Ep. 81 - GatherUp's Aaron Weiche
Jeff Robbins interviews Aaron Weiche, CEO of GatherUp, about working how you work best, expressing passion in a virtual environment, and amplifying productivity through remote work.
Here’s the transcript:
JEFF: Hi everyone. It’s Jeff Robbins back with Episode 81 of the Yonder Podcast, where we talk to company leaders and big thinkers, about how to make remote work. We’re focused on expanding the remote work job market, and helping listeners to create happy, productive, distributed teams. This time, we talk to Aaron Weiche who is the CEO of GatherUp. GatherUp is a SaaS platform for reviews stuff that companies use, sort of b to b kind of thing. He’s got a 23 person team that he’s built over the past few years, spread out all over, and great conversation with him. Aaron, like myself, is a philosopher about these things. So, we always get into deep conversations (laughing) when I have people like that on the podcast. We talk about this idea of working how you work best. I like that one. That’s another T-shirt. Work how you work best. Also, the idea of how to express passion in a virtual environment where you can’t quite always express your zeal (laughing) through the virtual communications, and a lot about productivity which we talk about on this podcast. But Aaron has an interesting perspective on that, having moved from a historically collocated environment to GatherUp which is a fully distributed company.
If you’re not already subscribed to the yonder newsletter, you can go to Yonder.io/newsletter to get that, and, of course, if you’re not already subscribed to the podcast, if you’re not getting the podcast immediately (laughing) as soon as it comes out, you can subscribe at Apple podcast, Google Play, Stitcher, we’re on Spotify now, and stuff like that.
I also wanted to mention my business coaching and mentorship practice that I have for basically the past two or three years since exiting my company, Lullabot, the company I started back in 2006. I’ve been working with owners and leaders of various types of businesses, both remote and collocated to act as a virtual business partner. Someone to check in with weekly, and we usually meet one on one and work out the issues that are top of mind for my clients, and help them stay on track towards their goals, both the goals of their company, but oftentimes there’s a lot of checking in to make sure that your company is working for you. I think if you started a company you want to make sure that it’s also something that’s fulfilling your life, that it’s not sucking you dry, and oftentimes I think that there’s idea that your company can’t be successful and being happy and having a successful company, are mutually exclusive. But it’s certainly been my experience that one feeds the other. The happier that you are the easier it is to have a more successful company. And so, that’s the kind of work I do with my business coaching clients, and this podcast about remote work, I have a lot of experience with remote work, if you have a remote company, or you’re thinking about harnessing that, certainly we can talk. Some of my clients are also collocated businesses. A lot of the issues that come up are not particularly unique to remote work. A lot of the stuff we talk about on this podcast is not particularly unique to remote work, and I love helping people with all of this. You can find out more about my business coaching at jjeff.com, which was my personal website, and now it’s my coaching website. So, yeah, you can contact me through there and we can set up a call and I can explain the whole thing to you. (laughing). Alright, let’s get to our interview with Aaron Weiche.
JEFF: Hi Aaron. Welcome to the Yonder podcast.
AARON: Thanks Jeff. Thanks for having me.
JEFF: Yeah, it’s great to have you on. (5:07) So, the first question I ask our guests usually when I remember is, where are you talking to us from today?
AARON: I am just outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota.
JEFF: (5:19) Right on, and do you work from home or do you have an office?
AARON: So, I have an office. It is a whole 5 minute drive from my home, and I need that dedicated space as a father of four, ranging from 15 to three. Working from home is not a very consistent productive thing.
JEFF: Yeah, I mean the thing we talk about on this podcast a lot is productivity right and how ultimately when people are working “from home”, it’s a matter of doing a little self-managing and finding your own point of productivity which is not always at home. (laughing)
AARON: Exactly.
JEFF: Yeah. (6:07) So, why don’t you introduce yourself to people here.
AARON: Yeah. Well, an easy way to surmise me is I’m 20 years in now to a digital marketing career. I spent a majority of that time in the space of web design, web development, search engine marketing, SEO, and a lot of that came through starting and building agencies. So, doing client work, starting out with a lot of small business and then moving upstream from there. The last agency that I was partner at we built to roughly about 50 employees. We were doing work with a nice roster of Fortune 100 companies building websites, mobile apps, all those things. Then after well over 15 years in that I got the bug to do something a little different. I moved into the software as a service, into the SaaS world, came onboard at GatherUp where I have been now for the last four years. Roughly about two years ago I took over as CEO, and GatherUp serves a little over 20,000 businesses globally helping them capture customer feedback, online reviews and really understanding what their customer thinks about their business and then helping them respond and use that to their advantage in marketing.
JEFF: (7:38) And how big is GatherUp as a company itself?
AARON: We’re right around 23 employees as a head count now.
JEFF: (7:50) Describe to me the companies relationship with remote work these days.
