hours. Our team meeting without fail is less than half an hour every week. And we have, I do that with teams of 30 or 40 staff, 50 staff quite happily. And always, always, always keep your team meetings as short as humanly possible. Because when you're on that team meeting, you've got 30 people sitting there, 30 people times their hourly wage. That's an expensive meeting. That's true. Yeah. That's how I found managing the remote team. That team meeting is the number one, you know, go over your goals, go over your purposes, go over your plans. What happened last week that was good? What happened last week that was bad? How are you going to handle it? Yeah. What are the KPIs, you know, measurements of the business and what are you going to do in the new week? That's the key thing to cover in a team meeting. I've probably forgotten something. That's what we do every week. And then the other thing is you have to be able to track and manage the performance of your staff somehow. You have to, because you can't see them. Right. I mean, they're often doing something. How do you know they're not at the beach the whole week? I mean, you can trust them and you should trust your staff, but at the same time, there has to be some accountability that goes back the other way for the paycheck, right? So keeping those measurements of what they're doing is really critical.

Speaker 1: Absolutely. And that's obviously one of the key features that we like about Metapulse.com is the statistics feature so that the managers, everybody knows where everybody's at, what's been going on, what's been happening. And then that is used, as you were saying, with what's the goal at each staff meeting, you can predict where you're going towards your goal.

Speaker 2: Otherwise you're just guessing. Awesome product placement, by the way. That was so smooth. It just like nailed it. Yeah. I mean, look, fundamentally, we use Metapulse internally to run my business. It's actually why I built Metapulse because I actually started another company that was a software development business and we had all these staff and I was like, well, what are they doing? And I tried to find, we started off doing measurements on Google docs and we do a weekly mail in like almost a TPS report from office space. If you've watched that, if you haven't, you need to watch it, but we're doing things like that. And then I was like, okay, no, we have to have a system that can manage the growth of my company by looking after the staff and making sure everyone's doing what they need to do. And they know where they are. And you know, when you're not in an office, you don't see your senior. Actually, funny story. Can I say a funny story? We were doing remote for like seven or eight years. This is pre COVID. And we would have a twice a year or quarterly, depending catch up with a whole company would fly in to it like a day, just so we can meet each other. And on this day I have this person walk up to me and go, Oh, hi, my name's blah, blah. What's your name? And I'm like, Michael Linzer goes, great. Yeah. What do you do here? I'm like, I founded the company. He's like, he died. Right. But it's really funny, you know, and this guy had been working for us for a while. We'd never met. We'd never had a zoom call together because he was, he worked for one of my team that like, you know, this happens. It was hilarious because he was also highly productive. Yeah. So it really sort of shifts your viewpoint on what do you actually need to run a company? Yeah. Are bums on seats equal to production? And they're not right. No, but you get people that think they are right. Where are you? Well, he showed up. So he's working right. And that's just not the case. Right. So this is what the KPIs thing is. And I think forcing us into a remote working environment really pushed us to develop the growth management system, which if it works in a remote working environment, it's going to work in any business, right? For sure. Because you get rid of all that bull that, you know, that things that make it hard. Yeah. Plus you have wonderful benefits. Like when, you know, global pandemics hit, you don't have any problems.

Speaker 1: Cause you're already working from home, right? Yeah. Well, I think it's easy for, you know, just as a side note, companies that were already working remote when something like the pandemic came through, we're able to just kind of keep rolling a little bit more, but now you've got people or companies that were structured for only onsite delivery. And now they're trying to get everybody productive. And they're trying to bring them back and nobody wants to come back, but they're not set up to be able to remote work because they don't know how to do a team meeting. They don't know how to, what KPIs are,

Speaker 2: and how to communicate to your team. And yeah. And it's really interesting. You see these massive companies forcing their staff back in. Why? Well, there's a couple, they don't have a system. They don't have a system. They don't know how to actually, so hang on. Were they actually managing their staff properly before? No, they're just as bad at managing remote. Yeah. Right. So they were compensating not managing their team by forcing them to be in attendance and then hoping some magic source happened where everyone somehow produced a product. Yeah. So I think it's really interesting, those companies and CEOs. And if you're a CEO out there and you're going, Oh, yeah, you know, I don't actually track all of that. Talk with the guys at Matterhorn they'll help you get set up on Metapulse or I mean, look, you can use Metapulse. You can also get something basic set up in just a spreadsheet. It doesn't really matter, but you have to write down the goals and purposes of your company. You have to communicate that to your staff. You have to tell them what was good last week. What was bad last week? What are we going to do to fix it? How are we going to fix it? And how are we going to actually achieve the goals and purposes that everyone's gunning for? And if you have that, you create this dynamic, strong, powerful team. That's very resilient to any problems. Yeah. And they're just fun. Yeah.

Speaker 1: And I will tell you the key to building a successful team is to have everybody actually in coordination and working towards the same goal because you can't have a successful team that doesn't coordinate and doesn't have meetings and doesn't do these things. Now there is a wrong way to run a staff meeting where everybody hates it and can't wait to leave. That is true. But you can't say, well, because people hate the way this staff meeting is, we're just not going to do a staff meeting because a team will not win the Superbowl if they just say, Hey guys, we'll see you in two weeks. I think kickoffs at six o'clock. So I'll see you on the field. You know, we tend to think that we're not allowed to do that in our business, but it's okay for like professional athletes to do that. But we're not allowed to do stuff like that. If that's your backwards thinking nobody can help you because you can sign up with Metapulse and you won't learn anything. You can sign up with me. You won't learn anything. It'll be a waste of money. It's a waste of money and it's a waste of time. So what you have to do is decide what needs to be done to get your team onto the same page. And then it will start to become easier and easier. Like you were saying, once you start getting systems in place, it actually becomes a lot easier. The hardest part is step one, which is starting with some sort of a system, but that's what we're here to help you with. That's what Michael is here to help you with. And you can find out more at Metapulse.com and you can find out more if you click the link down below at adventure to profit.com and we will be able to help you implement all that. So Michael, thank you very much for coming all the way to Australia and we look forward to seeing you fly. Yes, your flights. That's right. We look forward to seeing you on the next video. Thumbs up, comment down below. Tell us if you learned something new. If you think I'm totally wrong, tell me it makes me laugh every time and it brightens up my day. I'll see you next time.