RWL061 How to Thrive in a Distributed Digital Agency with 10Up’s CEO, John Ekman

Distributed Digital Agency Growth and Philosophy

Speaker 1

0:00

Hello everybody from around the world, wherever you may be tuning in. Today I have yet another wonderful guest I only bring the best guests for the Remote Work Life podcast and I have a guest who, again, I've been following for a little while now and I just had to get him on the show. It's John Ekman, and John Ekman is the CEO of 10Up, and you can find 10Up at 10, that is the number 10,. 10andupcom that's 10upcom. 10up is a distributed digital agency and they focus on building well, they say great publish web, um publishing experiences on open source platforms, primarily wordpress, and wordpress is something I love. Um, not that I'm a developer, anything like that. I I just uh build my own wordpressorg sites and uh pretend that I can, but I really can't. But I just love what John is doing with 10UpJohn. So thank you so much for joining us today.

Speaker 2

1:12

Thank you for having me Excited to be here. I often find myself having to explain the 10Up URL to people at 10upcom, because if I say 10, then they want to write T-E-N. Yes. Happy to be here excited to be on the show.

Speaker 1

1:27

Excellent excellent, yeah, and, by the way, I love the 10up website. I think that's something that really sort of you know those kind of websites that just draw you in and you want to look more, and it's captivating, it's easy to read and all those kinds of things. It was just you know, you.

Speaker 2

1:48

Yeah so that was a redesign that launched back in 2014, right when I first uh came on board to turn up. And you know, from some perspectives, it's now five years old and starting to show some of its age in places. Uh, we've been gradually tweaking the design behind the scenes, updating and in dribs and drabs, rather than doing a wholesale top-to-bottom redesign.

Speaker 2

2:10

So I'm happy to hear that it's working for people. I I know there are parts of the site like our map of employees and I feel like are just for a nearly out of date and wish we could find the time to set aside our own staff to actually work on our own site.

Speaker 1

2:25

But you know it's a perennial problem for agencies that the travelers children have no shoes yes crappy cars yeah, yeah, but I mean it's one of the things that um not just reading up about you. But the website, I think there's so many. I mean, obviously there's a number of remote businesses out there and some put more effort into their websites and others and I feel as though, uh, distributed teams and remote business need to put that bit more in, because you just got to sort of bring people in, you got to draw people in that bit more. You got to show what you're all about, don't you when, when it comes to your website, but remote business, and I think you do it ever so well.

Speaker 2

3:04

So yeah, in a lot of agencies that I've been in there's kind of a debate about what kind of imagery to use on the site, because you want to show kind of photos of employees working. But uh, some larger agencies end up using sort of stock photos oh yeah first group of attendees in the conference room having a meeting right and we don't want to do that.

Speaker 2

3:23

But as a distributed company you don't really have offices, there's no building to show right. So we've tried to find a balance. I think on our careers page now there's a good video at the top that we filmed at our All-Hand Summit in Jackson Hole kind of took advantage of everybody being together in the same place to do some of the stuff you might more easily do in a non-distributed company and really get some content on the site, not just for the prospective client, right, who's our primary audience on the site, but also the prospective employee, which is a significant secondary audience that we also want to make sure they get a sense of what it's like to be a connoisseur, which can be a challenge for a distributed firm to really show what that experience is going to be like.

Speaker 1

4:03

And that's massive. That secondary is is massive, because one of the questions or one of the pains that I get from a lot of people who are looking for a role, particularly if they're looking for a role in a remote business, they say, um, you know well, there's a lot of people that either have like sort of dubious looking websites or dubious-looking job descriptions, etc. I always say one of the ways in which you can really get a feel is by doing your own assessment of a website, and 10Up goes a long way to really easing you into that whole life that you guys have.

Speaker 2

4:45

So it's brilliant, okay, so it's funny how web development and design organizations sometimes don't present the right image on the web right, it's easy to be your own worst client. You sort of make all the same mistakes that you have your clients make and not properly thinking about your audiences and prioritizing them and thinking about what their experience is like is one of those mistakes people make.

