In this episode we were able to talk with Liam Martin, the Co-Founder of TimeDoctor, Staff.com and Running Remote. Liam is what we would consider a "remote work expert". He has spent many years building successful remote companies and talking to remote founders. We were able to really dive into the data and discuss the current state of remote work, what the future might hold, and much more.

Liam is the Co-Founder of Time Doctor, one of the leading time tracking software tools for remote teams. One of my favourite parts of talking to Liam was diving into the data he has aggregated with his work at Time Doctor and what this tells us about the broader picture of remote work. Things like: How many hours of productive work a day do we average? How many people are truly living the "digital nomad lifestyle"? What are the implications of mass data collection on remote workers?

We also discuss in depth the conference he co-founded -- "Running Remote," which has become the world's #1 conference for remote work professionals. You can find more info on Running Remote at runningremote.com and youtube.com/runningremote. Also, if you want to track your teams productivity (or your own), check out https://www.timedoctor.com/

Liam's book everyone should read: Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham

Matt H: Hello everyone! My name is Matt Hollingsworth and welcome to another episode of the Remote Show, where we discuss everything to do with remote work with the people who know it best. Thanks so much for listening. The Remote Show is brought you We Work Remotely, the largest community of remote workers in the world with over 220,000 unit users per month. We Work Remotely is the most effective way to hire. My guest on today's show is Liam Martin. Liam is the co-founder of Time Doctor, an Inc 5000 company, staff.com and the Running Remote Conference. Liam is an expert marketer and team builder and was an early adopter of remote work as an entrepreneur. He continues to manage a large remote team at Time Doctor, which become the world's leading time tracking software tool specifically for remote workers. Liam now also helps run the Running Remote Conference which has become the largest remote work specific conference in the world. There were 400 attendees, 95 partners and 28 speakers over two days. Running Remote 2019 is on June 29th and 30th in beautiful Bali, Indonesia. For more information, please go to runningremote.com. Liam, thanks so much for coming in the podcast. I really appreciate it.

Liam Martin: Thanks for having me Matt. I know that we've been trying to get this on the books for a long time and I'm really excited to be able to get into it with you.

Matt H: Yeah, me too. You're one of those people that I've been wanting to talk to for quite a while as well, so I'm glad we got this organized. Where I like to start typically and we can get into the nitty gritty of the remote world in a bit, but I like to give people some context. Can you talk a little bit about your entrepreneurial journey, how you got started with Time Doctor at the start and what were you doing before and how the idea came about?

Liam Martin: Sure. First off, Liam Martin, planet Earth more specifically in Ottawa, Canada on planet Earth. I know that you're from Vancouver, so it's probably a better Internet connection since we're both sharing a Canadian backbone. I've been working on Time Doctor with my co-founder, Rob, for approximately the last eight to nine years. That actually came out of my failure in graduate school if I'm going to be completely honest with you. I was getting educated in sociology at the University of Ottawa and McGill University. I was pursuing a PhD and I was basically going to teach my very first class in sociology. For anyone that's been in graduate school, you know that they kind of palm off the really crappy classes to everybody that is a graduate student. They pay them almost nothing, but it really gives you that experience to be able to get into academia. I did the first class. I believe it was the worst ever professor review in departmental history for the first year sociology class that I had. I had started off with about 300 students and ended up with a little bit less than 200. I think I got about a 3.1 out of 5 stars for my formalized review, which was horrific. I remember walking into my supervisor's office and I said, "I don't think I'm very good at this." He said, "No, you're not." I said, "Well, what should I do?" He said, "Well, you really got to get a lot better at this whole kind of teaching thing if you want to enter academia. Either start working on getting better at that or figure something else to do." About six weeks later, I threw one of the most horrible master's theses, [thesi 00:03:24] under his door and I was out into the real world. What that actually ended up teaching me was I very much enjoyed teaching, but I did not like lecturing. I think we could probably get into a completely separate podcast about the future of education and how remote workers actually impacting the future of education, but I believe that the ability for people to get educated today has never been easier and yet it's also so incredibly difficult to be able to get that information into your mind. I, in essence, started a remote touring company. I had graduate students of Ivy League schools that were teaching students their premed prerequisites, so Bio 1-2, Chem 1-2, Math 1-2, et cetera. That actually ended up going quite well until I ended up working myself into another problem, which was I would bill a student for, let's say, 20 hours of tutoring and the student would say, "Well, I didn't work with my tutor for 20 hours. I work with them for five hours or 10 hours." Then I'd have to go to this tutor and I would say, "Hey, did you work for Jimmy for 20 hours or 10 hours?" The tutor would of course say, "I work with him for 20 hours." Who is I suppose to believe, the tutor or the student? I'd end up having to refund the student for the unused hours and then I was paying the tutor for the full amount of hours that he or she build. This was basically destroying the business. That kind of came into Time Doctor and I saw Rob had ... He basically built a very early alpha of what Time Doctor would become and it was a tool that can enable you to be able to measure very precisely exactly how long someone is working for you when they work remotely. I looked at that. My other business, I had, had a bit of an acquisition at that point. I had the cash flow to be able to do it. I said, "Okay. Let's partner up." We both co-founded the company and then eight years flew by and here we are right now, talking to you.

Matt H: Wow. All right. Just at the time, was there any other service that was doing a similar thing as Time Doctor was? Or was Time Doctor one of the first one that you had seen up to that point?

Liam Martin: There were a lot of tools that tracked time, but you could say, yeah, I was tracking 12 hours and 22 seconds on task X as an example, but there was no way to actually quantify it in a more precise way and just sort of like a way that couldn't be spoofed. What we do is we measure websites, applications, mouse movements and keyboard movements while you're doing that task. Then it allows us to be able to know not just that you're working for 12 hours on task X, but you're working 12 hours and 12 minutes and 32 seconds on task X. Here's your entire break down what applications you used, what websites you went to, how you actually got that work done. Then that would be delivered to somebody, let's say, if you work in an agency as an example. The biggest application for us are agencies and large BPOs, which are business process outsourcing companies and they use that technology to be able to very clearly communicate exactly what work is being done and how efficiently it's being done. The next thing that we actually rolled into almost by accident is the rise of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Now, a lot of the things that we do are more predictive. We can detect when an employee is unhappy with their work, as an example and we can try to figure out how to actually solve that problem. Or we can predict when someone is going to quit their job before they actually quit their job. The HR can go in and try to help solve that problem earlier. This would not have been possible had we not had the largest second by second work database up until this point. That's, again, a separate conversation for another podcast, but definitely a piece of technology that when you build it initially, you don't really understand the implications that, that technology could have 5, 10 years later. It makes for a very exciting world because we have no idea what the application of this type of dataset or technology could produce in the next 5 to 10 years.