AARON: We have been always fully remote. So, we have a few spots; my office is one where I actually recruited someone from the community I live in, so he works out of the same office space as I do. After that, you’re pretty hard pressed to find anyone else in the same location. We have team members in Michigan, Oregon, North Carolina, New York, Georgia, Poland, the Island of Cypress, Toronto. Definitely a distributed, fully remote company. We do have a few little aspects here and there. I’ve always been in the Minneapolis area, that’s where my agencies have always been officed out of. We can dive into that. Very interesting moving from at an agency where everybody’s there, everyone’s in the office, camaraderie, culture, those things all the time, and then going to a fully remote company was definitely an interesting process (laughing) to say the least
JEFF: Yeah, I’m sure. I’m sure. Wow, you’ve got people spread out all over. (9:08) Are you sure to make sure that your company retreats happen in Cypress?
AARON: (laughing) We have yet to pull that off.
JEFF: (laughing) We’re all coming to your house. Congratulations on your new job. (laughing)
AARON: Yup, it’s tops on everyone’s list. You know, not surprisingly our engineering team is all over in Europe, split between Cypress and Poland, so those guys actually have, and they just had one this past week, they have their own summit and face to face get together with the five of them, and then we do an annual summit in North America. What we’ve done the last few years with that is, we bring everyone into Minnesota because that’s where we have our highest head count.
JEFF: Yup.
AARON: And we rent a resort, a couple of really big, nice cabins, about three hours north of Minneapolis and hang out for the week and just have a really great time. It’s probably everybody’s favorite week of the year when we get to sit down face to face and have meals together and hang out and do business and fun.
JEFF: Yeah. (laughing) It’s a lot to do this podcast that’s about remote work in companies that are distributed and stuff like that, but I almost want to do a podcast just about company retreats, particularly for distributed companies because it’s such an interesting thing and such a fascinating phenomenon the way it works, and the dynamic of all of it and where things happen and stuff like that, and having run company retreats all over, the idea of setting something up within a stone’s throw of someone, rather than completely remote right? You know, we’re all going to go to Hawaii, where no one is, as opposed to setting something up not too far from Minneapolis, where someone (laughing) could go out, scope things out, make sure there’s enough beds and food to eat and all that kind of stuff.
AARON: Yeah, absolutely. And having boots on the ground to help pick people up at the airport and all of those details to help with is definitely helpful, but what we’ve done, over time as a company’s growing, once upon a time it was basically a 4 or 5 person company when I joined and we would get together sometimes in just random towns and all show up and do an Airbnb for the week, we’d have meetings and stuff planned out and then we’d just start looking into like, alright what are other experiences that we can have since we’re in Austin, Texas or Boston or Orlando or San Jose, and things like that.
JEFF: Yeah. (11:52) So, talk to me about joining the company. Your history previous to GatherUp had all been collocated, conventional, digital agencies you said, but more what we picture as a conventional company up until then, or had you had some remote work experience prior?
AARON: No. Basically I had had none personally. I even laugh now. So much was put into everyone being there at any given time. You can grab two developers and a designer and a strategist and jump in a room and bang out an idea on a whiteboard and all of those kinds of things, and it was interesting. We hit a point in the company as we were growing, and we had a Project Manager who, she was highly liked by the client, it was a very large client for us, but her husband was in the military and they were being relocated out of Minneapolis out to the coast, and it was really stressful for us as the executives in the company; do we allow her to remain in her role and work remotely, and what do we do with this one person that operates so different from everybody else we see on a daily basis. Through whatever hemming and hawing we arrived at like, ok, the client likes her, she’s a top performer, why are we letting location get in the way of this, and we moved forward and it worked out fantastic, and other than that we still never sought out remote employees, but that was quite a change going from being around nearly 50 people all day every day to then all of a sudden all by myself, with four or five coworkers that were spread across the country.
JEFF: (13:48) How did it feel? I really want to focus on this a lot because I’m sure we’ve got a lot of listeners who are, as I call them, remote curious, (laughing) and have a lot of experience as most people do of working in a collocated office together, and certainly managing and running a business. Oftentimes that transition is really scary. It seems like you had, sort of an advantage that the company was still relatively small, so you weren’t stepping into something where you had to connect with a whole lot of people in this intermediated (laughing) kind of way, with the cyber (laughing) between you. But, talk to me about what that was like.
AARON: I think the easiest way to put it is, it was confusing.
JEFF: Yeah.
AARON: When you go from being in a situation especially when you’re a leader in a company, I’d be in my office with the glass door and whatever and people were lined up outside of it like a deli with their number and they were going to walk in with their problem of day, what they needed help with, whatever that might be, and then all of a sudden I was sitting at home in the office at my home without all these people around me, all these demands on my time, and in complete isolation where I just couldn’t walk over to someone and be like, “alright, well tell me more about this, and help me get to know this, and understand this,” and so many of those things. So it definitely was really confusing and, you’re right, the good news is that I wasn’t trying to acclimate and trying to build relationships with another 20, 30, 50 people, it was just a handful, but that isolation was definitely weird and I’m an extrovert, I’m a people person, and it was a lot to traverse in the first couple of months. I definitely got my feet under me fast with work that needed to be done and tasks and things like that, but the isolation part was much more difficult.
