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anywhereconsulting-blog · 6 years

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How to keep your remote team happy and connected

If you implement and embrace asynchronous communication, set your communication guidelines and have a great system to track and manage projects plus you use the right tools to communicate, you still need an extra effort to make sure, everyone’s happy on your team. This extra effort can be the spice that feels everyone connected, no matter where they are.

Happiness can be defined in more ways that I can imagine, but I am sure, respecting and connecting with others are in the mix. As the manager of your team, you should implement processes that enhance interconnectivity across team members and respect others personal lifestyle.

One way to boost interconnectivity is to have scheduled 1-on-1 calls with your team members and randomly pair them up with each other. These meetings have no purpose apart from getting to know each other. You can also create separate chat channels for unrelated communication, so-called ‘watercooler’ rooms. In these rooms, there are no rules. Usually, these rooms are filled with animated GIFs. You can also recognize each team members personal hobby or pursued happiness-source and make it public or shared across the team. Who knows, it might turn out that if someone is into traveling, others might want to talk about travel experiences. The more non-work related communication have with your team, the happier they are.

Check my previous post on how to master distributed meetings or the one on how to have efficient video calls with your remote team.

Respecting others’ lifestyle and decisions is a big thing which you can’t just get granted but actively promote it as a practice. A way to embrace this is by transparent voting. If there is a decision, don’t just decide on it on the go but have a quick vote. You can use tools like Loomio to gather votes for decisions, publicly or anonymously. If your team members can express their needs directly, they feel they are valued.

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Anywhere Consulting helps entrepreneurs, startups, and SMEs to change and grow their business anywhere. We are a remote marketing and business consulting company. If you want to grow your business, we can help you.

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anywhereconsulting-blog · 6 years

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How to avoid fallbacks with your remote agency

The classic agency model is under pressure, and it’s constantly changing. That’s a good thing — agencies were always the first to respond to business challenges, and they weren’t afraid to try out new setups. When it comes to remote companies, apart from pure technology products and SaaS businesses, creative agencies were the first-movers. It’s easy to understand why — creative professionals love remote working and they often collaborate with each other thus creating remote creative companies.

But what about those who were in the game before this whole remote working concept? How can they adapt to this new challenge? How can you, agency-owner with a solid clientele and in-office team, avoid the mistakes and fallbacks when switching to remote?

I have worked for big network agencies as a senior strategist, spent time with medium-sized creative workshops, plus had my own classic digital marketing agency. These came with offices, in-house teams, global & regional campaigns and all the belongings you are familiar with. Now I’m running my own remote consulting business and helping entrepreneurs to transform their companies to a remote business and grow beyond their limits.

There are many crucial areas where you can make mistakes when you are running or switching to your remote agency setup.

Overhead and margins.

Yes, let’s address the money issue first and get this out of the way. There are obvious benefits for remote business ROI.

First, your team can be flexible. Meaning, your overhead costs are manageable. You can hire freelancers for projects on-demand and for as-needed.

Second, your remote team will be more productive. Period. If you don’t believe me, look at the fact that remote workers are less likely to call in sick. Tools track those who work most of their time remotely — they have a hard time to fake their timesheets. All in all, they get things done more effectively for you, which means more work, which means more revenue.

Third, no office. It’s a significant amount in any agency’s budget. Plus there are no furniture, supplies, catering, etc.

Last, if you based in a high-income city, you will have the option to find equally talented people from lower-income cities. It means less money spent on fees and salaries. Oh and most of the remote agencies work with their team on a freelancer contract basis, so no benefits and taxes on top of wages.

What can go wrong with your budget?

As an agency, you will have severe savings on your current setup if you switch to the remote business model. It can be tempting, and you can forget what’s on stake here: your reputation and your quality of services.

Improving your team and your services should be the number one goal for you when switching to the remote agency model. Here’s an example. If you save $10 with the switch, this is how you should distribute it:

$3 should go to your team as bonuses. Pay them well, and they will be more likely to stick with you and do better work. If you use many on-demand freelancers, pick the expensive and talented ones, don’t be cheap. They are more likely to prioritize your projects over other projects they are doing. If you have long-term employees, pay them bonuses. They will be more loyal to you.

$3 should go to your remote office. No, you won’t have a traditional office. But you will have extra expenses that you haven’t had before. You will travel more to on-site client meetings. You might rent more meeting rooms and coworking spaces. You need tools and software to work remotely. You might need to invest in solid home office equipment. You might also want to do retreats and team building events with your remote team. All of these cost money which you shouldn’t skip.

$3 should go to experimentation and pet projects. The most significant benefit of having a remote agency is flexibility. It allows you to do fun stuff. Experiment and try out new things. You have a PR agency but always wanted to invest in digital marketing? Try it out, hire a salesperson and a digital marketer on-demand — see if you can sell those services to your existing clients. You had a fun idea that can turn into a PR stunt for your agency? Do it. This is the time. Build something amazing.

$1 is the increase on your margins. Enjoy it. Put it somewhere safe for those times. That’s your bonus check and also your safety net when SHTF.

What would your clients’ say?

Your reputation as an agency is essential. I get it. You had a beautiful office with excellent coffee and motivational quotes hanging from the wall. You filled up your client’s meeting room with an army of account managers. Now, you are meeting with clients in coffee shops and dialing in via Skype wearing your panties. Your clients won’t get this.

Of course, if you are starting and you are young and agile, this won’t matter anyway — having a remote agency is flexible for you and you can find clients who will cherish this. But those agency owners who’ve been in this game for a while now have a reputation to risk.

Fear not, there are ways around this. For a start, most long-established agencies who switched to a remote setup, still have their core team in one location. They might not have a classic office, but they can serve their clients in-person. Plus, co-working spaces and short-let offices have evolved much, it’s ok to use them if needed.

My works-for-everyone solution is this: retain the core team you had before, mostly the seniors who will do face-to-face client work anyway — but transfer every production related work to your remote team.

The outsourcing mistake.

Here comes the outsourcing mistake. Operating a remote agency doesn’t mean you are outsourcing your production work to external freelancers. It is one of the biggest mistakes — literally everyone, every agency owner falls into this.

You know that the better your team, the better your service is. Which means, the better your agency is. As a client, would you work with an agency, which has 2–3 great senior people in their team and a bunch of low-key people from a very low-income part of the world?

But that’s not just about reputation, it is about time and ultimately money as well. If you have low-performing hired guns only, you will spend more time on briefing and correcting their output. You will lose money at the end of the day. Would you hire a burn-and-churn video production person for $5/hour and end up spending $500 on the freelancer plus your unbilled time on debriefing the work OR hire someone for $1000 and receive a quality product, plus a loyal team member who will get more work from you on the long-term? Investing in quality team members is a must, even for remote agencies.

Don’t outsource your work. Build an overseas team instead.

Those brainstorms that you value much.

Oh yes, those creative meetings... When you sit in a circle of bean bags and lavishly rambling about The Next Big Idea. How could you brainstorm online, anyway?

Well, first, you can. Of course, it’s less chemistry in it — but also less ego. It is hard to hide in the corner and stay put in an online brainstorm situation. Planning virtual creative meetings need preparation and well-rounded briefing. Online sessions can have live discussions, and there are online whiteboard tools available too. First, this might be a bit awkward, but later you would never do it any other way.

And if you have a significant client with a substantial brief, remember you are saving tons of money on not having an office. Organize team retreats and creative workshops, even if it means you have to make sure everyone travels to the same location at the same time.

The always-on agency.

Remember the buzzword, always-on? Now you are part of it. There’s a part in account management for clients which we call extinguishing the fire. Solving some minor but critical issue for your client, sending out a material with a timely matter, handling a customer problem right now. These issues need to be addressed quickly so an agency should be highly responsive.

A remote agency model can’t make a mistake on this. A remote agency can be much better in responsiveness. The lack of location means the absence of timezones. With some preparation and planning, you can operate an always-on account management team, handling client requests 0–24, without the limitations of your client’s office hours.

The mistakes you can make as a remote entrepreneur.

These were the mistakes that are made mostly by agency owners due to the nature of the agency business. But there are other, more general mistakes you can make as a now-remote entrepreneur. Just run down them quickly for reference.