Matt H: Right. That might be a good segue actually, because one of the things that I want to bring up with you to do with Time Doctor was the concept of time tracking itself. Your response is typically from people that are asked to track their own time and just the concept itself. I don't know, I've heard that being described as maybe too Big Brother-ish and not a lot of employees like to think that their employers don't trust them to do their own work in their own capacity. Is that something that you find ... Obviously, you've thought about it a little bit, but what is your take on time tracking generally in remote teams?

Liam Martin: It's definitely a more complicated issue than first looked at. Number one, we really see Time Doctor as one of the major leverage points for expanding remote work. A lot of us that are in the remote workspace and are true believers, we run remote-first teams as an example. If you were to take the average person that runs a remote-first team, they're usually tech-minded, they run a tech startup or they run a SaaS business or something like that. They're usually highly educated. They're probably in the top 1% percentile of the global economy. Their lives were pretty great. They're what I call MacBook Pro remote workers. When you actually look at the real percentage of remote workers around the world, those people are mostly hired out of Southeast Asia. What my definition of a remote worker is someone that works from home for a business that is located somewhere else. Most of those people are usually working in the developing world. They don't have access to first world passports as an example, so they could not become a digital nomad or anything else that we have the advantages of becoming the first world. When I look at something like Time Doctor, when I walk into a Fortune 500 company, the top question that I get asked for a Fortune 500 that's going remote or wants to go remote is, "How do I know what they're doing?" That is the first, second, third, fourth and fifth top priority for anyone that it's a large scale organization that's, let's say, over 10,000 people. That's the only thing they're concerned about. The company culture questions come up. None of the collaboration project management systems come up. Well, we already have these systems in place. We have our processes solid. How do we know that they're actually doing what they're supposed to do be doing when they get into a remote team? We solve that problem perfectly. We deploy that tool. We allow them to be able to say, "We've solved that issue for you." Then that person can start working remotely. We have, in essence, removed that no from them and we kind of call it the Trojan horse of remote work. You can get something that the employer wants. You're absolutely right. There are a lot of employees that don't like tracking their own time. We could kind of break that down in a deeper way, but usually about 95% of workers don't necessarily have a problem with it. About 5% of workers do and we spend a lot of time trying to communicate to them exactly how our software works. It's never subversive. As an example, it's something that you actively must use and we tell you, you actively turn it on and you actively turn it off. When it's turned off, no monitoring occurs, whatsoever. If you want to use it on your own computer, you absolutely can and we're never measuring any of that data. Then there's a percentage inside of that 5%. Once we go past that education, that just doesn't want to use it because they know that they're really not giving that much into the organization. I kind of call them like the office clowns. The people that are very charismatic and are getting away with not really doing their work. Our software very directly shines a light on them because we can identify exactly how productive they are and what they're trying to do. If you're looking at average tech startup of like five guys from New York, they shouldn't be using Time Doctor. If you're looking at hiring a large scale design firm where you could hire designers from all over planet Earth and you could facilitate that ... I'm thinking of someone I met just yesterday called Design Pickle and they have about 500 remote design reps all over the world. They went from zero two years ago to 500 remote design reps. Most of these people are hired from the developing world. A lot of them have gone from $2 to $3 a day to making $3000 a month. I'm very passionate about focusing in on those people and seeing how I can turn those 500 people into 50,000 people, because that's the real engine that ends up getting a lot more workers globally into remote work and getting the job opportunities that they wouldn't have had otherwise.

Matt H: Interesting. The other thing that I was thinking about too when I was looking at Time Doctor ... I mean that makes a lot of sense. I think that there's a lot to be said for just the accessibility piece in general that you're allowing a lot of workers that wouldn't have otherwise been able to do what they're doing and companies that wouldn't have normally gone remote in the first place. Taken away one of the hurdles at least. Is there any other hurdle that you see amongst the major companies to do with remote work or is it strictly the time tracking component that they're concerned about? Is there anything else that you see regularly?

Liam Martin: It's very interesting because I don't think we mentioned this as well. The conference that we run called Running Remote is just a conference specifically built for building and scaling remote teams. We end up getting delegations from ... I'll keep calling them Fortune 500, but large organizations with 10,000, 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 people. They come to us and they say, "Our board has said ..." This is mostly from their HR staff. "Our board has said that 10% of our company needs to be remote by 2020 and we have no idea what to do. The reason why we came to this conference is because there was no other place for this type of information except for here, so please tell me what the heck to do." When I have conversations with those people, which are always very interesting, the monitoring component comes up, what are they doing. We solve that for them. Communication is probably the next largest one that I generally hear. How are we suppose to communicate efficiently? Then the third one, which a lot of tech startups don't really touch on all that much is the legal ramifications. They're very concerned about, let's say, if you end up having all of your people work remotely. If they work in the same location and they move to another state or province, what are the ramifications of that. A recent case that I had a client deal with was we had someone that was working in the province of Alberta and then they moved to the province of British Columbia. The initial contract was stated that they could work remotely, but not where they could travel. This actually came up to the court system and the employee won because the employer wanted them to stay in the State of Alberta and the employee moved to British Columbia. I think there were also some tax implications as well, because I think they were being taxed under the Alberta ... This is Canadian, for anyone that doesn't understand the difference. These are provinces and there's different payroll tax systems depended upon the provinces. The corporation ended up having to pay those extra payroll taxes. I think there were some other damages as well. These are the things that these large companies are looking for because once you have thousands and thousands of people, it becomes a big issue. I remember last year, GitHub was speaking at our event and we had their director of remote, I suppose you could say, because GitHub is a remote-first company. She was telling me about how they had a serious problem when the hurricane hit in ... I can't remember the protectorate that's in the United States that got hit with the massive hurricane about a year and a half ago. Probably people would be listening now and telling me what it is mentally, but unfortunately, I can't get it through. Anyways, there were 12 developers there in that location and they had to actually end up flying them out at a huge expense to GitHub because they didn't know that they were actually located there. Now, GitHub is actually building a piece of software to be able to know where all of their team members are all the time so that they can make sure that if there's a hurricane, as an example, that's going to hit a particular island, they can tell those people to get out and pay a regular fair ticket as opposed to flying in a private jet. These are the types of implications that I think we need to deal with as large scale remote kind of really spins up. It's an exciting time for sure, but it's definitely not the same questions that I would get from, let's say, an agency of 10 remote team members.