JEFF: (16:01) What lessons did you learn? I’m guessing that there were a lot of epiphanies that happened, or at least sort of ideas and methods (laughing), like, “hey, let’s talk on the phone everyday” or “let’s do some video calls.” What worked for you in that transition? Having run a distributed company for 10 years myself, the idea of sitting in an office with 10 people outside the door with deli numbers is really, from a productivity standpoint, is horrible (laughing). It’s just not very efficient. On the other hand, I would feel important, I would feel connected, all that kind of stuff that I could see missing if we started reorganizing, scheduling everyone and doing video or phone calls with everyone. It wouldn’t feel quite as immediate.
AARON: Absolutely. A couple of things as I mentioned what I probably found the easiest was bearing myself in the work and finding the strategical and task driven things that I could push forward and then I quickly realized that in that environment, like surfacing those, it’s like when you work in an office with people it’s really easy to discover what others are working on or their progress, because you can be over their shoulder, you can stop by, you can ask for an update, you can go grab lunch together. There’s all these ways to surface that progress and I quickly realized being heads down when you’re remote and when you have a small team, it can definitely lead to just about everyone wondering, “what’s that person doing” and “what are they up to” and especially when you’re the new guy. So, I quickly realized, alright, I need to find ways to surface progress, or here’s where I’m at, small little sit raps and things like that, and when we were that small we didn’t have these, like, “here’s our set meeting time”, “here’s are all hands meeting,” or “here’s when we’re going to discuss this.” So, those are the kinds of things that we started building in that I think helped started to foster that communication and focus time to see what was happening.
JEFF: It’s funny the idea of discovery. Correct me here, because I haven’t had maybe as much experience in managing a collocated team as you, so this is a really interesting perspective that you’re bringing to the podcast, that (18:47) discovery can be more of a pull situation as a manager; I can walk around and pull out of people what they’re working on whereas in a distributed work environment, it tends to need to be more of a push that we need the people to share and be transparent about what they’re working on and what their concerns are, and it’s just a different dynamic. There can still be opportunities that you can make as the manager to meet with people one on one, or create those environments for them to speak up, but if people don’t speak up you won’t really know what’s going on.
AARON: I think you’re very spot on with that where collocated it just kind of happens organically by being a human and how you exist and move and make conversation.
JEFF: Someone sitting at their desk and sighing from a management perspective is very telling. (laughing)
AARON: Yes.
JEFF: And you’re not going to get that in a virtual team.
AARON: Yeah, and virtually right, especially if somebody’s working on something that’s bigger or longer cycles. I remember one of the first things that I took on is, we badly needed at that time to get to version two of the marketing website. So that was when things were like, “this is something that needs to be done, I’m just going to take this on”, do whatever else. Well, what I was working on was kind of large so it was a much longer cycle and I can remember one of the other partners at some point just being like, I felt like the call was like, “what are you doing,” right? Like, “we haven’t really heard from you.” There’s no time where the periscopes gone up to take a look around and whatever else, and I was like, “Well, here’s what I’ve been doing. Here’s this whole website” right. And he was like, “Oh, Holy cow, okay, there’s a lot being done here, and whatever else,” and that was kind of a teaching moment to me and like, “okay, we need to create more of daily interaction, communication, things like that. And some of that time too was the movement off of email communication to utilizing Slack. You start to realize some of those things that help fill the gaps and help be ignitors or provide a place for things to surface more easily.
JEFF: Yeah, you need to find different fidelities and different expenses of communication. Slack is cheap communication, you can send a two word message, whereas email is a little bit more expensive, you’re kind of expected to use full sentences, maybe proper grammar (laughing), a little thank you at the end, a sincerely perhaps. I think for some of the communication that we need to happen in companies that expensive communication, that more formal communication can be a detriment as people might not have the complete ideas to share (laughing) to write an entire email to summarize their day, but maybe they can hit some checkboxes somewhere or they could, who knows what? Slack, like I said, can be cheap. Then, also having multiple modes of communication as well on calls and video and stuff like that.
AARON: Absolutely. And, then, some of those you come across, some of the stuff I wish I would’ve documented to a certain part, when you get years down the journey and it’s like, “oh, I wish I can go back,” and, “what was the tipping point that made this happen or that happen?” But you just saw things that were needed, especially when we went from four or five people to nine or 10 people, just how do you create more of that, and what are some of the challenges in getting them to feel culture or personal relationships. What are the questions you asked? How do you start off meetings with that type of interaction? We definitely started to have conversations as the three or four of us that were shareholders on the executive team, how do we create happy hour digitally and so Slack channels or leading the way in what was shared, using webcams during meetings. Our team is probably divided in half. Mondays is our all team call, so all 23 people are on and 12 or 13 will have their webcam on and be engaged in whatever else, and then another 11 or 12, you probably couldn’t pay them to turn on their webcam for one reason or another. It’s dealing with all those differences in personalities and how people like to work and what’s beneficial just for them personally, also balancing with what’s beneficial for the entire team. Those things just get really, really interesting with how you address those over time as you grow.