Collaboration and communication issues. You have to keep everyone in the loop, in the hustle. Remote team members can feel disconnected from the core activities. Disconnected team members are more likely to leave you or become less productive or motivated. The solution sounds simple but it isn’t: establish clear communication guidelines internally, make the agency hustle transparent and use remote working tools to manage collaboration. It would be great too if your team members learn how to work remotely before switching to remote work.

Culture and retention. Remote team culture that will make your team happy and it will help you to retain them. It also helps to keep critical clients as your clients want to work with an engaging and inspiring team. Building a remote team culture is doable, and this is where you can get creative. Anything can fly, and anything can work. Some agencies have quarterly team retreats. Others have offline perks for team members. It depends on your team, your current cultural setup, and your creativity.

Preparation can save you from the setbacks.

If you think that switching your agency to a remote business is your thing, you have to make preparations. The switch can come with serious setbacks and lots of risks — but it also rewards you with unspeakable benefits at the end. Learn everything you can on remote business and when you think you are ready, go all-in.

If you need help, don’t afraid to ask. I’m helping entrepreneurs, including agency owners to transform their current solid business into a flexible, more profitable distributed business. Our resources are free to browse. This article is a great starting point on how to start the transformation. Join the remote revolution and build your remote agency that can grow anywhere.

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anywhereconsulting-blog · 6 years

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How to build asynchronous workflows in your team

Asynchronous workflows are processes where your distributed team should be able to access to collaborate together, at any time from anywhere, without the participants would be online together at the same time. With asynchronous communication, you have a certain time lag because not everyone is online to respond – but will respond when they will be online. In a distributed company, the majority of the communication is asynchronous because of… timezones of course. Also, there’s no office and you just can’t chat-up anyone immediately. Even a synchronous – real-time – communication channel can become asynchronous, for example, a chat room on a company’s Slack can be lagged, even if you are chatting with someone 1-on-1. So, you should get familiar and embrace asynchronous communication in order to achieve efficiency.

Asynchronous communication = more focus

There is one big advantage of asynchronous communication: focus.

First, you don’t have interruptions on your work, no one can just grab you to a meeting room or just talk to you. Successful remote workers tend to use mute on notifications and check the corporate messages in a certain timeframe so they can keep their focus on working important tasks.

Second, with your newly found focus, you have to be super precise in your briefing and communication. Because the communication is asynchronous, you have to explain yourself precisely with a sharp focus, so everyone can understand your needs by reading your asynchronous message.

There are other benefits too. With asynchronous communication, you save all of your progress and communication. If you use a corporate chat service, a to-do-app or a project management tool, or just simply put anything to GitHub, you have direct access to everything that has happened so far on that channel – preserving a great deal of corporate history. This provides you with an immense wealth of material for understanding prior decisions, work, and relationships.

Transparency and flat structure. Because all messages and parts of communication is recorded and online to enhance the efficiency of asynchronous communication, everything becomes transparent and flat. There are no closed office rooms for the managers, you are in the same chatroom with other team members. We discussed the deal with transparency and why it is a must for every distributed team – asynchronous communication further extends transparency across the whole team.

Enhancing collaboration and communication. The asynchronous platforms require collaboration – it is actually a must to collaborate and communicate. You simply just can’t disappear and not react or reply to a task or question. If you have worked in a big team with more than 100 people in an office, you should know, ‘disappearing’ in an office is kinda easy. With asynchronous remote tools, everyone is seen to collaborate. It makes everyone super accountable for their tasks and responsibilities.

All in all, asynchronous communication is not just a must for distributed teams, but also the best way to enhance productivity, make everyone accountable on their responsibilities, boost company’s culture, transparency and collaboration capabilities. However, you should agree on the communication guidelines for asynchronous and synchronous communication as well.

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anywhereconsulting-blog · 6 years

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How to transform your company into a distributed business?

In a recent study published by OwlLabs concluded that 65% of on-site employees in the US want to work outside the office at least once a month and the majority of them would love to try this even for once per week. There is no denying that a change in how we work is here. Remote business is embraced by startups who manage fully distributed teams and entrepreneurs who grow their business remotely. But how can an already established company keep up with the trend — how do you turn your company into a distributed business?

The transformation process is a simple 5-step approach, but it is full of risks and possible setbacks with great rewards at the end. It’s not much different than launching a new product or an MVP. Except for this time, your company is the one that’s getting (re)launched.

Step 1 — Learn the why.

The first step is risk-free and lots of fun — and it’s essential. Learn how the distributed business model and managing a remote team can help your company to grow. In a nutshell, backed by countless of studies done on remote workers, your team will be more productive, much healthier and you will have the chance to manage a truly diverse, multicultural and inspiring team. The change will influence your company’s growth — in real numbers and ROI. On the top of the increased productivity, you will have higher margins, access to the global talent pool and a much flexible business model.

Learning about the benefits of a distributed company is free. My company, Anywhere, helps entrepreneurs like you to make the change and go remote. All of our resources are free, including our long-read book, which you can get from here.

Step 2 — Evaluate your current setup.

Distributed business is not for everyone. If you have a medium-sized team, your company operates in the technology- or creative services space; chances are you are good to go. It is easier to make the switch if all your current processes are running online anyway. For everyone else, evaluate carefully.

Do you have full support internally? Make sure that everyone in your current team would support the change. The simplest way to secure this: ask them. Do internal meetings and surveys if they can and would work remotely if needed.

Do you have full support externally? You are an established business with existing clients — will they able to work with you remotely. You have to make sure that switching to a new model won’t lead to churn.

Put the current setup up to the whiteboard. Map out your current operations and look for those which are essential. You won’t touch these for now. Find those areas where you can allow a few days or weeks of setbacks. If you have operation areas like this, that’s where you will test the new model.

Once you got everyone onboard and mapped out the current setup, you can prepare for the change.

Step 3 — Prepare for the change.

The distributed business model is all about location — the lack of location. You need to prepare all your current operations to remove the location out from the equation. There are two minor steps you need to do to achieve this.

One, you have to educate the current team. It is not enough just to let everyone to buy-in to this. You don’t want to change your current team. You want the team to go remote — so help them to do so — doing internal training programs and preparation is a must at this stage. There are countless courses for employees helping to stay productive while working remotely.

Two, you have to work in your office as there would be no office. It might lead to silly situations but stick with the plan. If your current project management is not fully online, build the infrastructure first. You would be surprised how many companies have slow or non-existing cloud-based solutions for their resources or how many teams still use offline whiteboards to map out entire project plans but don’t turn that plan into an accessible online roadmap. Setting up the new tools and methods would take a while but even if you don’t make the switch at the end, just by setting up these new processes will kickstart your growth.

Step 4 — Test the new model.

This step is required only to manage risk when you make the final switch. You have to test the model out first. Testing the model is easy: you have to skip the office for a while. The goal of the test: go remote for a short period and learn how to manage the inevitable road bumps. Your productivity might even fall a bit, but that is normal. When everything falls into place, you will be surprised how quickly it recovers and even surpasses your previous standard.

There are a few ways you can do the testing — all depends on your current setup:

You can let some people or your full team go remote for a period. A week is a minimum but a month would be the best. They have to skip the office entirely and only work remotely. Support them on this journey: for some, having an office is critical — let them work from coworking offices.

Hire someone remotely. If you were about to extend your team with new members, why not hire your next employee remotely? Integrate the new employee into your current team. The critical thing to test here is not how the new employee can work with you but how your current team can work with someone remotely.

No matter which option you choose, sit down with your team and gather feedback after the testing. At that point, you will have all the processes established to go remote, and your team also had an impression on how to work remotely.

After the testing, you can make an informed decision if you still want to transform your company.

Step 5 — Build a remote business culture.

The final step is to make the decision — at this point, I highly recommend to go all-in. Become a fully distributed business. By going all-in, you can change not just your processes and operations but also your culture. The critical element for any distributed company is their culture — that is how they retain their remote team and grow their business.

Remote business culture is not about your office — it is about diversity, transparency, self-responsibility and the way you work. Build and share this culture with everyone and help other entrepreneurs to learn from your success.