Speaker 2

5:06

Instead of kind of put that audience at the center, design the site around what their needs are rather than kind of the company out, which is like here's all the stories we want to tell and let's put that all over the web, instead of kind of what's the things that the audience needs to hear, right.

Speaker 1

5:20

And I'm intrigued, exactly, and I'm also I'm just intrigued, though, john. How did you get to this point where you're? You know, you've got your brilliant website there and you've got Tenup, which is you're headquartered in London. You've got you know people all over the world, but you're headquartered in London. What path did you take to get to where you are now?

Speaker 2

5:43

Sure, so, technically, tenup take to get to to where you are now sure. So technically, townhops, a california corporation. So our, our hq, such as it is, is out in sacramento california.

Speaker 2

5:51

Oh, it is okay where jake, our president, founder uh, lives. But you know, headquarters kind of doesn't mean anything, you know, to a fully distributed firm. So I'm outside b in a town called Salem Mass. Our executive team is spread throughout the US. Our team today is 185 people plus or minus in 23 countries, I think at last count. So we certainly have a significant presence in Europe, a bunch of folks in the UK, including in London, but really it's a global distributed team in every sense of the word. It has been from day one.

Speaker 2

6:28

So the mission of 10Up from the beginning was based on the notion that we wanted to find the most qualified talent in the world, wherever they were, and find a way to work with them, rather than a lot of agencies would start out with this notion of like we're going to first build some local offices and then maybe we'll add a remote team. Both jake and I have had experiences with companies that were in that kind of pub and spoke model where you have a bunch of offices and you have a bunch of people who are remote and really felt like that can create a kind of first class, second class citizen mentality. Where sort of the people who are in office. See the notes that are posted on the whiteboard, get called into town halls in person, right, kind of have a different experience than the people who are remote, uh. And so, uh, jake, when he started ten up back in 2011, really started with the principle of we're going to be fully distributed from day one.

Speaker 2

7:20

That has meant over time. We briefly held some office space in portland, oregon, because we had five or six directors there who wanted to co-work. So we kind of arranged a space that we called the studio at the time, which has since been shut down as they've found they weren't using it effectively. So, you know, we've had headquarters in various places, really truly a fully distributed firm in every sense of the word. So get back to your question how did we get here? I mean eight years of organic growth, right, starting. Jay Goldman started TenUp in 2011 in the.

Speaker 2

7:58

Providence, rhode Island area. He and I met actually planning WordCamp Boston back in 2010, so sort of before 10Up existed, and you know it's always been a focus on do great quality work, hire people who are going to be able to deliver, hire just ahead of demand and keep rolling forward into bigger and better projects. So kind of you know we haven't taken any outside funding. We managed to bootstrap the entire thing and now we're going to be a 200 person company, certainly at some point in 2020. Wow, so you know it's focus on doing the best work that you can, focus on hiring and retaining the right people, growing their skills and then making sure that your sort of leadership and management are keeping the ship headed in the right direction, but not micromanaging the day-to-day activities of the various teams.

From Academia to Web Development

Speaker 1

8:58

And what about you? I mean that's great, it sounds like. I love to hear stories of businesses that are growing, that are really doing well, especially remote businesses, because that's what I love. So but what about you, though, john? I mean you've gone from your BA in English and now your Master's in Information Systems, and now CEO of Tenook.

Speaker 2

9:22

I had a good career, though, honestly, at least kind of in the mid-'90s and then early 2000s. Everybody I knew that was working on the web had come from somewhere else, right, because you didn't study the web in the mid-'90s or the early 2000s. There just wasn't formal training in it. So some of my best developers and engineers and technical discipline folks and designers and user experience people had been lawyers, had been musicians, had been electrical engineers, had been what was a seminary student from Harvard, right, like just people who came from wherever they came from, and brought those disparate backgrounds into web agencies and digital agencies because the web was a new thing. So me personally, yes, I was a very ambitious student, went straight from kindergarten through to PhD, so you know, without stopping at anywhere in the middle. So, without stopping at anywhere in the middle, and what that meant was I was at the University of Washington in Seattle from 92 to 99.