JEFF: Absolutely. This idea also of moving from a more collocated style management, that pull style of management to a push style of management where you’re depending on the staff to push out their communication, ultimately that kind of stuff, the styles and ways of working come down to culture right? It becomes the culture of the company, the way the people interact with each other. (24:23) So, I’m guessing building a company, and so quickly over the past few years as you have, you had to do a lot of thinking about that, (laughing) about, you know, “hey, you’re going to become an employee at GatherUp, here’s what you need to know.” Are you tending to hire people that already have remote work experience or if they don’t what are you looking for? What are you sharing with them as they come on as an employee?
AARON: I would say that’s something that we have definitely integrated into the interview process. We look for people that have had experience working autonomously that are self-starters and have the right set of communication skills. That said, we’ve taken on a couple that haven’t before, but we’re able through the interview process to be able to determine that they have that. I would also say we probably, whether purposely or just how it shakes out, we’ve probably hired more on the side of experience with someone who’s a little bit more developed in their career, where they know what they like, they’ve already done the, grass is greener over there so I went over there, and then I realized that I liked where I was. So, some of those things are really helpful to get someone who kind of understands how they work best and how they’re most productive. One of the really big, high level things that I tried to really champion and view this way is this idea of, work how you work best, and for some people that’s at home in their pajamas, moving 10 feet from their bed over to a desk in their one bedroom apartment. For someone else, it’s having a hot desk at a co-working space or getting to be around other people or being able to get together with a few people that are within their area. Or, might be like me, where, yeah, I have an office just so I have quiet focus space away from my home and where I’m at. But that’s a lot of what I’ve tried to build is, finding out what is your best scenario where you’re happy, where you’re productive, you have all the things that you need to be excited about work, and then what are the best things that we can do in order to make that happen for you, so that you feel like you have the right environment and you’re not stuck in a specific environment on how you have to work.
JEFF: I hear this a lot on this podcast that people are tending to hire people that are a little further along in their career, maybe a little bit more self-assured, not so entry level, partly because you can because you have a bigger pool of potential employees being all over the world and not just in your local area, but also partly because as you’re saying, in order for people to work how you work best, people need to know how they work best (laughing) and it’s hard to discover that when the first job you have is working at home, and without any sort of point of reference or experience maybe.
AARON: A really hard skill to develop professionally is self-awareness. So, through experience and when you’ve done things a couple different ways, you gain that self-awareness, where you really understand it. I can say now, I would absolutely prefer to work remote because productivity is super important to me, especially at this stage in the game and the things that I’m trying to accomplish and everything else, and that was something I didn’t always understand. That was probably my biggest challenge as a leader. When you’re in a collocated place, you can see someone’s work ethic, it might come out in the time they spent, it comes out in their passion and how they talk about things and how they engage, if they see something happening that’s challenging or a problem and they’re willing to take part, well when you go to remote all those situations are much harder. You don’t’ have this way to be able to see how someone is working. You can’t see how passionate someone is on Slack, because if they’re typing in all caps or a lot of emojis or exclamation points, who knows what that means, it could be yelling mad, whatever else, so that was really hard for me to learn how to be who I was where I felt like I was a good, but still always learning leader in person in building good relationships, to going to where you had to work a lot harder in different ways to do those exact same things. You had to earn it in a much longer time period than you could in person.
JEFF: (29:41) You mean you personally had to earn it or the people who you were managing had to earn it? I mean, I guess it’s both, meaning that you felt you were working really hard, but you were afraid that it wasn’t coming across.
AARON: Yeah. I think the latter more than anything. But, I do think it applies to everyone somewhat, because we’re all wired that seeing is believing and I guess it gets back to my, how do you work especially to begin within shorter cycles where you’re able to bubble things up that people can see and have tangible conversations about it, and everything else. That was really, definitely hard on me personally, on things that just were easy. It was like I was just being who I was in an office environment and other people saw, alright, he’s super passionate, he’s always upbeat, he has all these things. Well, that translates over Slack very poorly, right? If anything, you might look like an a—hole sometimes, when you’re actually like, “I’m just really excited about this and I want us to do the best job.” It just comes across completely different.
JEFF: (30:52) So, how do you express that? We talk a lot about moving to a more results oriented focus which I think is a good thing, but passion in itself, and part of being a manager certainly a CEO, there aren’t as tangible outputs (laughing). Certainly, maybe you’ve investors and they want tangible outputs, but for the employees it’s not oftentimes so easy to show your results if you’re talking about this results oriented way of being, but how did you find to express your passion?
AARON: I don’t know if this is a great answer (laughing), but from us having executive summits, or some of us getting together, others whom I’d never bet before, they saw that in person, so then they were able to communicate to others. Maybe if someone else raised like, oh, how dedicated is he? Or, who knows however it came up, but it allowed that person to be like, “listen, when you’re around him, he is so all in on this,” whatever else, it’s not coming across as it might be, so that definitely was one part. So maybe it’s looking at, how do you find a few people to build those relationships that maybe easily get you or you can spend some time with, or those types of things, so that they’re able to basically vouch for you that that’s the angle that’s being taken. But on the other side I think you have to understand it’s a little bit longer game, and you have to understand that it’s consistency, probably much more so than like, “here’s one thing I can do that will get the stamp of approval.” It’s like, over and over and over until they’re like, “yes, this is the consistent energy,” how they look at it, the questions they ask, the things that they do. I think that’s so much more important in a remote environment.