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anywhereconsulting-blog · 6 years

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How to align goals with your team

Keeping everyone on the same page is important for every business. There are three types of goals for every business:

Longterm goals: here goes all the financial goals and annual plans. Basically, we are speaking here about corporate strategy.

Milestones: these are certain limits that you can accomplish and exceed in order to achieve the long-term goal(s) of your business.

Short-term goals: these are more like reports, small achievements, daily project management task accomplishments also goes here.

First off, before you can make sure everyone is aligned with your goals, you have to define these goals for yourself. Make sure you have a solid business plan with a strategy you can execute. I rarely define a strategy with more than a year lifespan. Anything that has more than a year lifespan, I call it a dream, or if we want to keep it professional: trend. You just don’t know where the market is heading, everything changes so quickly and so many variables are unseen for you – so there’s no point wasting time on 5-10 years plans. But if you can define a very clear annual plan with fixed milestones to achieve, you are off to go. Defining your business strategy is highly personal, you have to know your business and your capabilities.

Once the plan is ready, make sure it is transparent too. Share it with every member of your team so they can see you have a plan and they are in the same boat as you. Make sure the milestones are also shared when achieved and celebrate achievements. There are three rules on how to align goals.

Make the goals transparent

Make the goals transparent so everyone can feel they are in the same boat. Yes, even financial results and planning. Make sure all of the plans are visible to everyone. You can create a digestible document that is shared across your team and can be commented on everyone. Who knows, a team member might have some great addition to your longterm plans!

Updates on progress

Share updates on the progress.The easiest way to share it: a weekly progress report and a monthly strategy report. These reports can be written in a template, which you should update every time. In the weekly report, share the progress on certain projects, the actual cashflow of the company and the teamwork schedule, focusing on sprints, time-offs, new hires and layoffs and also share new sales prospects and results. In the monthly report do the same but on a grander scale. Don’t focus on the smaller projects and reports but report on how the milestones are and how far you come with the annual plan achievement. These reports are amazingly important as they are getting an update for everyone on the progress of the goals.

Celebrate + Get feedback

Every time you achieve a goal or reach a milestone, celebrate it with the team. If you fail to reach the goals in time, gain feedback from everyone on the causes of failures.

Having transparent goals help you to get everyone on the same page and it boosts morale and productivity. No one wants to work for a company that doesn’t have plans or it is secretive about results. Transparency helps you to reach your goals and even further, it helps you to improve your strategy via team insights and feedbacks.

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anywhereconsulting-blog · 6 years

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How to make sure if the applicant for a remote job is a great fit for the position

You have made tremendous efforts to select the best applicants from a talent pool. You also conducted plenty of interviews with the best applicants. After the interviews, a lot of candidates will be disqualified. You act like you always do: reject them even more politely, as they’ve spent time on talking with you. Let them know they are rejected quickly, it is polite. They might hunt for other jobs as well and still wait for your feedback. With those who qualified during the interview, you should do a test job. That is the first step in the process, where you make sure that they are a great fit.

Testing your applicants for a remote job

This can be tricky because it highly depends on the position you are about to fill. Also keep in mind that if the test job requires more than a couple of hours, you should pay their time. Some companies even pay a flat fee for the test job, regardless of the time. It’s polite and respectful.

Note that the test job’s goal is simple: it is done only to test their skills. Nothing else. Let’s say you are hiring a marketer. The candidate has great skills and it got confirmed by a background check. The candidate also did great during the interview, sharp, proactive, prompt, not too pushy and chemistry worked too. But you are a developer shop who wants more clients and this candidate only worked for SaaS startups before. The candidate might have a unique approach to your company that totally misaligned with your goals. So even if on paper everything is fine, you still need to make sure that the candidate is the right candidate solely for you.

On the test job, ask something presentable and deliverable. Even if you pay for it, the test job shouldn’t take more than a day of work. It should relate to the position, so if you are hiring a developer, ask for a code on a non-relevant project of yours. If you are hiring a PR person, ask for a copy of a press release with a couple of journalist names to pitch the article. If you are hiring a customer service agent, bring out some issues and let the candidate answer the questions. It’s up to you and your business, but keep it relevant, brief and reviewable. Set a deadline and let them know that they are free to ask anything but that doesn’t change the deadline. You need to check the quality of the test work of course, but also keep an eye on how this small project has been managed, how the candidate communicated.

How to make sure applicants are a great fit

Those who made it through here are worth to hire. There should be only a handful of them. From now on, only one thing matters – culture. Everything that has happened until this point was just to test if the candidate is able to work remotely and can deliver value to your company. But none of this matter if they can’t fit in your team and company culture. Now testing this out is tricky, and seriously there are no general recipes for this. It all depends on what your company culture is. The last interview should test this out.

There is no recipe on how to test the cultural fit but I always recommend one approach that is certainly working for others. The approach is the podium talk. Sure you can test personality traits through various tools and assessment but ultimately, your team has to work with someone new. So your team has to make the call. Anyone who made this far is worth to hire as they have the skills and capabilities, plus they can work with you personally. From your point of view, anyone from your now narrowed shortlist would be a great fit. So why you are the one who picks? Let your team pick who they want to work with.

Gather around all of your team for a video call and invite the candidate to join. Let the candidate speak on a topic of her/his choice. Let the candidate know beforehand that the interview will be about a speak-up event for your team where he/she needs to pitch something to your team. The speech somehow has to be connected to your business. It shouldn’t be more than a short presentation, followed by a Q&A. This is great as this podium talk lets your team engage with the candidate and the candidate has the chance to peek into your business and your team. After the call, let your team vote anonymously for the best talk and hire the winner. Write back to those who didn’t make it but highlight that they were on the very end shortlist and you might be getting back to them with actual work.

How to do a trial period for new employees

Now that you have a winner, make sure you still test the applicant out before finalizing the employment. I mean, not on paper as most of these employees will work on a contract basis with you anyway but more in your mindset. Be upfront and tell them that their first month is a trial period. Some companies even offer a lower base salary for the first months. In this trial period, keep a close eye on their work. There are a couple of ways you should do that.

Some companies who have a SaaS or any kind of service that needs customer service support, throw the trialing applicant into customer service first. A significant amount of their time should be spent on customer service to learn more about the product, the customers, and the main issues. This is done for everyone, even if you hire a marketing director who did customer service ticketing years ago or haven’t had the chance to do anyway before. Companies who do this, they don’t evaluate the work based on the sharp customer service the applicant provides but the way the applicant works.

Some other companies, like Buffer, have new employees bootcamp. They do a serious and sometimes offline onboarding for newcomers to further test out if the new candidates are a good fit for the company. During this time the applicant gets a base salary but not doing actual billable work but only tests.

Others simply attach the newcomer to non-relevant projects first to test out if they can be a good fit. Even others attach them to the most important project, the deep dive, see how they react to pressure.

It all depends on your business, but ultimately you should test before you buy. A trial period time salary is great as it shows the candidate that during this time, they are undergoing a testing period. Once it’s done, their compensation rises to normal levels. If it turns out that your candidate is not the best fit, you can still turn back to other shortlisted ones. Now that you have a new remote employee on board, your job is to keep them happy, motivated, focused and productive.

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anywhereconsulting-blog · 6 years

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How to automate your remote business

I wanted to clear up some examples here so you can learn how much time and money you can save by simply automating certain tasks on your business. Here is a couple of them.

Request processing

Planning a team retreat and don’t know where to go? You need a new business tool to use for your team but not sure which one? Planning an offline meeting but not sure where? Want to organize an out-of-the-blue team call where everyone participates – which is an issue due to multiple timezones?

Worry no more, email is here to help you. Or… not. On an email thread, things can get lost and mismatched and forgot. It is also utterly time-consuming scrolling and looking through a long thread. Simply put the request up to a board or workflow card on Trello or any other tool like that and share it with the relevant parties. You can simply collaborate on the board and automate issues like availability for everyone due to calendar integrations. It saves time and minimizes miscommunication.

Claims and reimbursements

As a distributed business you might need to manage how your team use tools and claim expenses or how they travel around the globe if needed and claim reimbursements. Yes, you can do that manually and claim invoices to get expenses covered but you can also automate this process to minimize hassle and reduce mistakes.

