Our 2BHK office in the heart of Koramangala was barely being used even before the pandemic began. I would go once a week to the office. Our Bangalore employees would visit every other day initially, then once a week and eventually about once a month. Karan, my co-founder moved to Chennai a year ago, so he ended up visiting once a quarter.
We finally decided that there was no point in keeping an office. We had been working in a hybrid environment for years now, with employees in Bangalore and other parts of the country. The pandemic was the final nudge to shut our office down for good.
I went in after many months to clean up, gather all our belonging and memorabilia that had accumulated in the office over a period of 10 years. That’s how long it’s been for us on this entrepreneurial journey.
Funnily this was my second time winding up an office. I had done it at my first job when working for a startup in the US, back in 2010. The US operations of the Israeli company were being shut down and I was requested by the CEO to help close down the office by selling off the office furniture and other items. I did the same thing this time around too.
The Pixelmattic office was a co-working space for a long while, sharing space with 1985. It continued to work like that with our employees coming in and out as they wanted. It’s hosted a few WordPress meetups as well.
Moving out of the office and going remote was not an abrupt decision but a gradual and organic one. We were destined to be remote because of the way we built and grew the company over the years. The way we created our work culture, how we generated new business, how we managed and delivered projects all played a role in us evolving into a remote agency we are today.
I will go through some aspects of what we did, some consciously and some subconsciously, to create a remote agency, working with clients for many years without having ever met them.
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Work culture based on the quality of deliverable not time
Micro-managing has never been a trait we have followed at Pixelmattic. Both Karan and I despise it. This has been a challenge at times because our education system has trained our minds in such a way that giving autonomy and freedom to solve problems can put people in an unfamiliar situation.
When we hire people we assume they are a good fit for the job. And so once a task is discussed and assigned we trust them to deliver it. The expectation of quality and timelines are set upfront. The initial months can be challenging and some might need time to ramp up to meet our expectations and we’re patient till that happens. Most of the times people do learn and progress to meet our levels. Some of course get overwhelmed and have to be let go.
But it’s a pleasure working with people who once the task is understood can go off and get it done. We’re always available to help them when they get stuck with a problem, but there is no overhead of managing their work as long as they are sending frequent updates.
Expectation setting is one thing but ensuring that it is understood is another important aspect. Both need to be on the same page as to what is expected to be delivered. There is a learning curve here. Communication is critical. Comprehension too. Since we work with employees from different geographical locations with English not being the primary language for most, it takes a while to understand the semantics and nuances in text-based communication. (Oh we don’t rely on video calls much)
We’ve created internal documentation and do knowledge sessions every now and then to ensure the skills, quality and consistency across the company is maintained. It helps that we have a clear well-defined process for work, whether it is design, development or copywriting.
Systems and processes are critical. Once they are established and the team is educated about them, they replicate the template for every project, only making changes as and when necessary.
I’m a big believer in the documentation and creation of systems, the one big thing I picked up during grad school. It creates a single reference point for everyone to align their work. The expectations are clear, the steps required to execute the project are laid out and the outcomes are defined. What is then discussed is creative solutions for every project’s unique requirements.
The genesis of remote sales
From day 1, our approach to business growth has been digital marketing. More specifically SEO and content marketing. We started with one intern and me working on the website to build content and SEO over a period of two and a half years. 5 years later it continues to pay dividends. More than 60% of our new business every month comes from leads generated through our website alone.
The sales process that starts online continues online through downloadable assets, presentations and paid website audits. By the time I speak with the client about the project, they are convinced that we are the right fit. It’s the finer points and details that are then discussed.
While sales materials are shared during the sales process, some manually and some automatically, our previous work is on our website, the client testimonials are online and our point of view and opinions are on the blog. This gives most clients a good insight into how we think, how we work and what we’ve done previously.
Of course, there are those who insist on meeting in person, but equally, there are those with whom we’ve worked for more than 5 years and never ever met them. Some of them happened to be in Bangalore. When you can build trust, step by step, and demonstrate your experience, online sales or remote sales becomes easy. In fact, I’ve never considered myself a salesperson in the traditional sense and nor have I looked at this as remote sales. It’s an organic result of all that we do and a conversation I have with someone who has a need and is interested in speaking with us about it.