Matt H: Yeah, really interesting. One of the other things we talked about previously before the podcast was the future of remote work in general and how the shift from the idea of digital nomads into what you're describing, which is the larger organizations and the realities of remote work to those large organizations. Which actually affect more people than the digital nomad kind of concept and idea and a phenomenon that I think a lot of people romanticize a little bit and don't often have a lot of experience with. Because the idea of working as a digital nomad is a really exciting one to a lot of people, but I think that's not the majority of people that are working remotely. I guess my question to you is what is the future of remote work look like? What would you consider to be the best case scenario in five years from now as this remote work phenomenon continues to evolve? In your specific context of Running Remote and Time Doctor, but just generally speaking, what would be a good outcome for this phenomenon and what would you think would be a positive five year sort of long-term outcome for the remote work concept?

Liam Martin: Boy, that's a really hard one, Matt. I was hoping that you'd be able to help me out with that one to be honest with you. I think there are various different definitions of the future. I'm always in the mindset that I don't know what's going to happen two quarters from now. I'm always thinking one quarter ahead. That's where I'm focusing my energy. This next quarter, it's making sure that the next iteration of Running Remote goes well and that the SaaS companies that we run are running reliably and everyone in the company is happy. If you look at the data over the last three years, full-time remote workers in the United States have gone from 1% to 3% to 5%. If you look at people that work remotely some of the time in the United States, it's 77% as of last year. That's a pretty big number. If you look at other estimates, some people ... There was a large study just recently and I can't remember the name of it off the top of my head. They predicted that 50% of workers in the United States that could work remotely will by 2027. Now, that's kind of the rosy version. If that is true, we are going to see a shift in labor that we have not seen since the industrial revolution or maybe even more specifically since the rise of the Internet. I think that we're going to see a massive shift in the way that everyone works. People will not go to offices anymore. Coworking spaces will exist and they will be 10 times more popular than Starbucks’. You'll see that even the usage of cars will go down significantly. I think single university towns in the United States in North America, the cost of real estate in those places will double because people will realize those are probably some of the most beautiful places to live on planet Earth. Since you don't need to actually be in downtown Toronto, as an example, which is where I was yesterday, which is an exciting place, but kind of a stressful expensive place. I'd much rather be in a town of 150,000 people with a top 100 university as an example. All of those implications are going to be huge if it moves forward. Now, do I believe that? No, I don't believe that. I really want that to be true. I think that, that would actually be a much better and happier world. I think that there are a lot of barriers that we need to overcome before that occurs. That's part of the reason why we built Running Remote is we wanted to be able to create a collaboration space to be able to address all of these large scale socioeconomic issues. At this point, I see a lot of failure points inside of that system. I also don't necessarily see the rise of digital nomadism moving any closer than it is right now. I know that we had spoken about this before, Matt, but when I say this, I'm not trying to belittle the digital nomad community at all. I think that they're actually some fantastic people inside of that community. I think it's very insular and I think there are a lot of people that make their living as digital nomads telling other people about being digital nomads. I think that, that's a bad feedback loop that I think we need to get rid of, which is why we specifically, at our conference, have not discussed any of those issues because it's a very touchy subject and we want to really talk about building the remote work culture as opposed to necessarily the digital nomad culture. With that said, I'm a digital nomad. Technically, I suppose you could say about three to six months out of the year. We do not spend the winters in Canada. We travel to a warm country and it's amazing. I think anyone that's able to get access to those types of situations, it's amazing, but the reality is you need a lot of disposable income. You need to be, in essence, make more than, I would say, $36,000 per year, which is putting you in the global 1% of earners on planet Earth. You need a first world passport and there's a bunch of logistics that you need to be able to solve. You need a company that's actually going to be remote-first friendly and be able to help you. We had pulled our clients and our speakers last year at Running Remote. We found that approximately 5% of remote-first companies hire digital nomads, which blew me away. I thought it was going to be 25% to 50%, but it ended up being about 5%. The reasoning was that they don't have as much of a throughput than remote workers that are just sitting in one particular place and are focused but are just working from home or working from coworking spaces. I would love it to be 50% of people in the United States working remote by 2027, but I just see a lot more barriers that we have to overcome before we get to that point.

Matt H: Yeah, totally. I also think too with the idea of a digital nomad ... Again, I'm not saying this from a perspective of somebody that wants to degrade the value of travel and work. I think that there's a lot to be said, a positive outcome there and I think it's a great experience for people that can manage it. Like you said, the reality is that there are very few people that can manage what that will actually look like in practice. I consider myself someone who likes and really values travel and yet when I'm working, I need some stability in the sense of I need to have a regular routine and I just need to be able to focus in one place. I think until you get into what a digital nomad actually does and how they live, I think that, that's something that people forget. It is very hard, productive long-term in an environment where you're moving all the time. To answer my own question too, I agree with you in the sense that remote work is going to continue to evolve and we aren't going to be, in my opinion, in a position where like the statistics that you just told me. There's going to be a lot of ups and downs and I think that there's going to be a point where just because the infrastructure for having larger teams remote isn't there yet, there's going to be a lot of issues and problems that arise from people that are just going remote right away with these larger companies when they don't really understand the nuance of what that actually means. Some things will get worse before they get better and I think it will take a lot of time before the infrastructure allows for a lot of these companies to be either partly remote or fully remote. I don't have that outlook on remote work in the next 5 to 10 years, but it's still an exciting position to be in. I wanted to succeed and I don't want to see it fail, but I think some things about remote work will fail and I guess we will see what happens, but I don't have a crystal ball either and I was hoping that you did, but ...