Onboarding

Onboarding for clients and new employees. When you need to send out the very same documents to a number of people, you can do better with automation. If you are an in-office team, you probably have an in-office onboarding process for new employees, where you show them around the office and introduce them to other colleagues and to the main database you work with. As a distributed company, you have the same tools, people and assets that you need to guide every newcomer through. The first time you do this will be a manual process, but even the second one can be automated. This can be done for clients too with automated proposals and workflow introductions. It also gives you the opportunity to treat everyone the same way – same automation.

Basic admin work

There are tons of stuff you can do with automation tools like Zapier from password management, database inquiries, marketing, and customer service automation to social media scheduling. These are microscopic tasks, for example, someone subscribes to your newsletter organically on your site but you want to keep their records on your sales tools too, tools like Zapier automates this database inquiry with ease, without you even pushing a button. Microscopic tasks are minor ones which can be done manually in a minute, but they can accumulate and tend to be forgotten if not treated immediately. Simple administrative automation can help you to save a lot of time, keep your business organized, and not to forget anything essential.

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anywhereconsulting-blog · 6 years

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Where to incorporate your remote business

You are a distributed company doing business remotely, serving the global market online. Where should you incorporate? Incorporating somewhere ultimately defines your taxes and your access to service providers. Every business is different so does every setup so all needs to be tied into the best possible incorporation setups – but there are a couple of insights you need to consider when you set up a business.

You are a distributed business – you can go anywhere

Having a business is a legal entity, which means it is a legally binding creation. Set up your business where the business environment is solid, the government values entrepreneurs and their spirit and contribution to the global economy. Also, consider the value of your public image as a company – not as a business. If you are operating, you have to issue invoices and file legal documents anyway – which country do you want to be listed as your legal address? What image do you want to show? You also want to access all the modern online service providers. Check where companies like Stripe, PayPal, and others accept business account options. Avoid countries that are missing from their lists.

All in all, you need to consider the following criteria when incorporating: visibility, costs, and access.

Stay transparent

As for the visibility, you need to incorporate somewhere safe and publicly renowned with a rock-solid business environment. Offshore heavens are not like that, even though, as an online distributed business, you can technically operate from an offshore heaven, without a single visit to your legal company address. But that projects a picture of your company that you don’t want to show: dodgy, shady and not worthy of the trust of others. Stick to countries where incorporation is simple, minimalist and straightforward, possibly can be done fully online.

Stay efficient

You also need to consider the costs of running a business– and here I’m not talking about taxes. When you do the math, even if you pay a small % of your revenue to taxes, it can be still more beneficial in order to do so, compared to a 0% offshore tax heaven as running those offshore companies tend to be expensive. Privacy has its price. Cost should come to your mind when you calculate your hours of running that business. Necessary hours need to be put in when you run your company – accounting, legal and traditional business operations like invoicing, cashflow management and others. Of course, you can outsource those to experts but these experts have varied prices in different countries. The more complicated to set up a business somewhere, the more hours you need to invest in running the business itself.

Every hour spent should be considered and added to the cost, even more, when it comes to an outsourced expert, like an accountant.

Be flexible

Your company also have full access to the global market. Remember what it means to run a distributed business – it means global access. Your chosen form and location of your incorporation should not limit you from accessing a global market. By access, I mean you have access to service providers that can help you save time and reduce costs plus your customers have access to your company as well.

Let me give you an example: if you are running an offshore company, a certain type of clients won’t pay your invoices. Simple is that they just don’t want to transfer funds to a company that incorporated in a sandy island somewhere. Certain countries are also exempt to have access to service providers like PayPal, Stripe or e-banking accounts like TransferWise and Revolut. You need to incorporate where you have full global access to the market and you have zero limitations due to the location of your incorporation.

Having said that, do your research and consult with experts but in general, you hardly can go wrong with countries like the USA and their certain business-friendly states, the UK or Ireland with their ease of doing business, the Netherlands and Luxemburg with their commerce-friendly environment, or with Estonia with their minimalist e-residency business setup. If you have a significant amount of profit that can give you leverage on incorporation, you can set up businesses in respected and business-friendly countries like Singapore, Hong Kong or the UAE (keep in mind that running a company there is expensive) but at least, you can choke down some tax bills and a still run a non-shady offshore business.

The elephant in the room

Speaking of taxes… With that, you should certainly consult your accountant as the accounting will be the one and only thing that you should outsource to an expert anyway. Anything else can be automated pretty much or can be done by yourself, but not taxes. Not because it is hard to file taxes in business-friendly countries like Estonia or the UK, but because running a global distributed online business has some flaws in terms of taxes.

There’s a term called corporate or company residency, where your business is tax-resident. Even if you live in the UK but your business is incorporated in the Netherlands, your business can be treated as a business in the UK, when it comes to taxes. This is because of corporate residency – you pay taxes in the country after your business, where your business is centrally managed and operated. Now, when it comes to online businesses, it is super hard to determine what is considered “managed and operated.” To most, it is based on the shareholders. If you are a sole entrepreneur and single shareholder of a company, your company is taxing in your home country, where you are a tax resident as a person, no matter where your company actually is incorporated anyway. But, this can be highly varied due to business setups, countries and their local tax laws and your personal status as a tax resident.

I don’t want to jump into that in this post as this is more likely a tax expert’s area but let me remind you to talk to an expert before you jump to conclusions.

So just to recap: stay somewhere visible and transparent, optimize and automate your business and stay accessible & flexible, plus consult with an expert before incorporating. It seriously pays itself out on the long-term.

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anywhereconsulting-blog · 6 years

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How to position your business and succeed in your niche

Positioning your company is crucial to your future success because ultimately, your position as a company will define your position in the market. If you don’t have a clear vision about yourself, on what your company does and for whom you work, you will lose sight of your progress. But positioning as a distributed company means much more than that. It will define your workflows and also the very foundations of your company structure.

First, positioning matters because, with that, you can distinguish yourself from your competition. Also, as a distributed company, your positioning or brand image will be the first selling point for customers. As you don’t have a shopfront or you might not do any solid personal networking, your online presence is the only thing that keeps you in the loop. You should always maintain, change and rely on it.

There are three strategies to position yourself as a company. Of course, these are general concepts so you always have to apply or combine them to fit your special business needs.

The Leader

This approach is great for those who can claim such quality of service or expertise that can be fitted with this strategy. No matter your competition, you can claim that your business is the leader or expert in the field. However, there are two problems with this strategy: without relevant background, the leadership claim can’t be fitted, second this is the most common approach. It is hard to become an industry leader as if you become one, you might not need to claim the title at all.

The Explorer

This is more fitted for those companies who have a creative, out-of-the-box and innovative approach for their services. The innovative initiative is the very essence of your position, you can share how differently you do the work. Hint here, by stating that you are a fully distributed company, you are already a special one amongst others.

The Scientist

This is great for those who are not dealing with an all-rounder approach and only focusing on one thing. If you are a digital production agency, you might be familiar with 360-approach, where you do pretty much anything that is digital. With the expert approach, you can just one or maybe two types of work, i.e. you are a digital agency who’s focusing only on email marketing. The narrow focus gives you the competitive advantage and as you are focusing only on one thing, you can claim expert status.

You can also combine the industry leader and pioneer categories or the expert and pioneer categories together to get a more solid position.

But positioning doesn’t stop here for a distributed company. A market position also affects you as a company. If you are transitioning from a traditional setup to a distributed company, you can streamline your operations with a new positioning approach. If you are an all-rounder digital production agency, you can narrow down not just your focus but your team as well, and only work with a small team of experts focusing on one thing.

We have talked about transparency and its importance before, and I want to highlight that transparency also helps with positioning. With a transparently shared approach, you can design and publish thought leadership materials that can help you to claim the desired position on the market. Any inbound marketing materials you push out, whitepapers, webinars, surveys, blog posts etc., all of them are tools in your hands in positioning.

Having a solid vision of where you are and how you approach your industry will help you to attract more clients and raise more awareness about your business. With a solid position, it is also easier to market yourself online. Positioning your business should come after you have a clear vision of the market and on your business model’s viability.