JEFF: I guess without the fidelity (laughing) of an in-person relationship all the time it is more of a long game, right? You’ve got to be consistent. And, ultimately, it’s about trust, right? You’re building trust over time. Trust that Aaron cares. Trust that Aaron is passionate. Trust that this employee is productive and knows their stuff. It goes both ways.
AARON: I think finding the way to have more personal conversations is really needed when you work remote too, because your interactions tend to be so confined to work, to business, where again, when you’re in an office environment there’s all kinds of watercooler talk, happy hours, all these things, and you walk in everyday with part of your life as always part of you. But, when you communicate remotely, you’re just in these small fragments where it’s like, while you’re writing that quick Slack message, they don’t know that two of your kids are home sick with the flu. They don’t know that your dog needs to have surgery on a leg. They don’t know the things that might be troubling you or stressing you, and I think those are harder to talk about in a remote environment too, because instead of talking about work, you’re just going to directly state, “hey, here’s something weighing on me, or hard in my personal life,” when you just don’t have that personal life overlap because you’re not physically interacting. I don’t know if that makes sense.
JEFF: (34:40) Well, here again, in a collocated environment the employee’s sighing at their desk. It might not be about work, it could be about their dog, but it would give you idea that something was weighing on them even if they didn’t speak up about it so much, but I think in that more intentional, more proactive culture of remote work transparency, we need to allow people to speak up about their dog too, right, and allow that into the wholeness of things. I worry about collocated companies that get a little too formal, a little too logistical with making sure that every meeting that they have is super-efficient and we never talk about our personal lives at all, and certainly in a remote work environment we don’t want that to happen. That can become dominant. There are all these books about essentially how to make sure that your not injecting any personal information into the company meetings (laughing), that they’re super-efficient. But in a remote work environment it doesn’t work, right, because these are oftentimes your only interactions with people, you’re not having coffee room, watercooler interactions where you do get to find out that peoples dogs are sick or whatever’s happening.
AARON: Well, it doesn’t end up with a seat at the table, right? That I think is definitely something I struggle with, because let’s take a look at the context of all this. One, you’re in a startup so you’re working your tail off to get traction and to grow and to have all these things happen. Two, you have a list of to dos far more long than you have people, time, resources to be able to get done. Then you’re trying to have all that efficiency and you’re still trying to have this interaction and communication, and it’s something you have to create space for, you have to make it happen instead of just organically happening. So, within all those things it’s really easy to be like, “hey, we need to focus on what needs to get done, and getting it done,” and all those other things, and fail to realize we need the human side, we need the personal connections, we need a platform for people to be able to talk about what is their why behind working. What, who, why are they trying to make money to take care of? What are the experiences they want to have? All of those types of things. It’s really easy to fall into that trap. That’s definitely something I’ve had to remind myself from time to time, is, okay, the business side is great, all those other things, but you have to stop and get people connected with each other.
JEFF: (37:38) Do you feel like people end up the same amount of connected, less connected, more connected, with a distributed team as compared to a collocated team?
AARON: There’s definitely pros and cons in both. Anytime you’re part of somebody’s almost daily life, you’re going to be a little bit more connected, but that connected brings some of the cons too, where you notice the idiosyncrasies or the little things that might bug you, or that person’s always late and you’re always on time, where you have some really gracious passes on those in a remote environment. But when you don’t get to experience it all, that’s where it becomes harder, and that’s where I do think it’s so important to have those meetups, to have a summit, to get people those facetime. I even see it. We don’t get to meet face to face with our development team, and so I see even though we have great interaction, we’ve made videos for each other, we share photos when each side is getting together, doing a summit, we do so much of that, there’s still, if we had just one time of getting together and hanging out for three or four days and eating meals together, that bond would be strengthened so much further than even four or five years of work together has built up in it. So, you can have all of the right ingredients, but the mixture of them is when you actually do get just even the smallest amount of facetime. I don’t know if it’s validity or trust, or what it brings to it, but it does put it at a whole different level.
JEFF: You’re totally right. And, it’s the secret of this podcast (laughing) right? We talk all about remote work and we talk about how to be productive working over virtual communication tools and stuff like that, but there’s still a piece missing and that piece seems to be filled in with about, I don’t know, three days of hanging out in person (laughing), maybe once a year, twice a year, maybe even more often, but whatever you can work out, it seems to just fill in that piece, and there’s this vacuum for that piece, which is why these get togethers are so valuable that people are looking for them.
AARON: And they really look for it. We just recently did a survey from all of our employees and that was one of the things that was pretty high was like more facetime, in person facetime with the team, because the good news is if you’ve done it right, and we’ve built a really great culture, they love their coworkers, they enjoy them professionally and personally, and so, of course, give me just a little bit more of it, this is something I look forward to. Can I do it more than once a year to have everyone together, because I like the energy, I like the laughs, I like the things that happen, of course I want a little bit more of that.
JEFF: (40:41) I want to dig a little bit more deeper into something that you said earlier which is, that having done both you really prefer the remote work thing. Can you expand on that some, particularly, again, knowing that there are probably people listening who just can’t quite imagine getting over that hurdle? What’s on the other side? What do you prefer? What makes the grass greener in the remote work realm?