Liam Martin: I take a lot of my pointers from Ken Weary who's the VP of operations at Hotjar. He's speaking this year at Running Remote and he is a digital nomad. He's been a digital nomad in the VP of operations for Hotjar the past three years. Hotjar is basically a website analytics company and they're quite successful. I believe they've gone from zero to eight figures in under four years or under three years. Entirely remote first. Ken will say this just as much as anyone else, which is digital nomads that are moving every few weeks, they basically cannot work. I know for me, what we do is we move to one location for three months. In the winter, we choose a single location, Costa Rica. We did Manuel Antonio which was beautiful. Playa del Carmen in Mexico was very nice. Ubud in Bali is very nice. Chiang Mai is another real big hot spot. Barcelona is another one. We would choose one of those locations and then we set up and we get a three month long-term rental, which you can usually negotiate quite easily and we get really good Internet. If we have below 5mbps Internet, I actually have to submit a speed test to recruit and HR. If I basically can't hit that level of Internet, I am permanently on vacation until I can find Internet that meets those connection requirements, even me. It was a problem for me because I spent a month in Cairo a few months ago for a separate project and I was on vacation about two out of those four weeks, which sucked up all my vacation time, because I just couldn't find a reliable enough connection. Moving to one location, spending an extended amount of time, that could be the future of remote work. I could see that as a possibility for people to be productive, but even when we analyze our own data of people who are digital nomads that are inside of our network on Time Doctor, we see a significant reduction in overall productivity versus people that are not. We haven't formalized this data. This is just us kind of looking at, let's say, 20 or 30 people that I know and then comparing them to a larger group that they've given us permission to have access to their data. It's definitely something that we need to kind of look at and I think that the people that are significantly investing in digital nomadism as the future may be pretty unhappy about where they see that ending up. I actually believe and we talked about this before, I think this is the teach English as a second language evolution. 20 years ago, you couldn't be a digital nomad, but you could do TESL. Now, I don't know what the numbers are on TESL, but I don't think there were many people that teach English as a second language anymore that are coming from first world countries to the developing world because it's actually a lot more profitable to become a digital nomad and easier. It just gives you more freedom. That capacity I don't think will massively expand in a bigger way. I mean it might double or it might triple, but it's not going to 10X and I don't think it's going to 100X, which is unfortunate.

Matt H: Yeah. Well, I think it's a niche market and I don't think people can really appreciate that as much, but you need to have a lot of the boxes checked off like you said to be able to do that sort of thing. I just don't think that ... Yeah, like you said, I don't think the market is big enough that can support that much more growth in that sort of segment. Not only just of the population, but just the people that have the capacity to live that digital nomad life. This isn't to say that it's a bad thing to do. If you can do that, then by all means, do it.

Liam Martin: I love being able to travel in the winter and get away from the horrific cold up here in Northern Canada. It's amazing, but I do take a hit on that from a productivity perspective. Probably the first week that I have moved when I go to a new location, it's an essence of write off in terms of me being able to actually work productively. Then when I moved back to Canada, probably that next two to three day period is a write off as well. That's pretty significant when you think about maybe a week and a half to two weeks out of my work here is a write off and I'm just moving once. Imagine moving 10 times. Maybe I'm just not the person that's figured it out and there might be digital nomads that can actually work a lot more productively in that context, but it's certainly not me.

Matt H: Yeah. Well, hopefully those people will listen to this and then share their thoughts because I haven't figured it out either.

Liam Martin: Hey, I really hope that you guys don't hate us if you're listening right now. You're a hardcore digital nomad because I love you guys. I'm totally on board with where you're at right now. I'm just trying to figure out what are the actual, real large scale ways to expand that community and looking at it with their critical eye. Sometimes, you just look at it with a little bit of a negative perspective.

Matt H: Yeah, for sure. One of the things that you mentioned there too that I'd like to know more about. You mentioned that there's a requirement for your speed of Internet for when you go to a new location and even for yourself. I'm curious to know if just within your company, is there any other prerequisite or any other things that you have to check off when you get to a new location that's like structural within the business that you force everybody to do or is that just sort of a one-off?

Liam Martin: Internet is the biggest thing. Everyone needs to be able to make sure that they have proper equipment. We've had situations where my MacBook Pro was just fried and then I would need to figure out how to solve that in, let's say, less than 48 hours. It actually doesn't really matter to us. We say if you don't have the right tools to work remotely, you're on vacation, you're sucking up your vacation time until you figure out a solution. It really does self-motivate people to be able to figure out how to actually solve those issues. I would say, yeah, it's Internet. Just generally being in a safe environment, no loud sounds or anything like that around you, those types of things. These are all things that we just actually do that when people do an initial hiring and then it's just one of those assumptions that we have when people are traveling. The only thing that we do formally is the Internet to be able to make sure that everyone is doing that. Oh, and also too, people need to make it for their meetings. We have weekly stand-ups with everybody and those meetings are set in stone. Meaning if you're a team of seven and one of you has decided to travel from Canada to Egypt, well, you're going to have to change your schedule to be able to meet at those particular times. That's the only other thing that we would have because that's too disruptive to be able to have six people to change their meeting time. It's much less disruptive for one person to be able to meet at 2:00 in the morning as an example.

Matt H: Right. I want to talk about Running Remote in a bit, but one of the questions I had for you just about Time Doctor specifically. Have you found that there's been uptick at all in the number of individuals that are going to your platform as a form of sort of self-check I guess or making sure that they are doing the best that they can? Having that be sort of the motivation and rather than having the large organization's force or strongly encourage that sort of time tracking mechanism. Is that sort of a piece of the business that you've seen a larger increase in? At least for me, that's a big piece of how I try to stay as productive as I possibly can. I use a tool as well and it's not Time Doctor unfortunately, but it's just a simple time tracking tool that I use as a check on myself to make sure that I'm doing what I should be doing. Is that a piece that you see an increase in?

Liam Martin: Yeah, absolutely. We've always had a really active community that has used the tool for themselves individually. They're very passionate group of people. They are probably the most responsive people when we look for feedback on new features. However, if there are about 3.2% of revenue ... When we initially thought about building the tool, we built it specifically for that purpose. I am not a very productive person at all. If anything, I get very easily distracted by a lot of different variables. I won't go into that in a deeper way, but I get distracted very easily. The tool, I use it to be able to make sure that if I go to Facebook.com right now, while I have the task podcast initiated, it will tell me, "Are you really working on podcast?" Well, no, I'm not. I'm getting distracted. I need to get back into focus. We've always built it with that context in mind and realizing where we are now versus what the initial thought was for the tool, which was productivity. Man, we would have not had a business. We would have had an okay lifestyle business. We could have hired a small team of, let's say, maybe two to three people and it would have existed and it would have been okay, but it would not have been what we have now, which is a business of 100 people in 32 different countries. Because the real application was for team productivity and this application of I want to take my team remote. How do I know what they're doing? We have that solution for you.