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anywhereconsulting-blog · 6 years

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The difference between fully and partially distributed teams

If you evaluated your business and did the pivot successfully on distributed business, you have two options. You can go fully distributed or partially distributed. Fully means, all your team members are working remotely, and they are placed in different locations. Partially means, you have a central or core team– not necessarily placed in an office but regularly catching up offline – and you have a team of remote employees all around the globe.

There are no cons and pros or benefits regarding the two models. It is 100% up to your own personal business choice which way you go. But there are some fundamental differentials between the two models.

Fully distributed teams

A fully distributed model works mainly for those businesses whose products and services are 100% online anyway. Software companies, SaaS companies, online consultants, online marketing agencies and any type of service or product that can be sold via a full online marketing. In this case, the team is essentially working together online, and their office is in the cloud. They cooperate online, they work online, they do customer service online and they sell online. Even if they do offline team retreats – which is a must but more on that later –, the day-to-day work is fully remote. If your business requires lots of personal networking to sell or if you really need to be at a certain place to excel in work, a fully distributed model might not be the best option for you. Also, most of the early-stage startup companies and extended freelancers operate their business full remotely. They have a small team and it is not a big deal to work together online anyway. But only a handful of companies I know who have more than 50-100+ people on their team and they still operate completely remotely.

The biggest advantage: fully distributed companies are very flexible. They can change and adapt to any new circumstances and business situations. They are usually the first to innovate in their services.

The biggest challenge: keeping a fruitful company culture that motivates their team and retains their employees on-board. Due to their flexibility, their employees are pretty flexible as well in changing jobs, unless there is a clear and engaging company culture.

Less known information: because fully distributed businesses are super lightweight in terms of awareness and structure, most of them go defunct before we actually hear about them first. So those who did make it and you can read about their policies on remote working are the ones who you should listen to and learn from.

Partially distributed teams

A partially distributed model is the mainstream for those companies who are interested in this topic. It works mainly for businesses that started out as a traditional business with an office or those who still need a personal presence somewhere in order to grow their business. Let’s say you are a software company selling services for startup businesses in the Bay Area. Yes, you can target them with online marketing, but it certainly helps if you are attending events there and do some personal networking as well. And there are companies that already established businesses with clients, payroll, cashflow and a team with an office – but faced with a certain challenge, mainly the limitation in geography and picked distributed business model to solve the issues. Most of the distributed businesses are partially distributed: they have a core team in a certain location and have a team of remote employees. Also, having some remote workers doing your work with your classic team doesn’t count as a distributed business. It’s called outsourcing. You are partially distributed if at least 50% of your headcount works remotely.

The biggest advantage: partially distributed businesses can stay on top of the competition with a flexible business model while not changing too much in running the business

The biggest challenge: company culture again. The remote team shouldn’t feel like an outsider compared to the office team. You should do whatever it takes to integrate the two teams together.

Less known information: in this model, employee retention is lower for remote employees because of the outsider problem. Most of the businesses treat them as freelancers so they act like freelancers: they come and go. Again, you should do whatever it takes to integrate your remote team into your office team and create one single team with a company culture in place.

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anywhereconsulting-blog · 6 years

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The evolution of remote working

Since this post is being written at the middle of 2018, the distributed business model is flourishing and spreading massively. I’ve been working as a location independent entrepreneur for years now and it was very informative and interesting to see how companies have approached remote working in recent years.

Everything started with internet technologies and social media spreading far and wide across the world in the early 2000s. I participated in more and more online video meetings while still working in a classic office setting. Speaking to a client overseas via an online meeting was a thing 15 years ago. Now it’s the norm.

Then new shiny tools appeared: project management, business instant messages, online business networks, intranets, etc. At that time, a large part of the business process was managed online, regardless of whether or not the company had an office. And then startup companies came in…

The early adopters of distributed business

“Ditching the office” and managing a remote team was first embraced by startup companies. They made it look cool and engaging. Buffer and Basecamp were the first big ones who not just worked with a remote team but also embraced the idea and wrote serious knowledge materials, books around it and built up their whole company with the distributed business model in the heart.

Then, around 5 years ago, the number of online entrepreneurs, remote freelancers, and digital nomads started rapidly increasing. More and more remote companies appeared that helped businesses to find new talent remotely and more and more tools gained attention that helped businesses thrive in this remote environment.

The current state of distributed business

Nowadays, the distributed business model is not just a shiny cool thing for startup companies or an embraced option for big businesses – it is a viable route for SMEs as well.

Owl Lab published a survey at the end of 2017 in which they asked 1000+ US-based workers on remote working. The report entitled “The State of Remote Work in 2017” ended up with some interesting results. If you haven’t done so yet, give it a read. Some key insights from the findings: among employees who don’t work remotely, 48% stated that they would like to do so at least once a week. Also, among employees who don’t work remotely today, 65% of them would like to work remotely at least once a month in the future. So, there is a clear need to work in the distributed business model on the employee side– but what about the business owners?

The study shows that fully distributed companies were able to hire 33% faster on average than other companies. They have access to a widening pool of talent and also the hiring process is much shorter. Also, those who support remote work have 25% lower employee turnover than companies that don’t. Now it’s clear that finding and retaining employees remotely is easier than in a classic business model – which shouldn’t be a surprise as most of the employees are already embracing or at least wish to work remotely. But does it affect employee performance?

In the study, managers see equal performance between their onsite and remote employees, and they consider performance the most important factor when recruiting a new remote team member. However, for managers, the hardest part isn’t project management online, productivity tracking online or direct employee management but cultivating a company culture online. The biggest challenge companies are facing right now when applying a distributed business model is to create an engaging, motivating company culture that helps to retain and cherish employees.

Overall, the study shows that remote working is one of the leading trends in business management, wished both by the employees and the employers. However, the new model has new challenges as well, which need to be addressed.

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anywhereconsulting-blog · 6 years

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How e-Residency minimises hassle for entrepreneurs like me

As a lifelong entrepreneur and owner of a consulting business, I have extensive experience in starting and running businesses in multiple countries in the EU. Recently, I opened a company in Estonia through its e-Residency program and settled with it for long-term. I had three reasons to do so: minimalism, transparency, and long-term benefits.

Estonian e-Residency business = minimalist heaven

How much time do you spend on admin work? Like, doing paperwork and stuff? Creating your company, setting up the business, issuing invoices, doing annual returns, etc. I spend 1 hour per month on average on this, even though I still love creating my invoices manually (weirdo! :D). I have established and operated businesses in the United Kingdom and also in my home country, Hungary. Nothing even comes close to Estonia. Also, prices. I have my lovely legal & accounting partner Nordic Consult in Estonia — no paid endorsement, I just love them — who helped me to set up the business, provided legal address and they are doing my annual accounting plus provide me intense support for all of my weird questions. I pay a couple of hundred Euros which is significantly less compared to anything I paid before anywhere else. I also run my business remotely, which means business without borders. Everything is not just digital — it HAS TO BE digital, otherwise, I can’t work with it. I have clients from all around the world, I need access to global payment services and tools which help me to automate, run and manage my business, anywhere I go. With the Estonian company, I have full access to everything. Just an example, it took me weeks to get in line and open a business account with a Hungarian company on Revolut. It took me a day to do the same with my Estonian business. It’s more credible, identity check is simpler, everything is in English and everything is accessible online.

These sound like the norm for everyone, but if you are coming from Southern or Eastern Europe, you are more familiar with the opposite experience. For me, managing my Estonian business is a clean, minimalist way of doing my job, which doesn’t even stress me out — it inspires me to achieve more.

Why transparency matters

I’m from Hungary but I rarely work with clients from my home country. Every client of mine is from the US or from the EU. My background is in digital marketing and business consulting, and I’ve been working remotely for more than 4 years now, mainly as a gun-for-hire freelancer. I decided to step up and create a full-fledged consulting business to help companies to build and manage their teams remotely and grow beyond their limits through a distributed business model. I created Anywhere Consulting, incorporated in Estonia.

Apart from minimalism, transparency was the second most important aspect for me. The reason is simple: let’s be honest, if you are a freelancer, your clients don’t really give a thing where your invoices come from unless they contain your banking details. But if you are running a business and acting as a company, you need trust. I do believe that transparency is the key driver in trust. I do think e-Residency provides a super transparent background for everyone. Everything is online and you can look up all the companies in English. For some, it’s not a big thing and they go for a company let’s say in Hong Kong. To me, it was one of the driving forces that moved me to open up shop in Estonia.