Our clearly defined processes and approach to work also eliminates a large portion of those who are not our ideal customers. It also puts us on an even keel and there is not vendor-client hierarchical nonsense. It still does happen with companies that have a bureaucratic process, but beyond a point, we decide to say no to some of them. Systems and processes are great, but if it gets in the way of having a productive and equal relationship with a client, it’s best to walk away.
Tools to punch above our weight.
We’ve always looked at tools that we can use to do more with our limited resources. Tools that can help us punch above our weight. Tools that help us become more efficient and produce more with less.
Slack has been a fundamental tool in our evolution of becoming a remote agency. We never believed in sending internal emails. I hate them. Before Slack, we experimented with project management tools like Redmine, Asana and internal communication tools like Yammer. But once we tried Slack, it seemed to be a perfect fit for what we wanted.
Slack provided the right amount of overlap between communication and project management. The other biggest reason was its ability to hook into other tools and become a company dashboard of sorts to access and view information from different areas.
Since we started out as a WordPress agency, it was important to also find tools that made our website design and maintenance processes efficient. Blogvault has been a huge help in that aspect. Akshat, who is now a good friend is the founder of this company that now powers backups and security for millions of sites. They have a suite of tools now that originally started with backups and now have migration and security scanners. We make use of all of them. and it saves us a ton of time.
When we signed up GSuite, we were lucky to get a free account for up to 50 users and continue to use it. It powers our email which is used mainly for communicating with the client. But the most useful aspect is Google Drive that we use extensively to manage project documents and collaborate with clients and our different team members. Our project templates, wireframe templates and campaign management templates are easily replicated from project to project and all of it is organized for the most part into logical folders and subfolders. Even though we have MS Office subscription, we only use Word for contracts and other legal documents. All project documents by default are created and shared only through Drive.
Canva and Buffer have proved particularly useful over the years. Other tools that we use include the following:
- Zeplin for design handoff
- Zapier for workflow automation
- Adobe Creative Cloud and Adobe XD for design and asset management
- Dropbox and Box for company and file management
- Quickbooks for invoicing and accounting
- MailChimp for email marketing
- Trello for retainer account management and content marketing
- Freshdesk for ticket support
- Zoho and Freshrelease for project management
- LastPass for password management
- Grammarly
Technical tools like Ahrefs, SEMRush, UberSuggest, GTMetrix and PowerSuite SEO
Asynchronous communication
Basecamp has an excellent public document on how to create a culture of internal communication that is primarily text-based. Asynchronous communication avoids unnecessary meetings and phone calls. When you implicitly trust the other team members to know their job and do their job, there is no need to discuss beyond what is necessary.
Text-based communication does require you clearly articulate what you are expecting, what you are doing and when do you expect to complete your task. We constantly prod our teams with questions to ensure their communication is complete with context and has no room for misinterpretation by other team members.
Async communication works great for a remote team because it lets each member structure their workday and affords them flexibility. You don’t drag the entire team off in one direction because of a meeting. Each member works independently and Slack acts as a central watering hole for discussions and exchange of information.
Remote work by nature cannot be controlled by rigid systems. Of course, this can cause a bit of chaos at time if there are members who are not used to his way of functioning. The ideal state of async communication is like watching the great Barcelona or Ajax team play tiki-taka football where each player has positional freedom and flexibility, but all of them playing towards one common objective. The opposite would be a second division English team set up to only defend.
We don’t have the issue of time zone difference, but for global teams, this would make even better sense.
I’ve noticed that companies new to remote work in this pandemic have resorted to simply replicating their work from office culture online. The days are packed with back to back video meetings. I bet half of those are a complete waste of time.
A lot of the times when a team member requests for a call with me, I respond with 2-3 qualifying questions. Most of the times the responses to these questions ends up clarifying their doubts avoiding the need for a call.