Speaker 2

10:30

First working on my PhD and then teaching and being in the world of academia. At the time that the web arrived, I had been a bulletin board user, I had been kind of a dial-up modem. Vbs, yeah, 80s and early 90s Transitioned that to the internet because universities were on the internet, right. So I had my first internet account in 89, because universities had connections at that point, and sort of found myself in the world of MUDs and MOOs, multi-user object-oriented environments that people were using in higher ed. Found myself teaching in what the University of Washington at the time called a wired classroom.

Speaker 1

11:11

Wow, yeah.

Speaker 2

11:13

But at the time it was pretty innovative that I would be teaching a first-year composition course, essentially sort of English 101, although we called it 131. And I would be doing it in a room that was full of computers, right, and talking about how to use the web for research and Gopher and Veronica and Waze and all these things that preexisted the web, and really in the times when I wasn't teaching or working on my dissertation or my graduate work, when I didn't have funding, for example, and the classic problem for graduate students, I was at the same time a giant computer nerd. So I had a work-study job at the Department of Microbiology installing networks and sort of pulling networking cable through ceilings in hospitals. I worked with some local ad agencies in terms of understanding their computer networks and I started taught myself how to build websites right. So I built my first website on what would now be called an open source CMS in probably 97 for the.

Speaker 2

12:09

Department of the University of Washington. It was Perl based writing content to static text files that it would then parse out to build the navigation, and it was very rudimentary. But that's how one learned the web at that time. It was all self-taught, it was all open source, it was all sharing and it was all look at what someone has done and figure out how to do it.

Speaker 1

12:30

And learn by doing.

Speaker 2

12:32

And learn by doing yeah. So fast forwarding a little bit late 90s. I just finished my dissertation. I now have a PhD. I'm on the job market. It's the worst year in recorded history for that job market. So every job I'm applying for has 5,000 or 6,000 qualified applicants.

Speaker 2

12:49

Many of whom have been teaching for years and visiting professorships and have a couple of books published and are way more experienced. So I'm looking in one direction. I've got this career where I can beat my head against the wall for the next 10 years, string together three or four community college jobs to make $30,000 a year and struggle to constantly get fired and rehired At the same time. It's the beginning of the dot-com boom, right? Anyone with a pulse and a breath can get a job working in the web and there's lots of opportunity and growth. So I kind of had a crisis and decided I'm going to go try that for a while. I'm going to give this web development thing a go. I'll give it six months to a year and see what that's like and, you know, if that turns out to be successful, maybe I'll take myself off the job market in academia and you know that was 20 years ago and obviously I never looked back.

Speaker 1

13:40

Of course.

Speaker 2

13:47

Went into web development as a content specialist because agencies kind of didn't know what to do with this guy with a PhD in English who claimed to be a developer and didn't have any background in computer science and didn't have any credentials but was self-taught. So I worked my way up to being what we called director of production, which was essentially a head of a front-end engineering team of about 30 people at an agency called Molecular, and then with that team worked through kind of being a front-end engineer, being a user experience designer, being a project manager, being a program manager, made my way over to principal engineer, went back and got a master's in information systems to kind of get some of those core things that developers study that I had never formally studied Database normalization, network layers in the stack, algorithms and performance right Some of the more sort of core discipline things that I had skipped as a self-taught programmer and needed to have a better understanding of. Got PMP certification kind of was in voracious student mode of like I'm going to learn all this stuff but I'm going to learn how to do everything in the agency that I can. And essentially over the last 20 years I've been in four or five different agencies in the Boston area all focused on web development and design and maintenance, mostly focused on content management and sort of large-scale web publishing. So I've worked with some big commercial CMSs, things like Interwoven Team Site, which was a major platform in kind of the mid-2000s, things like Vignette and Fatwire and Documentum and systems like that.