Matt H: That's interesting. It's also something that I think is important for people who are listening to be honest with yourself as you just were about how productive are you really. Maybe if your company that you work for doesn't already require you to track your own time. If you haven't done that already, it might be a good practice or experiment to do with yourself, because you might be surprised and how weird would that to you are.

Liam Martin: I had a couple friends of mine that were posting on Facebook in an entrepreneurial group talking about their average workweek. One guy said 62 hours, another guy said, "Oh, I work like 70 hours a week and all this kind of stuff." I said, "Oh, no problem. Let's give everybody a one month free trial of Time Doctor. I'll personally analyze all your data for you." They're about a week into it and they've posted back their data and their assessment of how long they thought they were working versus how much time they actually are spending is about 50% lower than what they thought. This is something that I find ... We just did a post recently on average workweeks by country around the planet and the OECD, which gets a lot of the work data that we use as kind of the standard of what the workweek looks like in the United States I believe, it was a 46 hour workweek. Maybe 54. I can't remember. Anyways, our data shows it's about 26 hours and 32 minutes of actual work on computer. We recognized that we're not expanding out into meetings and all these other variables, but our argument is that the 40 hour workweek doesn't really exist. Most people only spend about three to four hours of productive time per day. We've seen this and we've proven this quantitatively that you should just go home. I think that there's only so many hours of focus per day that you can apply realistically to something outside of mindlessly answering emails as an example. Where you're maybe only using 20% of your brain capacity anyways. What you should do is have four hours of focus work time per day and then do other activities like I would much rather have my team members go to the gym for an hour and a half as opposed to spend that extra hour and a half kind of working but not really super productive. Because we see those advantages, to the point in which we actually have implemented kind of a most hour bonuses if people do things like they get over 15,000 steps on a Fitbit. They could buy that and they could prove to us, yeah, getting this type of exercise, well you don't have to work as much because we know that your output is going to be higher if you get that type of physical exercise. We're trying to experiment with these types of feedback loops because we have such an interesting advantage where we have this huge quantitative dataset to be able to work on. But I think that when I go to Fortune 500 about this, people just don't believe me. Even though I have the data and I can show it to them, they still have this industrial revolution-esque type of mindset of 9:00 to 5:00 every day regardless of your personality type, which just doesn't work and we've proven it doesn't work.

Matt H: Yeah. Going on that data thread there, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts about what you think is going to be the biggest challenge moving forward as ... I think remote work, it's more popular. People and companies are going to rely more heavily on that data that you're talking about and making decisions on things like if you get your steps in or whatever, you get more time off or something like that. Again, I can't pull my finger on exactly what it is about that, but it's a little strange to me that, that would be a really big important aspect of my work life is all of these different data points that are being collected on me and that would really dictate how I spend my time and what was important to me. I'd be curious to hear what you feel would be the biggest backlash or what the biggest hurdle that you'd have to get over before those things become mainstream. Is it just the perception? Maybe it's enough of a hurdle that it just won't be wildly adopted, but I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on that.

Liam Martin: I think once it becomes an opt-out versus an opt-in, we're probably going to see that shift. Right now, most of these things are opt-in, meaning we don't tell anybody. No one has to have a Fitbit if they want to, but we just thought to ourselves. We know that physical exercise increases overall productivity. You've seen it. What's the best way for us to be able to create that type of result in our own team? Well, the only quantitative measure that we have is some type of tool that can actually collect that data like a Fitbit. We're kind of like a Fitbit for work. We then can connect those two and then we can see direct correlations as to whether or not that occurs. We're trying to provide people some type of positive feedback to loop to say, "If you get those 15,000 steps in, you can get an extra hour and a half off." Basically, we're saying, "Go to the gym for an hour and a half instead of work, because we think it's a better application of your time." I think it really depends on how you're communicating it. I remember there was something that popped up in the news recently where there were insurance companies that were deploying Fitbits on people and they would get a lower insurance rate if they had more than 10,000 steps or something like this if they were active. It makes me feel weird too and it's interesting because I don't know where it comes from. Because when I think about it logically, it's only helpful when I think to myself, "I want everyone in the company to be able to get 90 minutes of physical activity per day and I'm willing to pay you to get that type of physical activity." That seems pretty good on the surface, but then the only way that I can really measure that is through something like a Fitbit, which kind of seems weird. I'm kind of in the same place as you and we're trying to experiment with this and see how we can get that advantage without it feeling weird or Big Brother-ish. For us, we're just experimenting with all those types of things. We actually are doing ... I think we completed an integration with Fitbit, so we'll actually be able to plug that data directly into Time Doctor and then see very clearly whether or not there's an overall boost in the amount of output that's produced. We're also experimenting with the general mindset of a worker. To be able to figure out how happy they are and then see what the feedback loop is connected to that and we're trying to layer in physical exercise as another variable that impacts that. I actually see the end point of this being a piece of software. Not saying it would be Time Doctor or Fitbit or anything, but it would be a combination. It's probably going to come from something like Google Health as an example that would be able to sit down and tell you everything that you can do to become the best you that you could possibly be. I don't think that will seem weird in the future. I think there may be a moment ... I did a video on our YouTube channel about a friend of mine that recently committed suicide. He was a tech entrepreneur and I recognized that there were these stressors that were happening in his life. When I looked back at the data, I knew that all of those pieces were there. I knew that an AI could run sentiment analysis on his social media and could probably say that this person is going to hurt himself in the next six months and that he needs some help. Everyone knew it. All the humans that we're looking at him knew it and he ended up losing his life from mental illness. How can we stop this? I think there's a huge application for these types of technologies. They just have to be used responsibility. I think that's the biggest thing, because there could be an absolute reverse where we could recognize ... You can treat this worker very badly and they will not quit. Or this worker will not ask for a raise. That's also possible to this type of technology. Just thinking that in my head and that's actually kind of terrifying. That could absolutely be possible and I'm sure that we will not be building that tool, but I'm sure that tool will be built in the future. It's just managing all of those possibilities and hoping that we end up with the best version of the future that we possibly can have.