Long-term benefits: taxes!

If you are familiar with offshore companies, you may certainly know that everyone can pay 0% on their company earnings if they are doing it right. But these companies are a) not cheap to operate b) not minimalistic to manage, and c) certainly not transparent, hence the name offshore. Normally when you hear “pay low taxes” and “have a transparent business in the EU” — these two things are not correlated. I think the reason is very simple: most of the entrepreneurs think as a person when it comes to their business. They think about revenue as a salary or an expense or a dividend. However, I do think entrepreneurship ultimately means one thing: building your business — and not your personal wealth.

Estonia has a very generous offer for you. Please note I’m not an accountant though, plus your business taxes can be varied based on where do you actually do business. If your company’s permanent establishment is in Estonia, you owe taxes for Estonia. Anyway, in general here is the deal: you pay 0% on reinvested company profits. Meaning: you don’t pay a penny until you invest your company’s profits back into your business. To me, this is called the entrepreneurial spirit. It sounds to me as if the Estonian tax system was created by someone who’s actually running a business. There are other perks too: you pay 0% on salaries (if you are not an Estonian and of course, you have to pay your personal income taxes on this salary at your home country/country of residence). You also pay only 20% on distributed dividends, which is kinda OK, mainly for those who are paying zero after profits from dividends.

The 0% tax on reinvested company profits is a game-changer. Previously, this was an option only for those who run their business from a non-transparent environment. But this time, it is totally OK to reinvest those company profits into your business or even just open up an investment account for your business and reinvest & preserve your business capital anywhere.

Overall, this tax system works for those who are thinking long-term with their location independent business and want to build their company from the bottom to the higher ground.

Other minor perks: rule of law, national brand, full access

There are some other minor perks too, apart from minimalism, transparency and long-term benefits. First, the obvious, Estonia is the member of the EU and this guarantees the rule of law. Tallinn, its capital is also the center for NATO’s cybersecurity force, which at least to me, means data security. The e-Residency is at full speed and it has really amazing feedback from everyone. It is pretty cool to own a business like this so it adds up to the national brand value. I also have full access to everything: I own business accounts on all mayor fintech companies from Revolut to Transferwise, I could open brokerage business accounts and I have classic business banking accounts, too. Not a problem ever, actually it was much faster to open these services than it took me with my Hungarian company previously.

5-step setup

This is the most minimalist way to set up a business.

Apply for e-Residency here. As far as I know, until you are a human, you can apply. Yes, it’s fully online and it takes a couple of minutes only.

After approval, collect your e-Residency card personally from the closest Estonian embassy. In my case, this happened in Vienna, so you might need to travel a little too. I had to show my passport as proof of my identity, plus I had to give my fingerprints. Getting an appointment from the Estonian embassy, showing up and collecting the card took me 10 minutes, if I’m not counting the 2 hours of train-ride (I live in Budapest) + an afternoon of eating schnitzel in Vienna.

Get a service provider to help set up your company. You can do it yourself of course, but time is valuable — pay a small fee and use your energy on other productive tasks. If you’ve managed pick one, decide on the necessaries (e.g. name), pay the fees, wait for it max 1 day to process and voilà.

Now that your business is ready, set up a business bank account. You can choose Revolut, Holvi, Transferwise or literally any new fully online banking service providers — there’s no need to fly over to anywhere and set up a traditional business bank account.

There’s no 5th step actually… It’s that simple.

Time-wise, approval of your application is done within a month — to me, it took 2–3 weeks. I requested an appointment at the embassy on a Wednesday, I got one on the same week’s Friday. On the next week’s Monday, I had my company live and ready. I issued my first invoice a week after.

I would never have imagined that I will write an endorsement for a country’s government program. Seriously, everyone who knows me, know how much I truly hate paperwork and inefficient, slow and broken government programs. And here I’m, writing this article about e-Residency.

I truly think e-Residency is the future for everyone. All other governments should treat their countries’ business environment like this little European country does - 100% online, transparent and minimalist. After all, it’s a service for those who want to get things done and do business. Governments should not waste their entrepreneurs’ time and should help them whenever they can to provide services that help in building fruitful and growing businesses.

This post originally appeared on Estonia's E-Residency blog.

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anywhereconsulting-blog · 6 years

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How to write the best job application email for a remote job

Writing a job application email or cover letter is hard - it has to be detailed enough to give an impression but it also has to be prompt to get noticed. This is the ultimate guide on how to write the best.

As a freelancer, you face this challenge every day. No matter if it's just a gig or a full-time job - you need a cover letter or application email. Also, this is one of the most common questions I get from would-be-freelancers: do you use any templates when applying for a project? I do and I don't. Let me explain now. By the way, I believe these tips below can help for those who apply for traditional in-office jobs as well.

Understand the why

Before you even write a sentence - understand why you are doing this. What is the point of the cover letter? Simple: it's a pitch. It tells a super-short story on the applicant and why are the best fit for that exact position. The cover letter's point is to showcase what's not in your CV. If you truly understand this point, you won't repeat your resume and your titles. If recruiters would only hire based on skills and experience alone, they would not need cover letters or even interviews. They would just check your profile, your skills, your background and that's it.

Get noticed

This is your main goal. A cover letter's main goal to connect the decision maker (recruiter or employer) and the applicant. That connection is made through a simple acknowledgment: yes, this applicant is interesting enough for a 1st interview.

No matter how skilled you are, how smart you are, no matter if you would be truly the best applicant for that job if your application disappears in the spam folder or just simply gets ignored. So your number one drive should be to write something that is easy to get notified.

Be short and effective. Telling your life story might not be the best approach. If the employer receives more than a 100 applications (which is very common), trust me, they won't read all of them. Or they might read the email itself but delete it quickly or ignore it after a few seconds of reading. So make sure your email is short, easy-to-read and informative. Pro tip: use 3-5 bullet-points with 1 long sentence per points. One sentence behind the points and one after. That is the ideal length and structure for a cover letter.

Grab the attention. Make the subject of your email and your first sentence really unique and engaging. That will make the recipient to read the whole email through. Anything can go from silly personal stuff or praise of the employer, something that grabs attention plus showcases your style and that you know whom you are writing to and why are you applying for the job.

Show your skills, not just tell

Learn the difference between saying "I'm great with B2B marketing" and "In one of my recent job, I generated X leads for Y client with my B2B marketing." Simply asserting your skills isn't enough, show examples and give the words some meaning.

This is also true for your personal story. It is always better to say a personal touch on why you applied. It gives meaning to the whole application and shows some passion, which is always great. The "I saw your job post on X site, this is my application" only says you need a job. Any job.

...and the basics

I know this has been said many times by everyone literally but still, I see hundreds of applications missing the basic points... So here are the basic requirements:

Link your public profile or portfolio site - it saves time for the employer. If you are interesting enough, they will look you up anyway, but it's nice to save them a quick Google Search, especially if you have a very common name.

Don't attach a CV - it's 2018. If it's a must or someone seriously wants your CV, only attach a well-formatted, short PDF.

Keep the tone of voice as conversational and human as possible. You are not a robot.

Speaking of copy, never ever use a template. And please skip the formalities too, like "Dear Sir/Madam, please find my cover letter below..." - it just tells that you are highly unprofessional. A simple 'hi' will do it most of the time.

If it's a remote job, tell how long you've been working remotely. It is very important.

If you have a blog or any type of active social profile that you want to share, share it. It tells the employer that you are passionate about something. Your Instagram about your puppy-pictures might be too much, but you get the picture.

Close the letter professionally: suggest an opportunity for a talk or sum up your motivation for the application.

Too much jargon, bullshit, spelling mistakes, typos and grammar errors - instant delete, even if you are Elon Musk and Grant Cardone combined.

There you have it. If you have a routine and actively looking for a job, a project or a gig, it means you are writing 5-10 cover letters a day. The structure and some elements of the copy can be templated and saved to your notes and copied over - but still, every job is different so every cover letter should be different too.