Speaker 2

15:15

I've also then done a lot of work in the open source CMS space with Drupal and WordPress. Obviously I spent some time at Sitecore partnerships so I kind of got a sense of how a lot of different CMS platforms worked. And so as that all evolved, I found a passion for open source. It's always been something. It's how I was introduced to the web in the first place. It's sort of how I always imagined the web should operate. From my perspective, the web itself is an open source object it's been shared broadly and that's what's led to its adoption.

Speaker 2

15:49

So I knew I wanted to focus in on WordPress and Drupal. I started planning for WordCamp here in Boston as I got more involved in the WordPress community. That's where Jake and I met, and so I was at the time a director in a company called Aptaros, which was an open source consultancy. After that spent a couple of years at a place called iSite Design, where I was running kind of the East Coast for them, and throughout that whole period Jake and I kept in touch. I knew that he was going to start 10Up. I knew that I sort of kept my eye on the businesses that started. We had some conversations at conferences and wherever. We'd run into each other in space and kind of. When 10Up hit a large enough size that it made sense for Jake to bring on more kind of executive talent from the outside, he asked me to come join as the CEO. So I started. 10up started in early 2011,. Around February, march 2011. I joined in February of 2014.

Speaker 2

16:47

And for the last nearly six years now five and a half years Jake and I have partnered to run the executive team to grow the company to kind of focus on the things that each of us do best.

Speaker 2

17:01

So it is more the entrepreneurial-minded, sales-focused how do we keep growing the company? I am a bit more on the execution side operations policy programs. How do we scale successfully? So how do we make sure that, as we add people to the team, we're creating structures that are flexible enough to grow with the team size, we're having the tooling that's appropriate to our size and volume right, so we have the right sets of tools available to the team and we're focused on sort of what we're building for the long term. So it's not just how do I hire five people to do this project that we think we can sell, but also how do I make sure, as I onboard those people, that they become long-term, healthy, engaged 10-up employees over the longer period. And we've been very successful. I've been very happy with that experience and look forward to the next five or 10 years of doing it.

Speaker 1

18:00

And what I mean. That's a great story and I think you know, if anybody's looking to either sort of transition into the world of development, I mean, obviously it's probably going to take. It's going to be a slightly different story these days, but there's a lot of work behind the scenes that goes into a career in development and obviously you've taken a route that's been. In fact you've built, I suppose gradually, one block onto the next to get you where you are. You've talked about some of the challenges that you've had as well, john, but as well as that, you said that obviously building a remote team, remote business, has been a deliberate on your part. But what effect has remote working had on your life in general?

Building a Global, Distributed Team

Speaker 2

18:49

So I mean, being a distributed firm is very fundamental to kind of how Tenup has grown. In a lot of ways this was inspired by the way the open source community itself operates. So at Aptaros, a couple of jobs. Before Tenup, aptaros was an open source consultancy as well and was a multi-office world. So we had offices from San Francisco to Austin, to New York, to Boston, to London, to Munich, to Bucharest and kind of everywhere in between and the model was every one of our teams has to operate like an open source project, so they have to act as though they're fully distributed. To act as though they're fully distributed. Now, in that case, optaro still has offices, but the model was very much you have to document everything. Use tools like IRC this was pre-Slack, pre-hipchat To keep in touch. Use tools like Wikis and Enduras to make sure that every decision that happens in a meeting gets recorded and is visible to everybody else who might work on the project kind of very much run as though you're an open source project distributed around the world and we have global employees.

Speaker 2

19:57

So very much the focus was as a talent acquisition strategy, especially as an agency trying to be sort of the enterprise choice in the WordPress space. So WordPress is a fantastic community that has a very low barrier to entry, has a lot of freelancers and small agencies and people just getting started. The negative way to look at that is to say there's very little quality control. So there's a vast majority of developers available, but there isn't really a good way to tell a qualified developer from a non-qualified developer, or it can be challenging for someone who's a layperson, who's not a business person, who's just trying to get their site built. He or she doesn't necessarily know the difference. So 10Up felt like there was an opportunity to really become the enterprise class choice in this space. Jake and I and others in the company had been in various firms doing enterprise class work and we knew that WordPress was a platform that could be successful in that space. But we also knew there wasn't really a clear set of agencies who were aimed at solving that problem right. So kind of the combination of being focused on the right platform at the right time and investing in that community meant that early on, a lot of our recruiting and hiring happened through word camps which are held regularly. They're community organized events throughout the world. Um, so we had a strong kind of community to tap into and we still think of that broader community as essentially the sort of farm team right, that's what we recruit from happy to see small agencies spring up, because our best hires are people who have spent three to five years in the freelance world or in the smaller agency world, have cut their teeth, so to speak, have figured out the best practices for doing design or engineering or project management or whatever it is in this distributed fashion, and they come to us with enough experience that they can kind of hit the ground running Sure, distributed fashion and they come to us with enough experience that they can kind of hit the ground running on the next event, sort of coming in at the entry level.