Matt H: Yeah, I know. For those who think that we've gone on a bit of a tangent here, I think it's relevant and it's going to become more relevant as remote work becomes more important. Companies are just going to be relying on this data and they are going to use it in a way that hopefully benefits everybody, but again, depending on who aggregates this data and how it's being used, it's a really important conversation to have. There's a lot of applications that are going to be really positive. Like you said, it's going to be hopefully allowing people to e become more active. If it means that they spent four hours at their desk doing productive work and spend the rest of the time with their families. That's a positive outcome. Again, there's this sense and this feeling that things are happening quite quickly and the aggregation of the data in the wrong hands can be catastrophic in some cases. Yeah, it's an interesting question. Hopefully, people are having these conversations around the world and are thinking about these sort of things. I'm not sure. I hope, but I guess we'll see and I think that as long as these data points and these applications are built in a way that is communicated and is responsible, that's the key. Yeah, it's really interesting.

Liam Martin: I can give you another example that we have with our sales team which was we recently changed about a year ago the measure of the sales team. It used to be sales and now we switched to dollars per hour of work. At the end of a month, and I can think of a few people that they wouldn't necessarily want me to kind of put out their dirty laundry for everyone else, but we've spoken about this and I think it's a good example. We had someone who worked much longer than everyone else. Let's say we had one person that worked 140 hours during a month and then we have someone that worked 240 hours during that month. The 240 hour person, maybe they did $10,000 in sales and the 140 hour person maybe did $9000 in sales. If you were to just look at it, it is an absolute measure. The person that did 10,000 in a month is the top sales person but we don't look at it that way. We divide the hours worked by the amount of revenue that you were able to generate. That's our definition of productivity, because we think that, that's a better feedback loop. It allows you to focus on being more productive in how you close deals as opposed to just being the person that works the hardest, because we don't believe that makes you happier. I don't know if you've heard the Japanese word karōshi before or karōshi.

Matt H: No, I haven't.

Liam Martin: Okay. Basically, karōshi is death by overwork. It's a Japanese word and it is the process by which people currently in Japan, and it's a huge sociological issue right now. They are dying in droves. I believe in the late 90s, there were over 2000 deaths from karōshi. People that were working 159 hours of overtime in a month. A 31 year old dies of brain aneurysm and just drops dead. This is something that is serious. This is something that culture reinforces this mindset of karōshi culture. Meaning you have to work the hardest. Actually, if we look at the data of Japan, Japanese people have one of the lowest, if not the lowest GDP output per hour of labor on planet Earth, but they just work the hardest. They're actually an incredibly productive country when you look at the hardcore numbers, but 31 year olds are dying of strokes, left, right and center. Which will do you want? I definitely do not want to live in a world of karōshi. I can tell you that right now and I do not think it's a positive environment that I would want any of my staff to be working in either.

Matt H: Yeah. I also think too that there's definitely been a movement, from what I've seen. Maybe it's just the circles that I see and I'm a part of, but there is a move away from that within the startup scene in this sort of hardcore hustle culture that is the tech startup world. I think that's generally the consensus is that, that is not a long term productive strategy for building a business. Maybe I'll ask this question to you, but have you seen that as sort of a consistent phenomenon over the past year or two years that companies are trying to move away from them?

Liam Martin: Are we going to basically saying Gary Vaynerchuking yourself into situations? Is that what we're talking about right now?

Matt H: I'm not going to name anything.

Liam Martin: Yeah. I got to think it's that guy. I think that you basically can't change how smart you are. Maybe if you sit down and you are educating yourself every single day, you're putting four hours in a day and learning everything you possibly can about building a business, maybe you'll be able to increase your overall critical thinking skills by 5%, 10%. I don't know, I'm not in the education field, but you can always tell people to work harder. That will at least make them feel like they're moving in the right direction. I don't think that working hard is bad. I think that working hard is actually quite good, but I do believe that there are a lot of people that choose a direction to work in and they may be working in the opposite direction of where they need to go. As an example, I don't want to harken back to sales, but we are primarily a self-serve SaaS business at Time Doctor. Our sales department is quite small because a very small percentage of our customers would require salesperson to be able to close the deal. If we started working on all these deals where we were working with, let's say, we're closing up $20, $30, $40 a month deal, we'd be out of business pretty quickly. There are certain people in the company that believe that, that's the way that we should do things. I realized very quickly that the numbers just didn't work, but people then have this perspective of, "Oh, I'm overwhelmed. There's 20,000 leads in my funnel. I've got to work all these leads and make it work and all this kind of stuff." I remember going back to them and I said, "There aren't 20,000 leads. There are 17 leads that you should actually be working on. All these other ones, you shouldn't be touching them. Work smart. Look at how we generate income. Focus on the companies that are only generating these requirements, these flags in terms of working and you actually have a really relaxed job. You might only have to do one meeting a day in your job as opposed to doing 12." Lo and behold, we actually produced the same results. If not, we actually produced a higher result. That's the type of thing that I find quite problematic. You need to really use critical thinking to understand which direction you're going to go in. If you can combine that with hard work, you're unstoppable. I have a friend of mine that has built multiple companies to eight figures and beyond in the SaaS space. Has sold companies for very high amounts of money and he has this perspective of I'm just going to work. Even if I'm working on something that has nothing to do with moving me forward, at least I'm not moving back. I think that, that's another interesting perspective. For me, I think about a lot of things. I just sit down and kind of think for an hour before really making a move on something because that allows me to jump over a lot of missteps that I would have otherwise taken.

Matt H: That's a good segue actually. This is a more sort of generic remote work question, but I like to ask everybody. What does your daily routine look like? What are the consistent things that stay there every day and what do you find to be the most important part of your daily routine and how has that evolved?

Liam Martin: For me, I wake up in the morning probably around 9:00-ish. I either go to the small office that I do have. That's about a five minute walk from my house where I work from home, dependent upon how I feel. Sometimes I go to a coffee shop even if I need to be around people. I usually have a list of the biggest things that I needed to do the day before and that's actually in my Time Doctor. I have a category in my Time Doctor task list which is things to do today and I go through that list that also was pushed into my calendar. I use my calendar a lot as my to-do list because there's been a recent hack in the last couple years, but I realized that I need to also figure out how long a task takes. Not just that I need to do that task, so then I can figure out exactly what I need to do throughout that day and I can actually get it done. No email before noon. No dashboard checking before noon. That was an addition that I had for a while, which was checking revenue dashboards, customer support dashboards, traffic dashboards. I've recently gotten addicted to looking how many tickets that we're selling for the Running Remote Conference. I've tried to kick that out because these are all things that really distract you from what you really need to do, which is identifying one big win that you can get accomplished at the beginning of the day. As long as I'm able to do that, pretty much everything else sort of ends up being the cherry on top after that major task is completed.