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anywhereconsulting-blog · 6 years

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How to get more leads from LinkedIn with LeadCookie

Finding prospects on LinkedIn for your business is an obvious choice but the method might not be that obvious. Setting up a process is hard but luckily there are services which you can try and use to ignite your lead generation. Enter LeadCookie - a done-for-you lead generation business that helps other businesses to find leads from their fine-tuned LinkedIn prospecting process.

At this point, I have to state that I have zero affiliation with LeadCookie so it is not a sponsored or affiliate post. I used their service for one of our clients, KISSPatent. I was blown away how effective it was, though, I have to admit, it wasn't exactly rocket science. Before jumping into their process, let's answer the obvious question: why LinkedIn?

Why LinkedIn anyway?

According to LinkedIn - and their official Marketing Solutions Blog - there are some interesting stats to back them up. They have 500M users from which 61M are senior level influencers and 40M are decision-makers. From other sources, we also know that 260M of their users are logging in at least once a month and 40% of these users are daily users. Do the math, on average 15-20M decision-makers are logging in every day to the platform. In short: those who matter in business, use LinkedIn.

However, LinkedIn still has less noise than Facebook. Plus, if you send an InMail to someone, they get an email notification with your full InMail copy. Ok, this might have gone under the radar, so let me repeat it: you can send direct emails to anyone on LinkedIn. And we all know how powerful an email can be. Of course, there's the option to initiate a conversation with anyone directly on LinkedIn as well.

So all in all: you don't really need to build a list of prospects - they are already there on LinkedIn, you just need a solid process to approach them with your messages.

Enter LeadCookie...

Jake Jorgovan, the founder of LeadCookie has explained their process openly on his blog, you should read that. This post is a goldmine for marketers. LeadCookie has a solid process on how they approach prospects on LinkedIn. The process works with almost every business who want to sell services or products to other businesses. Of course, the more niche your business is, the better it will sell. LeadCookie uses a simple process, it is so simple that it is almost satirically funny - but it works.

They get access to your personal LinkedIn profile and polish it up. We can all agree that a better LinkedIn profile will build more trust - especially when it comes to cold prospects.

With your polished profile, they then jump on to LinkedIn Sales Navigator. They help you to find your target group and filter down the prospects for you. It will stay there as a saved search for later use.

To these targets, they send out 100s of connection requests. For this, they use a screening tool and a casual connection message.

Anyone who accepts the connection requests gets a drip campaign - which is predefined and prewritten. LeadCookie's team clears out these messages every day from your inbox. There are 3-4-5 steps - depending on your needs, goals and current setup - in this process and if someone replies more than just a "hi" qualifies as a lead.

Those who replied get transferred to you personally, from there, your sales funnel should work with them. LeadCookie is a lead generation business, not a sales business. Closing the leads is your job.

Here's the process explained in their video:

It is that simple, though Jake seriously gives away all the nitty-gritty details of this process on his blog. By the way, Jake operates a distributed business and he built up LeadCookie from his consulting business as a productized service from zero to $33k MRR - which is also detailed in his post here.

My results with LeadCookie

I have used them for one of our client, KISSPatent. Our client helps startups and innovators to monetize their ideas with intellectual property protection, like patents, trademarks, and copyrights. It is a semi-niche business with a well-rounded target group which you can filter down pretty easily on LinkedIn. Our client also focuses on key industry areas, like artificial intelligence and blockchain - which makes the prospect filtering process even more easier. We wrote the drip campaign together with LeadCookie and they handled the prospecting. We managed to breakeven LeadCookie's fee after the first weeks and generated 15-20X return on their service. KISSPatent's sales cycle is much longer than other companies' so I know that we will close even more sales later on, just from getting back to that engaged pool what LeadCookie has generated.

However, it wasn't as easy as it sounds. I'm not sure how it works for others but for us, it worked not just because LeadCookie has a simple and solid process for prospecting. Prospecting does not matter if...

you don't have a solid sales funnel ready. Generating leads is one thing, closing down sales is another.

you don't have already existing free added value content for your prospects. The added value content is used to nurture your leads or retain them, even if they can't be closed immediately.

So my advice: before you jump right into lead generation, with or without LeadCookie, first build up a collection of added value content and then create a solid sales process. These serve as a foundation for your lead generation. At KISSPatent, we built up a full resource center first with hundreds of articles, ebooks, and videos. Then we optimized our sales funnel and created all the necessary campaigns and processes. Only after these, we gave LeadCookie a try.

You can't just go fishing without a bait and a rod.

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anywhereconsulting-blog · 6 years

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Launching a remote business as a freelancer

This post is an excerpt from my book DISTRIBUTED.

Now, this is one of the most common challenges. Actually, this is the one I took myself years ago. How to become a distributed business, basically a company, after you had a successful freelancing career.

IT IS A TRANSITION

The most common misunderstanding is not viewing this as a transition and seeing it more as a milestone. It is really unique when you have a point, which you have reached and suddenly you are not a freelancer anymore but an owner of a company. It is not like that – it is smoother. I know many startup founders and solopreneurs who have companies – successful ones but at an early stage – but still do some freelancing. It keeps them fresh and it pays the bills. If you are a successful freelancer, why would you want to throw away the opportunity to have a decent income while you are building your distributed business?

However, you have to approach the distributed business model somewhat the same as a startup. You have to reclaim your own freelancing hours and substitute it with employees. If you are a freelance designer and bill out 8 hours per day and you want to build a distributed business for your own designer agency, hire your first employee on part-time and transfer half of your current workload there. Slow steps and once you are free from actual billable freelance hours of yours, you can start to act as a company and build it further.

THE HIRED GUN MISTAKE

Avoid the hired gun mistake though. From day one, start to build a distributed work culture and establish clear responsibilities and accountability within your team. Hiring other freelancers and your freelancer friends is risky, you can end up in tricky situations. Make sure you are building a business – and not a group of freelancers. I will talk about the hired gun mistake later on in this book.

ACT LIKE A COMPANY

Once you did the first small steps in hiring, try to change your contracts with clients. Transition away from per-hour work to monthly retainers and fixed priced projects. The secret is to offer more than ‘just’ your expertise. A freelancer is an expert whom can be hired to do a job. A business, however, is a business which you hire to deliver a service. Part of this service is the expertise, but it is only a piece of the mix.

There is one great relieving news: for a freelancer, no matter where you are based, distributed business is the way to go. You don’t really need to evaluate, pivot or test the approach, you just need to go with the flow and slowly building up the distributed business for yourself.

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anywhereconsulting-blog · 6 years

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Why do most remote businesses fail?

There’s a well-known research outcome floating around that says 90% of startup companies fail within their 3 years. This is true for remote businesses — however, a study has never been published yet. My bet, remote businesses fail within their first year or even faster. There are a couple of reasons for failure but only a handful of them that we can pick as truly ‘remote business fails’.

1. Fear of missing out

Remote business is not for everyone. Of course, for the right ones, a remote business can help to boost a company’s growth and reshape their business. But it can also ruin one. Just because there’s a buzzword, you shouldn’t jump on the wagon.

Before you commit yourself to run a remote business, ask yourself: is my business plan really built for remote business? Will a remote business serve my goals? Before stepping to the scene, you need to evaluate your own plan. Most businesses fail because they don’t have a strategy from day 0.

2. Geo-arbitrage is the goal and not a business asset

Being a remote company means you can operate from anywhere. But harnessing the geo-arbitrage shouldn’t be your end-goal. In other words, if you can’t be successful without the remote business model, you won’t succeed with it. This is true for most digital nomads as well, by the way, they buy their ticket to a nomad resort in SE Asia and start their freelancing work. But they are struggling and mostly blogging about how little budget they need to live there. That is not success — its failure.

First, try to be successful in the market in your home country. Then, you can move and harness the power of geo-arbitrage to boost yourself further. But relocation should not be your goal. Don’t just build a remote business because you want to save money.

3. The shiny object syndrome

Well-known problem — you are committed to building a remote business but you deal with anything that can fly. Losing your focus will cost your growth. The ones who make the most money are the ones who have a simple plan, a simple offering and a narrow focus on their product or service. You can’t be Elon Musk — I doubt that even he can be himself and successfully run at least 3 different companies. You also can’t be a generalist, you have to position yourself. There’s a great deal of noise on the market and only those can succeed who don’t fall into the shiny object syndrome and commit their business to solve or work on one key issue or problem. This is especially true when you have a remote business and while everything can be anywhere, your front shop is online — harder to maintain a personal network and connections with referrals for a generalist.