Speaker 2

21:59

So for me personally, I was concerned at starting at 10Up about what it would mean to be a fully distributed company. I had always been in agencies that had offices and had distributed teams, but each of those distributed teams was going to an office somewhere right, or the majority of them were and I actually thought that, you know, working from home would be isolating, that I wouldn't sort of have enough connection with my team. I had a call with one of my mentors, somebody who a former CEO that I had worked with in the past to talk to him about the role and he said well, you know, the answer is you just dictate that you know, 50% of the hires in the next year have to be in cities where we're going to open an office, sort of you know, you'll never really scale the company until you start to have physical locations. And I, I disagree. I don't think that's the right approach. I think there is a way we can make this work fully distributed and, again, never looked back. Right, that's how we've done it.

Speaker 2

22:56

So for me, I thought at first I would go into a co-working space. I thought I would be a WeWorker or you know, workbar is one that's popular here in Boston and then I came to figure out that I'm way more effective at home. I don't spend an hour and a half to two hours commuting into the city every day. I'm not creating environmental waste by driving back every day, and I think that's valuable. I have a nice office here at home with good connectivity and the way we very planfully set up 10 up culture a lot of zoom video, skype video calls, a lot of Slack interaction, a lot of thoughtful attention paid to culture I can honestly say I feel more connected to my team now than I did when I was spending an hour commuting into Boston to go into an office to get on the phone with other cities and be like why did I you know, why am I doing this phone call from an office in Boston when I could just as easily be doing it at home? And, frankly, now I could be doing it as a video call and I can actually see people's reactions, and you know.

Speaker 2

24:00

So we have a lot of work that we have done to try to create a culture in which we're all connected. There's a talk that I've done called Disconnect, called Distributed, but Not Disconnected, which is all about. Just because we're physically in different locations doesn't mean we need to be any more or less connected to each other. This is the marvel of the modern world, right? So I spend probably six hours a day on average on Zoom calls with various teams within Tenup the executive team, the operations team, the finance team, recruiting different projects or client teams, the experience design team, different parts of the organization that record up to me and I find just the prevalence of modern communication tools, the fact that every Mac laptop you buy has a camera in it and can run Zoom or Skype.

Speaker 2

24:51

The fact that everybody who works at 10Up their minimum requirement is you need to have solid internet access and a decent ability to show up for meetings on time. Yeah, of course, being able to do kind of meetings this way means we can really focus on our shared missions, get out of the noise of hey, that developer looks busy because she comes in every morning at seven and leaves at six but I don't actually know what she's producing and really focus on results. Right, really focus on a shared mission and what we're accomplishing, and kind of get out of the noise of the office stuff and whose music is too loud and who wants the lights up and who wants the lights down and who wants it hotter or colder. Yeah, everybody to their own. And then personally, I have found again, as I said, I'm more connected to my team now than I ever was and, frankly, I'm more connected to the community than I was because things like our local meetup. It used to be okay.

Speaker 2

25:49

I commute into Boston in the morning, I work all day and now I'm going to stick around for a meeting at 7.30 at night and I'm going to get home at 10. And I would choose not to do that and I would choose to go home instead. Now it's more like I'm working from home. If I want to drive into Boston to go to the WordPress meetup, that's a much easier choice to make than it was, kind of, when I was spending every day there, right, and so I actually feel like I engage more.