AARON: For me it really comes down to productivity. Based on who you are and why you’re doing it and what you enjoy, I mean, I really love my work, and so within that, having focus time to do that and to be heads down and not get pulled into certain meetings and things like that that can happen on a face to face basis, I love that. I feel like I’m twice as productive in a remote environment, even running a company and having demands on my time and travel schedule, and all these other things. When I get a solid week in my office, I feel I can be unstoppable with the amount of things that I can get done. I would feel that. I would feel a sense of accomplishment in working in collocated offices, but just nowhere near the level of just focused time. Like, getting back to the deli, there is always someone at the door. And here, now, if someone knocks on my office, I’m in the second story of an old building in the smaller community I live, I someone knocks on the door here, they’re really lost. It happens about once every six months. It’s a great feeling to have that focus time and that space to do it. It makes it easier for you to have boundaries around how you like to work.
JEFF: (42:36) Asynchronous and synchronous mean a bunch of different things in this context, but certainly having a line of people at your door means that you’re constantly in “putting out fires mode”, and you’re not getting any chance to go heads down and get anything done on your own. That can happen in a remote work environment. You can just have a phone and people could call you whenever they want, and you’ve constantly got a virtual line of people on hold on your phone. I’m guessing from what you’re saying that you’ve also reworked how that works as well?
AARON: I think it’s just easier for you to create space and create the interaction when you’re going to take it. When somebody’s at your door and you wave them off (laughing) or whatever else, there’s so many other things that go along with it. You’re sending a message, you’re not important, where in remote work there is some amount of implication where everybody realizes, “oh, they could be on a call, their heads down.”
JEFF: He could be picking his kids up from school, right? It could be anything.
AARON: Yeah. And they offer you so much more grace in what that might look like. No one’s ever Slacking me, like, “are you there?” “are you on?” “what’s happening?”, like any of that; where in person that’s totally the feeling that someone could give you if they need to talk to you right then and there in that moment and they can physically see you or approach you.
JEFF: Yeah, and there’s a little bit of panic as well, right, because you’re here now, if I come back to your office you might not be here, so I’m going to stand in this line of people and take a number from the deli counter.
AARON: Yes.
JEFF: (laughing) I love that metaphor by the way, that’s good.
AARON: (laughing) I’m like, “oh, if I can just slip out the back door,” right, on Friday afternoon before I get eight more questions.
JEFF: Yeah. It’s not great for anybody. Another thing, this idea of productivity when we talk about the productivity of things, it often comes along with the word optimization and then it quickly becomes a euphemism for sucking the soul and life blood (laughing), kind of optimizing the efficiency out of everyone at the company. I’m guessing that’s certainly not what you mean, by, you’re talking about it mostly for yourself, but as I’ve seen, it’s more helping people to find their flow and, what was the line you used earlier, work how you work best; that people can figure out how they can work best, and how they’re productive and then find some enjoyment, and ultimately become a morale booster to be productive rather than how we oftentimes think of it in more of an optimization thing where it can start to bring down the morale of people.
AARON: Absolutely. We all have things that we need, and we all get it in different ways, right? For some people, as I was alluding to, in having seven, eight people around the Twin Cities, we actually have a three desk coworking office that all eight of our people have an access and a keycard and can go there at any time. Now, most days I would say there’s maybe one person there, or maybe even two, but there’s definitely times where we just say, “hey, let’s everybody get together for a lunch,” or “here’s something important going on, let’s all work together that day if possible,” and it allows people who want to be in an environment where, “alright, I can go work in this office. I’m all by myself, but there’s at least 30, 40, 50 other people in those coworking space. I see them, I have my productive space, but I don’t feel isolated, I don’t feel like I’m only in my home and I didn’t get out for the day and the sun goes up and the sun goes down, and I didn’t go anywhere, or leave the front door.” Everybody’s definitely wired differently with what productive feels like for them, and really at the end of the day I think it’s options, right? Do I have the option to work alone if I want to? Yes. Do I have the option to work around others if I want to? Yes. Do I have the option to communicate a lot or a little? Yes. I’ve always found for people who are the most responsible, accountable, driven, all those things, that’s one of the biggest drivers, is like, do I have options instead of am I forced to only do it this way.
JEFF: Yeah. (47:31) What advice might you have for someone who’s thinking about taking their team remote or as you did, moving to a job that heads in that remote direction from a leadership and management standpoint at least?