Matt H: Was that one big win something that you sort of had to iterate on or is that something you've been doing for a number of years?

Liam Martin: Yeah, definitely something that has been ... It's a constant challenge for me. As I said before, I'm not a very productive person, so I've come to this begrudgingly. There are a lot of times I've almost kind of feel like an alcoholic or I'm addicted to something because I love to just get into that flow of checking email in the morning. When you look at it, it's one of the most useless activities that you could possibly do particularly. I talk about $10 tasks versus $100 versus $1000 tasks. It depends on where you are in your particular business or what you're doing with your life, but I'm trying to remove all $10 tasks from my life. Because if I can only focus on $100 or $1000 tasks. Instead of putting together the website for Running Remote as an example, I can delegate that to somebody else and then focus on making sure that these speakers are well taken care of as an example. That's more of $100 to $1000 tasks versus the actual design of the website, which I would consider a $10 task. Maybe not a $10 task in reality actually. That's probably a bad example, but scheduling podcasts would be a $10 task. Whereas basically being on the podcast is $100 task. Focus on the $100 task and forget about the $10 ones. Get other people to delegate those.

Matt H: Interesting. I meant to get to this earlier and it's important for us to get to before we wrap up here. I want to talk about Running Remote. Maybe we'll skip the history of it and get right into sort of what the objectives are and who is it for. Then we could get into sort of how you get involved. Yeah, tell me a little bit about what the objective of Running Remote is. We talked a little bit about this, but in your own words if you could.

Liam Martin: Sure. We had, three years ago now, we were doing one of our team retreats. We're really trying to figure out how we could get to the next level in terms of hiring and there was almost no information surprisingly on that subject. Now, we're starting to see a little bit more from people like you and a bunch of other people in this space that is starting to fill that gap. At that point, there was almost nothing. There was a whole bunch of information on how to hire a virtual assistant or how to become a digital nomad, but there was very little on how do you hire 2000 remote support reps as an example. Marcie Murray, who's the director of support at Shopify is going to be talking about how she went from zero to 2000 plus remote support reps in three years at Shopify. Shopify actually now considers themself a remote company because 90% of their head count is remote, which is very exciting, at least to me. I want to learn Marcie's story. I want to learn how did she do that, what were the implications of that, what were the barriers that she had to overcome, what are her problems that she's currently facing. Because I would hope in the future, I could be in a place where I would be hiring 2000 people. How do I actually get to that point, how do we create a collaboration space where everyone can kind of come together and start to build the playbook on how to efficiently scale a remote-first team. That's basically the point of the conference is how can we bring all those people together, get them to collaborate, discuss what they agree upon and what they disagree upon. The funny thing that we've actually discovered from previous Running Remote conferences is ... It's actually a very interesting insight that I've gained. All the companies that we've spoken to that are very successful ... My definition of successful is you're an eight figure plus remote business. As an example, remote-first business. They're all doing things really differently, but they're all successful. My believe is that there is no playbook. That basically everyone doesn't know what they're doing because it's so new, but because hiring remote is making people 20% more productive and there's a 30% higher retention rate than in office counterpart that it doesn't matter because they're actually scaling faster, because they have this massive advantage. When you think about a 20% increase in productivity, which probably equates to 20% increase in overall revenue for remote-first companies ... Let's just even focus on the tech space as an example. You're talking about companies that don't need to take funding. This is another thing that we found is there seems to be an interesting phenomenon of remote-first companies that don't take money. That's an interesting data point, so all of these things that we were trying to look at we've discovered there's a lot of more work that we need to do to be able to build that playbook and that's basically the mission statement of the conferences. To build that playbook on building and scaling remote teams.

Matt H: Yeah, that's fantastic and I wish that we were there and representing. Unfortunately, it didn't work out timing wise for us, but hopefully next year we'll be a part of it. For those who have been following us, we've been supporting and spreading the word as much as we can. Yeah, I'm super excited. One of the things that I found about this podcast too is that it's interesting to me to hear all these successful companies and the CEOs of those companies and the hiring managers all are doing things very differently, which just goes to show that like you said, there isn't one right answer. I think in the conversations that you're having at the conference and the conversations we're having here, we might be able to, as a group, add some other points or some other process that the other team hadn't thought about that they might go ahead and implement and we can kind of all get better at this thing as we go. I think it's in both cases. It's a really exciting prospect and I'm looking forward to [crosstalk 00:56:16].

Liam Martin: Absolutely. Yeah. I think that we're at a point now where we really needed one of these in place. It was terrifying when we first thought about it because it hadn't existed before. Putting my critical thinking hat on, I was like, "Well, why is that true? Why has no one done this before? Because I'd like to go. If no one has done it before, then maybe that's not a good idea." The first one, we just cut $100,000 check for the venue and just kind of said, "Okay. Worst case scenario, we lose 100 grand. Best case scenario, we can actually make our own team more efficient." Thankfully, everything worked out. We broke even on that first one and we're going to make a little bit of profit on this next one that we're doing, but it is definitely something that I think we need to do. I also think that we shouldn't be the only one that's doing it, so we should have other people that can get involved because I think there needs to be more than one in the coming years. For anyone that's listening right now that wants to do one, go ahead and do it. We'll even help you, because I think we need to kind of build that playbook in a bigger way.

Matt H: Yeah. Anybody will take Liam up on that offer for sure. Well, Liam, you've been so generous with your time. I think this has been a really good conversation so far. I have a couple of more closing questions for you. They're a little different and they're some of my favorites. The first one is what leadership practice or skill do you think is most important? This question will be interesting because I know that you have a variety that probably is unparalleled about leadership practices and skills that you talk about. I'm being curious to hear what the leadership practice or skill that you think is most important.