Speaker 2

26:15

I spend more time at WordCamps. I've spent more time in the community Now kind of pushing to spend more time at other conferences and places outside the WordPress community as we try to expose Tenup to a broader audience and some of the digital marketing folks and design folks who might not know who Tenup is. We're pretty solidly well-known within the WordPress community, but you go kind of two steps outside WordPress to see the broader conversations and they don't necessarily know who 10up is, and I think there's a lot of people there that we can help. There's a lot of great talent that we could acquire and retain and there's a lot of great clients that we could be useful to who aren't necessarily looking for a wordpress agency, but they're looking for an agency to help them with, well, web publishing problems.

Speaker 1

27:00

Sure, and I want to end up to be in more of those conversations and you've covered so many that I mean there's a couple of the overlooked benefits of working on a distributed basis the environmental benefits that you've covered, the social benefits, the community benefits. I mean an example from myself I work partially remote, so I'm in office and remote. But what I really miss, because I used to run a code camp, a startup camp for my kids' school, to help the kids at school, but now I can't, I can't do that because I'm I'm not fully remote anymore. So there's so many things that, uh, it can enrich not just your life but the lives of others around you and it's, it's uh you know, there's a giving back page in our primary navigation.

Global Impact and Distributed Team Growth

Speaker 2

27:50

We talk a lot about sort of one of our values is service, and that service to clients and colleagues and community, right. So it's kind of not just that we're a client services organization though that's obviously also true but trying to figure out what does it mean for a distributed company when you start to think about things like corporate philanthropy and giving back right. Obviously, for us, giving back in the open source community has always been very core to that. So we have open sourced our own engineering best practices. We have an open source set of practices around what it means to run an open source company and how to contribute back to the community. We develop a lot of platforms that are made available through the open source ecosystem around WordPress, and that's a valuable way of giving back, and we have a lot of people I mean Jake and I met as organizers of WordCamp Boston back in 2010, which was the first one right. So we've been very involved in the community in lots of ways.

Speaker 2

28:45

But it isn't like I don't know Microsoft Military Affairs, which is a client that exposes kind of Microsoft in the military world and can do a lot of giving back in a very centralized, traditional corporate philanthropy way.

Speaker 2

28:56

Instead, for us it's more. I've got 185 people in different communities around the globe and they can all give back locally. So a developer who is in Malaysia can be part of a local meetup there and actually help organize that meetup and skill up people in that community, but so can someone in Kansas City here in the US. Right, it's not just about kind of underdeveloped regions in the world or sort of adding to development in India or Africa, but we have people there as well. Right, it's more about wherever anyone is, they can make valuable contributions in their local community. Most of that historically for TenUp has been very software focused and has been very open source focused. But we're actively engaged now in trying to sort of figure out what does it mean to have volunteer day when you're not all in one place? So the traditional corporate thing that I've done a lot of places is like a volunteer day at a food bank or at Habitat for.

Speaker 2

29:52

Humanity or whatever, but we're distributed. So that kind of model doesn't work, and I think the trick is to get out of thinking of that as a barrier and instead think this is an opportunity. We have a way to do it differently. We have a way to have impact in all the places where our teams exist right, so your kid's school can benefit from you being able to run a code camp. That still is value to community.

Speaker 2

30:11

It just happens to be the community where you live rather than the community we're can benefit from you being able to run a code camp. That still is value to community. It just happens to be the community where you live rather than the community we're incorporated in right, which is kind of an irrelevancy right. The question of where we happen to be as a corporate entity is something the IRS cares about, but it shouldn't be something that limits our impact on the world.

Speaker 1

30:29

Yeah, it's great, and I think you've.

Speaker 2

30:32

Great. I just wanted to briefly follow up. So I know, because I know one of the things that kind of you're focused on as well in this podcast is this kind of diversity and under-representation Definitely yeah, yeah, clearly kind of being a distributed company. Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of Automatic and founder of the WordPress project, has talked a lot about how talent is evenly distributed, but opportunity is not. So the reality is there are just as talented designers and developers and project managers and consultants and sales people in every part of the world, but some of them have more opportunity based on where they happen to be born or where they happen to grow up or where they happen to live, and distributed is a way out of that. Now, it's not an immediate way out of that. There still has to be infrastructure, there still has to be training, of course, but it can really dramatically improve the ability of a company to empower people throughout the globe.