AARON: Some of my first advice would be just having clear communication. If everybody’s together and you’re disbursing, that would be a very interesting situation where you’d probably want to have -- here’s ground rules, here I’ll be different. You’d have a lot of people adjusting all at once, so you need to be mindful of what that might look like. What will be confusing is how do we set up easy check-ins for people to ease into this move through it and maybe how do you slowly change that environment, where you still may be, “alright, let’s get together and at least meet up for a lunch,” or do these things in some timeframe where it can get further and further apart until people find the way that works best for them, instead of just a complete like, alright, we’re all together one day and then the next day everybody’s going to be disbursed, and yeah we’ll figure out a time to meet up sometime (laughing) and whatever else. That definitely might be difficult. But, when you have people that are excited about the work they do, they look forward to it, they want to be productive, they want to get as many things done as possible, which is much different than if you have someone that’s like, “I want to do the bare minimum.” “I just want to get by.” “I just want to get my paycheck, fill my seat.” I think you get into a whole bunch of different things there. That’s another reason why when we hire that’s what we look for. We look for people that really want to make a difference, they enjoy what they’re doing, they want to get ahead and be part of a team that’s trying to get ahead as well. And, when you have that culture with it, I think it’s a lot easier for these things to happen, because people are really interested in, “what is going to make me more productive?” “What’s going to further the mission that we’re on?” And, they’re really open to what those ideas, or what they might look like.
JEFF: Absolutely. (49:43) Another thing that people oftentimes worry about when they’re looking at this whole remote work thing is legitimacy, and that happens on a number of different levels. There’s the individual, “what will my neighbors think when I’m not leaving for work (laughing) each day,” and then as you’re building a company you’re trying to find customers and clients, which with a SaaS isn’t so much of an issue, right, cause people are used to (laughing) buying things online these days, but, if you get, especially into the world of investors, venture capital and stuff like that I’m curious, I see a note here that your company was recently acquired and I’m curious, (50:33) the whole remote thing, I’ve always seen it as an asset. Do you think that investors (laughing) are starting to realize that, or is it still something that we need to fight for legitimacy with, or is it something, I’m guessing, it’s probably somewhere in between?
AARON: Yeah, probably somewhere in between. You gave me a few different things to breakdown in there (laughing).
JEFF: Yeah, take that anywhere you want (laughing).
AARON: (laughing) Yeah. As far as the first thing, legitimacy, absolutely. I live I’m a community of about 20,000 people, about 40 miles to the West of downtown Minneapolis, and how I work best, a lot of times I start my day about six a.m. and I’m going to respond to email, do a bunch of things to get things going, then my kids get up and start going to school and whatever else, and then I’ll often, around eight o’clock, bring one or two of my kids to school, and then I go to the gym to workout for an hour. So, I already have things in motion, whatever else, and then what’s best for me is then getting that sanity, taking care of my physical health, going to the gym. Well, when you show up to the gym at nine o’clock and people kind of know that you run a company in town, and whatever else, they’re like, “what company do you run where at nine o’clock you’re in the gym for an hour?” So, you automatically get that kind of look. So, that legitimacy thing is totally a real thing, but you also have to understand on the other side, they don’t see you when you’re working, when my kids go to bed and I might be working from eight till 11 at night, so you definitely need to be okay with yourself. How people view me isn’t going to validate me, especially with remote. When I was in an agency, I was wearing a suit and tie three days a week, and now the suits in my closet are so dusty and I love it. There’s so many things, where I’m going to wear what is unbelievably comfortable to me. Yes, if I’m on video calls I will look as professional as possible from the waist up, but I might have shorts on with my button up dress shirt, right. That’s the perks of being able to do those things. The legitimacy side I would just tell people, “you have to feel alright.” Not everyone’s going to understand it. Especially for me, I live in a community where plenty of the community are more blue collared jobs and trades and things like that, where, how I work and how my schedule can be so varied, can be a very confusing thing to them. Then, to your last part, one, when the company was started close to six years ago, we were completely bootstrapped, self-funded and yeah, as of November first, we were acquired, which, great success for us.
JEFF: Congratulations.
AARON: Thank you. A number of really great things have happened over that time and a really great team, and those are really big decisions to make with who you’re selling to and why and all those things. The company that we sold to, they definitely liked the metrics of what we were doing, financials and our growth, and all of those things. What they found out is, when we went through the purchase process is the team that we had built was like a massive bonus. They are actually headquartered in Seattle. They’re in a very competitive market, hiring people alongside of Amazon and Microsoft, so many other tech companies. They are primarily, for the most part I would say, they are three quarters collocated; everybody there is on site. So, it definitely is already a little bit interesting in one month of starting to work together. But, one really great thing that they did is, they flew all of our North American team out to Seattle, and we basically had what they called an integration day, and it was getting to know the other team, and getting to know how people work best. We went through an exercise called how to work with me. What are your values. What are your pet peeves? What are your strengths? What do you expect out of others? It was a really great way in a short period of time to get a bunch of people who were complete strangers acclimated to each other, start to build trust, start to do those things, and they did it upfront rather than, “alright we acquired you guys and we’re working together and we’re building relationships over Zoom calls and all these other things, and now eight months later, now we’ll meet in person.” Within the very first couple of weeks they said, “let’s get everybody out here. Let’s hang out. Let’s build relationships. Meet your peers in person. Have a stage where you can be recognized individually and collectively as a team, and then we can get to work with each other.” It had a really strong impact on our team, and I think on their side it took away a little bit of the stigma of, “okay, three quarters of our team is here in person, where 100% of you guys are pretty much remote,” so I think it did a great job from both sides in a situation filled with a lot of change.