Delegation of responsibilities
This is as much a necessity of a remote company as it is for founders to focus on areas of growth over operations. The E-Myth is an excellent book on this topic articulating why entrepreneurs need to evolve from a technical/hands-on role into a manager and finally into someone who spends most of their time-solving problems of growth.
Along this journey from technical to visionary, you need to put systems and processes place while training employees to execute them. Delegating responsibilities to different members of the team is the only you’re going to accomplish more. We’ve often been sucked into project operations losing sight of the big picture.
Identifying and training capable people to take over some of your current responsibilities should be part of your plans. As you grow, you will have bigger and more important problems to solve than the ones you do today. Automate where you can and delegate the rest.
Project management and hiring are two areas where we’ve used a combination of automation and delegation to free up our time at Pixelmattic. I would spend hours together creating job posts, sharing them, filtering and interviewing. Today, we have someone to manage the entire process. But we also use a combination of Google forms, an online test, Trello and workflow automation to filter and process job applicants. Karan and I evaluate the final shortlisted candidates over 2-3 rounds of interviews. This has shortened our time to hire and also saved us a lot of time and money.
We have 2 capable members of our team, who also incidentally were the first remote hires, now managing projects and retainer clients. Day to day communication with clients, coordination, reporting and project delivery is handled by them. Karan or I get involved when they get stuck or when we need to add our strategic inputs.
Discovering remote employees’ motivations
WordPress is not a favoured technology in Bangalore, so hiring remote employees became a necessity eventually. Finding good people with necessary skills wherever they are meant we hired people from different cities across India. Initially, some of them relocated to Bangalore. But those that do, used us as a stepping stone to find better paying jobs. And there’s no way we could compete with the funded startups.
When we decided to explicitly hire remote employees, we discovered that there are a lot of people in this country who would prefer to work from where they are and don’t necessarily want to move to a big city, like Bangalore. Their needs and motivations are different. It could be personal health, cost of living, ageing parents and heck, you could argue for better quality of life too.
At most times, we’ve had close to or more than 50% of the team made up of women. And quite a few of them are mothers with additional family responsibilities, so they need the flexibility. A few hours off in the middle of the day to go pick up kids from school, logging off early because of house errands etc. We’ve never found this to be an issue. Quality of work or timelines hasn’t been a concern either.
Working with and managing remote employees isn’t any more challenging or difficult than office employees. You save on commute time, office space and unnecessary meetings.
Difficulties of a remote work environment
The occasional office chats. Being an introvert who is not fond of small talk, I don’t miss this terribly. What I do miss is having good conversations that are not necessarily related to work. You can’t truly replicate that in a remote work setup, but we do try. We have channels to discuss books, movies, music and share personal stories.
In the future, we are looking at yearly or half-yearly meetups at a common destination. I know of companies that already do that, taking the entire team to the Himalayas or the beaches of Goa.
There is sometimes a tendency to not make decisions in a remote work environment. The chats can go without there being a conclusive decision. But this could also be an organizational or culture issue where no one wants to take up the responsibility. I’ve not seen too much of this happening and when it does, Karan or I generally step in to keep moving things forward.
It’s tough to build a team enviroment since everyone works independently for large portions of their day. Daily and weekly standup help. Possibly video meetings can be useful, but not everyone is comfortable with it. This is a work in progress for us. We don’t necessarily do any team building exercises either, but as we grow this will be an area to look at.
Communication can be a challenge since not everyone is familiar with a chat type text-based mode for work. Emails are rigid and WhatsApp is too fluid for remote work. Slack lets you have separate and detailed discussions through channels and threads. But it takes time for people to get used to expressing and articulating their tasks, problems and requests over text. When you hit a road block with text, the option of quickly switching to a call to discuss is helpful. We don’t default to calls as our first mode of communication though.
The largely asynchronous nature of our work negates the need for being connected with every team member all the time. However, connectivity issues are still a problem, not to mention the power outages (how long can a power backup work if you don’t have electricity for 12 hours). With some of our employees working from tier 2 and tier 3 towns, this becomes an issue once in a while.