Liam Martin: I think I'm going to give you one that maybe you won't be very happy with, but it's to lead very specifically. Then maybe a different way of communicating that is to be a cheerleader for everyone else. The mission statement of our company, which applies across Time Doctor and Running Remote and anything else that we build in the future is we want to empower everyone to be able to work wherever they want, whenever they want. We want to disconnect people from space and time as it applies to work, because we believe that opens them up to other job opportunities that they wouldn't have otherwise had in their local area. When you talk about that, that might sound a little crunchy granola to people that are just listening to it on this podcast, but I am personally very passionate about that. There are other things that we could be doing where we could be making a lot more money. I try to communicate that all the time. Every time we have a meeting, we talk about the values that we have. We talk about the mission statement of the company. We try to keep everyone excited about the things that they're doing inside of the company and how they're adding into the greater kind of movement that we see connected to remote work. I just had someone that I think is going to be coming. We're hopeful that they'll be able to come to the conference. His name is [Kazi 00:59:15] and he's from Dhaka in Bangladesh. The top export in Dhaka is garment exports. People are making clothing. The clothing you're wearing right now is probably coming from Bangladesh. He was working on a dollar a day in a garment factory and then he ended up being able to get an old computer for about $50. Was able to start working remotely. He started working on Upwork and started using our tool and started using a bunch of other tools. Five years later, he is making $3000 a month as a graphics designer. He's got a two-bedroom apartment. He's very happy. His life is completely changed. He is now living the top 1% of people that live in Bangladesh right now. Those are the types of people and the types of stories that I try to communicate to everyone when they are really frustrated with having to do bug fixes on code as an example and say like, "This is the reason why we're doing it is we want to put another 10 million Kazis on the map. We want to be able to get those people who have that passion, drive, commitment, and skill, and intelligence to the people that want to be able to hire them." The ability to lead and just be a cheerleader for everyone else is what drives me.

Matt H: Yeah. Fantastic. That mission piece of it I think is really important. I feel the same way, but that's a really cool story and I think that speaks to the power of remote work in a lot of ways and it without getting too far into it because those listening might probably already agree, but just allow that opportunity to those who wouldn't have otherwise got it is really unique and interesting in itself and it's a really powerful thing, so I think that's really interesting. My next question here for you is, again, a little different, so take this into whatever direction you want to, but if you could force everyone to read one book, what would it be and why?

Liam Martin: Oh boy. Just everyone on planet Earth?

Matt H: Everyone.

Liam Martin: Okay. Man. My initial gut reaction immediately was just Day of the Triffids, which is my favorite science fiction book. It's a book basically about everyone goes blind and then there is people that can see and the people that can see are being taken advantage of by everyone else. That's just my favorite science fiction book, but I realize that I would like to be able to talk about that book more often. That's probably the reason why I would want everyone to read it. If I had that opportunity, it would probably be quite egotistical of me to get everyone to read that book. I had a book that had all of the great religious works on it. That's the book that I would want everyone else to read. I would like ultra religious Christians to be able to read the Quran. I would love ultra religious Muslim people to be able to read the New Testament as an example, because then I think everyone would get a much better understanding of where everyone else sits in the world and realize that all of these religious texts are actually like 90% the same lessons, 95% the same lessons. That we should really stop arguing about the 5% of differences because we can agree on so much stuff inside of those books. 20 years ago, there was a massive conference on all of the religious leaders of the world and they all came together to try to answer this one simple question, which is what do we all agree on. What do you think the singular thing that they all agreed on was?

Matt H: I don't know. That their interpretation was the right one.

Liam Martin: No. The single tenent that they all agreed on was that you should treat everyone the way that you want to be treated. That was the single tenent that everyone agreed upon. I can't remember the way that Christians say it, but I mean that's an essence the way that I will say it is. Treat people the way you want to be treated. Everyone could agree on that single tenent. If everyone could just learn those lessons, I think the world would be a much happier place.

Matt H: Indeed. No, I agree with you. It's a pretty powerful statement and it applies on pretty much every culture. It's not one that I think many people would disagree with, like you said, so that's a good one. I have one more question for you here, Liam. Again, it's a tough one, but what is the best advice you've ever been given? Work wise, personally, whatever, what is the best advice you've ever been given?

Liam Martin: I guess maybe I'm just going to flow through and figure out a gut reaction on the answer to that question. People have given me a lot of advice. Buy bitcoin at $5 a bitcoin. That was probably the best piece of advice I've ever received my entire life. Actually, I'm going to stick with that one, because there was a bitcoin ATM for our entrepreneurs group that we had rolled in and there was a presentation about cryptocurrency. I bought, I believe it was 10 bitcoins for 50 bucks. Another buddy of mine bought 1000 bitcoins and he ended up selling a bunch of them I think before the first real dip for a couple hundred bucks. He was very happy with. I just held on to them. I sold one at the 20,000 a pop, but I'm hopeful that they go back up again.

Matt H: Wow. That would have been an interesting ride.

Liam Martin: Yeah. It was a very interesting ride because I had a friend of mine that bought the same 10 bitcoins with me and he sold them all at $20,000 and said I was crazy not to sell at that point, but I said, "Yeah, but what if they're worth a million bucks a pop? Two years from now, you're going to be kicking yourself dude." Then, of course, they went down to almost nothing and now they're kind of popping back up. If you're listening to this a couple years from now, maybe they're worth a million dollars and I'm in a really good position. Who knows, but yeah. I'm going to stick with that. $5 bitcoins was a great move.

Matt H: That's a good one. Yeah, I know. I think that you did see that came up as the genius in five years when somebody is listening to this or your buddy just came off as this far, but I don't know. I guess we'll see.

Liam Martin: Exactly.

Matt H: All right, Liam. Again, I really appreciate you spend the time and I think this was really valuable. Before you go, where should we be sending people to learn more about Running Remote? We'll link to everything, but where should people go to learn about it?

Liam Martin: Just go to RunningRemote.com. If you want to check it out, probably you might be able to get tickets for this year, but you'll definitely be able to get tickets for next year. If you want to just check out all the talks ... We actually put them up for free. We believe that putting that information out there is, again, connected to our mission statement of allowing people to work wherever they want, whenever they want and build this playbook about remote work. You can check that out at YouTube.com/runningremote.

Matt H: Fantastic. Yeah, and we'll link to all that as well and we'll put the book in there as well, because I think that would be interesting for people to maybe read and share and learn about. All right, Liam. Again, I thank you so much for spending time today. I got so many more questions for you, so hopefully we can do this again some other time. Maybe we'll reconvene after the conference and you can talk to us about that.

Liam Martin: Cool. Yeah, thanks for having me.

Matt H: All right. Bye now. Thanks so much for listening to the show. Be sure to check out weworkremotely.com for the latest remote jobs. If you're looking to hire a remote worker, We Work Remotely is the fastest and easiest way to do so. As always, if you have someone we should talk to, any advice you have or if you like to advertise on the podcast, please reach out to us at podcast@weworkremotely.com. That's podcast@weworkremotely.com. Thanks so much again for listen and we'll talk to you next time.