JEFF: Nice. I feel like we’re starting to hip a tipping point. There was certainly a point where, when investors would come in and they found out that you didn’t have a central office and they couldn’t walk into an office and see everyone clicking away on their computers, that they would slowly back away (laughing) feeling like, “ooh, this must be a scam. It’s not really a company.” But we’re getting to the point where people are realizing there’s value in that, and a lot of value.
AARON: Well, it’s so hard to go against the grain, I even know for myself, like seeing is believing. So, when you see somebody, again, in person, working hard or doing the things that they’re doing or how they speak to others, it’s just such an instant comfort level when you can see those things, and it’s a lot harder as a human to believe that those things are there when you can’t see them.
JEFF: Absolutely.
AARON: There’s some leaps of faith in it, that when I was younger, I probably would’ve failed at. I can say some of it is from having a 20 year work history, being around a lot of types of people, in a lot of situations, some who were successful and some who were not. That made that easier for me, that transition to happen for me at 40 years old compared to if that transition happened for me at 25 years old. I have no idea how that would’ve gone. It probably would’ve gone badly (laughing). I could probably say that I wouldn’t have understood either side of it. I wouldn’t have been a great performer and I also wouldn’t have been open-minded enough to give trust first in that situation and then look for the right signs and communication and help support it being successful.
JEFF: (57:52) Is that one of your concepts? I like this idea of trust first. Sometimes this leap of faith, I think from a management perspective, but just to default to trusting people, allow them to rise to the occasion and if they don’t there’s conversations to be had. (laughing)
AARON: I’m working on it. I realized it’s very important and with that it’s just continually trying to work on that and the benefit of doubt first and putting that trust in them that they’re going to do great things in figuring out “how do I best support that?” “How do I help unlock it or get it out of them, or champion it for what’s there?” The other side is pretty much fear based. It’s like, I’m fearful that they’re not going to be doing the work. I’m fearful that they’re not going to try hard enough. I’m fearful that they’re going to baseball games during the day instead of working. There’s all these other things that are all fear based with it instead of just saying, “well, I hired you because I believed in what this person is going to do and the things they’re going to accomplish,” but it’s weird, it’s like then when they start day one, you almost have this tendency to want to cut that off and be like, “alright, well now you have to actually prove yourself. We hired you, everything sounded great, your past is great, you answer questions great,” all these things, but now you’re like at ground zero and that’s not right.
JEFF: Well, even more than being fear based, it’s adversarial. You’re kind of setting up a you versus me situation, which is really difficult when you already have this intermediating technology (laughing) right? It’s already difficult to get to each other to add to that difficulty by not trusting each other.
AARON: What I’ve realized and what I’ve tried to help foster with our company is, when people have something else to do that is part of the flexibility of working remote, or a reason why, like, allow them space to be honest that that’s what they’re doing. If I’m going to leave early, my kid has a basketball game or I need to go to this doctor appointment, instead of creating an environment where they might fib about it or tell a lie or make something up, or just not even let anyone know and they just go do it, and they’re like, “well, no one knows so what’s the difference,” creating environment where people communicate that, that just builds trust with everyone. It builds trust that they’re respected, they can make their own decisions. It’s about getting the work done, and yes, you have to be available for your teammates, but if you’re not going to be, to take care of something at convenience or part of a remote culture, that you have the freedom to do that and you can openly state it instead of trying to avoid it, hide, or lie.
JEFF: As a leader you have to model that. You have to lead by example because you can preach that all you want, but until people start seeing you saying, “hey, I’ve got a doctors appointment.” “Hey, I’ve got to go pick the kids up.” “Hey, I’m leaving early for a basketball game,” or whatever those things are, they’re not going to quite trust that they can actually do it themselves, because it is different.
AARON: Yeah, that’s what you see in a collocated right? It’s like when the boss leaves at 2 p.m. on a Friday, you start to see people ducking out left and right, because you’ve created this culture of, oh, if there’s a supervisor, if there’s someone on premise watching over, then you’re not going to do those things, but the minute the watchful eye is gone, then everybody’s going to break out. Being that as a leader, a lot of times when that person does leave, they’re not saying anything about it. They’re also just trying to duck out the door or not be noticed, but, guess what, everybody notices. It’s much better to send something out and just be like, “Hey, I’m logging off early today to go and do this,” and again, those are the things that humanize you too, right? “Hey, I’m logging off early to go to my daughter’s basketball game.” “I’m logging off early to head out of town with the family.” Things like that. I just think that helps support more of a trust network and make people comfortable with being themselves more so than avoiding it.
JEFF: Absolutely. Well, Aaron, this is a great conversation. (1:02:29) If people wanted to follow up with you and find out more about anything we talked about or follow up with you about GatherUp, where should they get in touch with you?
AARON: I can easily admit I’m a Twitterholic, so, following or connecting with me on Twitter is a great way to do that. My handle is @aaronweiche. Otherwise, LinkedIn is always a great place. I call LinkedIn, slow Twitter, so I might post something once a month to LinkedIn where it’s probably daily on Twitter with that, but happy to engage with people there as well. Then I also cohost a podcast about running a SaaS company and that’s called the SaaS Venture, so people can look at up on iTunes or check out the www.saasventure.com.