Speaker 2

31:24

So that, to me, is one of the other benefits of distributed is you're not just focused on communities that you already know and live in. You're focused on kind of a broad set of global communities and you can find ways to leverage people from all those communities without having to worry about, like, are we going to open an office in that town or whatever no, it's great and I think you've just encapsulated all the the the thoughts and ideas and concepts around um having a distributed team or wanting a.

Speaker 1

31:56

You know I can I always say to people if you're looking to work within a distributed team, don't don't necessarily say that. You don't say that you want to work in a distributed team. You more talk about what you can you know, what you can bring to that team, what, how you can you know contribute to that team. And you've gone a little bit further. You've talked about not just contributing to the team but contributing to the, the wider things in in life as well. So if you're listening to this, I think something to think about certainly would say to anyone who's thinking about applying to 10 up.

Speaker 2

32:30

I mean we have noticed kind of two tiers of applicants. There's one tier that is clearly interested in distributed work. It's why they're applying at 10Up. But they focus in their application on their skills, their experience, what they think they can bring, what they hope they can do.

Speaker 2

32:45

There's a second tier, that is, people who can't come up with any reason for applying to 10Up other than I'd like to work from home or I'd like to be the person any reason for applying to 10up other than I'd like to work from home or I'd like to be there. There is a kind of perception out there and it's probably not helped by 20 years of work from home spam that people have gotten that turns out to be scams of various kinds Right that people can kind of think oh, this is going to be a job that I can do in my spare time, or that I can do while I'm watching TV or holding laundry or whatever time, or that I can do while I'm watching TV or holding laundry or whatever. You have to articulate no, this is an agency job. We're going to expect you to be leaned in and working hard and full-time, although we have part-time folks too.

Speaker 2

33:22

But the character of the job is not different just because it's distributed. It's still client services, agency work at the enterprise level. So you need to have skills and qualifications that are relevant to that and I don't. So you need to have skills and qualifications that are relevant to that and I don't think you need to like. You don't need to hide that you're interested in distributed work. We love the fact that distributed work empowers people that might not otherwise be able to commute in or have various disabilities or whatever, or challenges that require them to stay where they are. That's great, but that's not the reason why 10Up should hire you. That's kind of a side benefit or a side effect of the kind of company that we are.

Speaker 2

33:58

The reason that we should work together is because you have skills that we can leverage. We have things we can teach you. You have things you can teach us right. All the traditional values of an employer-employee relationship still apply. And yeah, if your cover letter is all about sort of, I want to work at 10 up because you're distributed period and there's nothing else, then that's going to be a red flag in our hire yeah, it's not going to slide, is it?

Speaker 1

34:21

it's really not.

Speaker 2

34:22

And expectation is like here are all the things that I'm excited about that you guys are doing, that I want to be part of, and here's all the strengths that I bring to that role and I love that you're distributed, then that's great right, like that's a net positive right and it sounds that you're distributed, then that's great right, like that's a net positive right.

Speaker 1

34:37

And it sounds like, from what you were saying earlier on, that you're going to be going through a period of hiring in the not too distant future. I mean, I'm putting this podcast out December 2019, but yeah, tell us about that. I mean, what kind of people do you foresee that you'll be hiring just to help people out there who may be interested in what they've heard?

Speaker 2

35:00

Yes, we are definitely always interested in talking to qualified candidates. For a while, there was even a website called is10uphiringcom that would just say yes, right, which we didn't even build, by the way. But so we're always trying to line up talents that we can hire when we're ready to turn that spigot on right. So, yes, we're always hiring in some sense, because we're always filling our queue and, as a nearly 200-person company, even turnover itself will occur. You're going to need to keep hiring to sort of even stay stable, let alone grow. If you're 30% in 2018, we'll probably grow 15% in 2019. We'll probably go another 15% next year.

