The Ultimate Millennial’s Guide Founders to Becoming Remote-First

So you might have seen the huge success that companies such as AutoMattic and GitLab have seen starting or transitioning to a remote first company and thought “how do I get in on that action?”. Well you’ve come to the right place. My name is James and I’ve been a “Backpack CEO” for almost 20 years now. Running my own companies from rural Japan, Borneo, Malaysia, the beaches of Thailand or Climbing up Ecuador’s largest mountain range in a cable car.

Why go remote first?

Well for starters it’s cheaper. Having no offices, no manufacturing plants or factories and storage facilities to maintain, staff and secure 8 hours a day, 5 days a week is super convenient. But above and beyond that now a lot of Gen-Z talent expects that kind of thing and to hire them you need to be willing to give them the kind of world culture they’re looking for.

With over 55% of Gen-Z graduates now looking to work remotely now, it’s very appealing to young talent today to run a remote first organization. I predict that more and more millennial business owners and Gen-Z employers will make the transition to remote first in the near future.

You get to hire people from all over the world and assuming you have good systems in place you can have a truly 24 hours workforce without breaking any labor laws. Your developers in Pakistan could be waking up, just as your sales team in NYC are going to sleep, then just a few short hours later your support team in the Philippines could be clocking on to deal with the tickets created from you developer updates as they’re being noticed. It’s great!

Not to mention that without a primary headquarters you have no obligation to sell to customers in 1 location With the internet now, we can have customers in Addis Ababa Ethiopia purchasing your products and services at the same time as people in Sydney Australia with zero geographical logistics on your part.

What kind of business are suited for the transition?

Well technically any business can go remote it’s just about how much of a cultural change do you want within your organization. Obviously tech companies are gonna fit right into this, companies like AutoMattic (WordPress) have been “All-Remote” since their conception and giants like GitLab have made the transition seamlessly during the pandemic.

There are a couple of things you’ll have to get used to such as non-liner workdays and project management across multiple timezones but it is possible for vast majority of SMEs and even giants like GitLab

First you have to go lean. You have to ask yourself what can be cut and what has to be kept. Are you currently running a Just-in-Case inventory management system? Could that be transitioned to Just-in-TIme? Or could you remove the supply chain all together? Could you have a fulfillment company such as Amazon handle that for you?

Consider productizing your services and sevicizing your products. Maybe you have a service you provide off line such as you modify or prepare spreadsheets for mergers and acquisitions, well could you pay someone to turn that into a web application that people could pay you monthly for?

Maybe you’re a lawyer or a yoga instructor and you have a physical practice in your local town. Could you film some of your yoga sessions or giving legal advice and put it on a learning management system such as Thinkific so that people can get your services on-demand? Or maybe you do them via zoom?

Do you have large servers in your offices or data centers? Consider transitioning to the cloud.

How do I go remote first?

Fortunately, today there are so many useful services online that can help you make the transition to a remote first company.

Remote.com - This is a service that provides a bunch of different remote HR services. Managing staff globally has never been so easy. Keep track of payroll details across multiple countries with their features that let you manage overseas LLCs and Sole traders payments and book-keeping entries for these people. They ever have a great remote jobs board.

Remote.co — Great place to find remote talent across technology, sales, copywriting, graphic design marketing and more. It’s used by Amazon and GoDaddy to recruit their remote staff.

AWS/GCP — Both Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform offer affordable and comprehensive cloud hosting solutions with dedicated functionality now for gaming and even AI. Just about anything you do on premises you can host in the cloud now.

SAP HANA — While this product is not as developed as on-premises solution it still offered a great alternative to having to have your own servers or data centers to run a large Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution. You can manage your suppliers, fulfillment agents and purchasing completely remotely now. Just because your business is complex, doesn’t mean you can’t go remote first.

Atlassian.com — These guys offer a great one-stop-shop solution to all your project management needs. They have Jira which is perfect for remote teams, Trello for smaller projects and even BitBucket to store and manage your code

Google Workspaces — Formally known as GSuite, this offers some amazing free online collaboration tools that go far beyond Word Docs and spreadsheets, today they have 1000s of apps and integrations in their marketplace. Ranging from Salesforce Integrations to AI powered collaborative automated calendar assistants.

DocuSign — It’s likely that in your current business, you have to sign a lot of documents and you’re worried that if you go remote you might have to scan those documents, sign them print them etc etc, well don’t worry about that, DocuSign has you covered.

Slack — So unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably know what Slack is, but if you don’t it’s like a multi-channel chat room environment for your marketing team, sales department, graphic design and all team broadcast as well. It’s a one-stop-shop for company communications. I love it!

Zapier — Have you ever wished that things were just a bit more connected? Like what if when you get an email it could update your calendar and notify the people in your mailing list that there’s a big event happening this weekend? Or maybe you or maybe you have a Slack channel and you need to have people update the Trello through planning on slack and then the meeting will be added to your calendar and proposed minutes added to your Evernote? Well this is what Zapier does. It makes your life easier.

Expensify — This is a great app that allows you to manage and track all the expenses your employees are reaching up globally and curate them all in one place. It makes book-keeping a lot easier and it makes it easier to find out who’s costing your the most!

Salesforce — Again this is another living under a rock one but if you don’t know, Salesforce is the world’s best known Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) and it will help you manage remote sales teams across the globe

Conclusion

It has never been more appealing or easy to go remote first as an organization. It makes a lot of sense for many organizations because it can save a huge amount of costs, attract the best talent and give you a global powerhouse that never sleeps. As with everything though, it doesn’t come without its challenges. All change has to be planned and managed and it might not be right for your company to go remote first now or ever. But it’s still worth looking into, to see if your company can benefit from have zero geographical restrictions.

If you have any questions about going remote first or just improving your companies digital competitiveness, please feel free to reach out to me with any questions you may have.