Of course, there are more reasons for failure, like hiring bad team members and working on products and services that don’t generate real value — but these 3 above are the ones where most of the remote businesses bleed out on the first place. If you fail on these ones, the lifespan of your business won’t be longer than months only.

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anywhereconsulting-blog · 6 years

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What is a Trusted e-Residency Company and how to get one

Anywhere Consulting OÜ is proudly incorporated in Estonia through their e-Residency program. As I'm getting questions on Estonian business management a lot lately, I decided to sum up my experiences in a blog post.

The most common questions I get:

1. Why open up a shop in Estonia? What are the benefits?

2. How to do it?

3. What are my experiences with running the business?

So I will focus on answering these questions, plus provide some personal background as well. This is by far not a paid endorsement of the program nor the service providers I mention.

WHY DO BUSINESS IN ESTONIA?

First off, here's my personal background, as every entrepreneur has its own unique setup which determines the decisions. Anywhere Consulting OÜ is fully owned by me and I'm the managing director as well so I'm responsible for everything within the company.

I'm a Hungarian national, so far a member of the EU, therefore tapping into the EU market wasn't really a bonus for me, I was already in. There are entrepreneurs who set up shops in Estonia in order to get into the EU with a fully EU-based company, which can be managed entirely online. For me, that wasn't the case.

In my home country, we have a very beneficial tax program in place for sole owners and SMEs. Though an Estonian company can be operated with on an almost 0% or a marginal amount of taxes, saving some money on taxes wouldn't be enough for me to justify moving my business to Estonia.

COSTS OF RUNNING A BUSINESS

The main reason to open a business in Estonia was the overall summary of costs to run the business. When it comes to running a business there are several costs which an entrepreneur need to think of.

TAX. However, I had a good setup before for tax optimization, Estonia has a lot to offer in this. Estonian companies pay 0% taxes on salaries for non-Estonian residents, which means if you are not living in Estonia and your company pays you a salary, you pay 0% on it. Of course, you still have to pay your personal income tax in your home country after that, but the company won't put any plus on it. The big deal, however, is not here, but you also pay 0% income tax on any reinvested or retained corporate profits and dividends. This means, if you have capital in your company and you reinvest it on let's say at the stock market as a business, you pay 0% on the capital gains. You actually won't pay any corporate income tax, until you take out the capital from the company. This allows you to reinvest your corporate profits in many different ways and get tax free profits. On the other hand, when you do get it out from your company as a dividend to your personal account, you pay 20% corporate tax + your personal income tax.

Overall, taxation in Estonia works for those who want to build a company, reinvest their profits and not live-off the company capital on salaries and stuff. Of course, claiming expenses is very straightforward and easy so you can deduct a lot, just by running your company.

MANAGEMENT. Here's where Estonia shines compared to offshore options like Hong Kong and others. Setting up the company is around 200 EUR which includes the state fee plus a setup cost for a 3rd party provider who actually does it for you. You can do it for yourself, but my time is worth more than a couple of EURs so I always use 3rd party service providers. You also need an official business address plus accounting. Taxes are running on e-tax so everything is submitted online. You can do the accounting as it is very, very, very simple, but again, my time is worth more and I use a service which costs me 300 EUR per year. That gives me an official address plus annual accounting, plus 0-24 legal advice.

I use Nordic Consult for everything, they are amazing, I would highly recommend them!

BANKING. Good news: you don't need to fly to Estonia and open up a business bank account. You can if you want to, Tallinn is an amazing little gem, is worth spending a few days there. As I said, I'm a Hungarian and I had Hungarian businesses. One of the main reasons why I switched to Estonia was the insane paperwork and the even more insane banking fees. However, as a Hungarian business, you can open an account at international online banks and e-money accounts, but just try to explain that in your papers for the Hungarian authorities... Thanks to the fact that Estonia is a fully digital country, they have no problem with businesses opening up business accounts at Revolut (affiliate link) or TransferWise (affiliate link). Through these online business accounts, I pay little or no fees on banking. You can open up a Revolut or TransferWise account online, with your Estonian business information you can verify your account online and that's it. Other options are Holvi, N26, Payoneer or you can just open a traditional bank account in your home country - it's not mandatory for Estonian businesses to have an Estonian banking account.

If you have missed our post on the Essential toolkit to manage your business online, read it here.

TIME. Overall, my time has been freed up. Seriously, I spend zero time on paperwork. Accounting is a) download the annual statement from my Revolut Business Account or TransferWise Borderless Account b) collect all my invoices which I always do anyway c) share the folder with my accountant d) sign the annual return online e) sleep tight. I'm not automating the invoices yet because I love to write invoices anyway but apart from this, I don't do any paperwork. If I have any questions on expense claiming, contracts, taxes, I write to Nordic Consult and they get back to me with a very useful answer within 24 hours. They are seriously amazing.

RULE OF LAW, TRANSPARENCY, NATIONAL BRAND

Apart from the actual costs, there are other benefits which are rather immaterial.

1. Estonia is a member of EU, NATO, and many others. NATO's cybersecurity HQ is in Tallinn, so I guess it makes Estonia's digital presence pretty secured. It's an established democracy, fully modern and trustworthy.

2. Doing business is fully transparent. Anyone can check other businesses online with the name of the business or the company ID in hand. I highly value transparency and I love countries who also value this. You can check our legal on this link, by the way. Transparency also raises trust between me and my clients. Estonian company is not a shady offshore business. To me, even a Hong Kong company is a bit controversial.

3. National brand is also important. It does matter if you issue an invoice from an Eastern European country OR from an offshore company. Estonia is a startup-focused country: they are popular with digital nomads, remote freelancers, and location independent businesses. The country is flexible, young, modern, and forward-thinking. Everything I can signup for.

HOW TO SETUP A BUSINESS IN ESTONIA?

Now this will be a shorter, straightforward part of this post. Here are the bullet-points:

Apply for e-Residency. You can apply here. Literally, anyone can apply, you just need to prove that you are who you are. Click on the link above and learn more about the process, which is surprisingly easy. The application is fully online.

Wait for the approval. This does take time as your application will go through the Estonian border police or whatever. For me, it took 1-2 weeks but for others, it might take 3-4 weeks or even more. Obviously, if you are from the EU already, this time can be shorter.

Once approval is done and you've got the email notification, go to the nearest Estonian embassy (in my case it was in Vienna) and bring your passport. Verify yourself with the passport and provide a fingerprint, plus collect your e-Residency ID Card. To me, the rendezvous took 5 minutes.

With the e-Residency ID Card, you can a) sign documents online on governmental portals b) access to e-services like Estonian banks and others. It works with every computer and it is fully encrypted and secured. It's not a new national ID, it's an ID which you can use to run your business officially.

Get a service provider (my recommendation is Nordic Consult) and provide the essentials: ID card number (don't worry, you still need PIN and password and the physical card to sign stuff), the name of your business and some minor others. You don't need to provide personal details at all now, as it is on your e-Residency Card anyway.

Pay the fees, state fee plus the fee for the service provider. In total it was around 500 EUR to me and I will pay like 2-300 EUR extra annually after the first year of accounting and legal address.

Wait, like a couple of hours, max 1 day.

Enjoy your new business. With the newly operational business, you can now open bank accounts online at Revolut or TransferWise or anywhere you prefer.

Here's the official walkthrough on how to start a company in Estonia.

FINAL THOUGHTS

E-Residency Business is amazing. The best part is the team who runs it. Imagine a world, where your government officials blog on Medium:

Who are Estonia's e-residents?

The next big industry to face digital disruption will be our nations

Not enough? Estonia is planning to launch it's own ESTCOIN and ICO, providing multiple variants of cryptocurrencies for entrepreneurs.

Overall I think e-Residency Business is the future. No businesses should be tied into one single nation's infrastructure and every business should freely pick the best online solutions for them. To me personally, establishing a business in Estonia was the best business decisions of my life so far and I'm proudly promoting this approach for everyone.

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