Speaker 2

35:46

So, yes, we'll continue to hire and grow the kinds of people that we're looking for. Check out setupcom slash careers for job descriptions. But engineers, front-end web engineers, javascript engineers, systems engineers, user experience designers, visual designers, project managers, team leads, audience and revenue strategists so people with either ad operations background or sort of SEO and digital marketing backgrounds. We're actually actively engaged in the conversation with CFO candidates right now. So any chief financial officers out there let me know and come talk to me? Sure, but it's consistently what we're looking for is people with sort of relevant agency experience. So it doesn't necessarily need to be distributed, it doesn't necessarily need to be WordPress, especially for project managers and strategists For developers.

Speaker 2

36:38

We're looking for WordPress experience and expertise, so demonstrated either through client work or through stuff in your portfolio or through open source contribution. But we need you to have an understanding of how WordPress operates, obviously, even as a JavaScript engineer, to really be successful. And then an orientation. Obviously you've got to be remote work capable, so that means you have to be a little bit self-managing and self-disciplined. That can be a difficult soft skill to interview for A lot of times. What we look for is what experience do you have with distributed teams, so that might mean again, you weren't fully distributed but you worked with colleagues from around the country in different places.

Speaker 2

37:21

It might mean that you've done some volunteer work or some open source work that demonstrates that you can collaborate effectively over distance. You know, we want to know that you're not going to struggle with distributed work. One of the tips that I'll share that sort of we learned the hard way was we had a lot of folks who were looking at 10Up as their first distributed role and they were either traveling substantially for the first time so doing this sort of digital moment thing, but they've never done it before or had just moved to a new community right and what we have kind of found is in either of those cases that's going to be a real struggle.

Speaker 1

37:59

Right, you need some sort of stability, don't you?

Speaker 2

38:02

some stability community that you're a part of right, whether that's a family community or a faith community or just a local community of whatever kind that you're connected to, that sort of satisfies, that other sort of part of your brain that needs to see other human beings in person, right and interact with them. Or if you're going to be a digital nomad, really helps if you start that work first. First, in an age where we've already so, people who've already successfully done it for a couple of years then come to apply to us. We're much more happy to have that conversation because they sort of have ironed out all the wrinkles and learned how to reliably have internet access and how to reliably operate. And the vast majority of our team are more traditional work from home folks.

Speaker 2

38:42

But we have a handful to a half dozen who are doing something more like digital nomading and traveling around the world and they're very effective at it because they learned how to do that and how to manage their own schedule and how to manage their own requirements and do it successfully. But if it's someone who isn't connected to a community and doesn't have some of that stability, it's going to be their first time working from home. It's not that that's an absolute no, but it's definitely kind of a yellow flag that we have to fill out a little bit the challenge of remote work. It's funny when I talk to people who aren't doing it they worry about how do you make sure work gets done and how do you know they're not just sitting around watching TV or whatever. What I always tell people is the bigger challenge usually is the opposite, which is how do I know they're not working 80 hours a week?

Speaker 2

39:33

yes, yep no work-life boundary and they don't set aside a separate space for work and they just kind of stay on all the time, and that's unhealthy because it's going to lead to burnout, right. So how do I make sure they're there? I prefer work-life integration to work life balance. Right, it's not necessarily that the two are competing, but they do need to have kind of a healthy sense of how to set boundaries between their work and their life and they need to have some kind of life outside of work, right? Um, because otherwise, if your work is the only thing that you have and you do it 80 hours a week and it's staring into a screen, that's not going to lead to kind of healthy long-term sustainability right, you're gonna. You're gonna burn out, you're gonna start to make bad decisions, and those are going to impact our clients and our teams, right.

Speaker 1

40:14

So yeah, there's a lot of misinformation, I think, around digital nomadism if that's the word and working on a distributed basis, it's. I think, especially the digital nomad lifestyle is is glamorized a lot, a lot too much, and you know yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2

40:35

Yeah. I get that some people can do that and I love we have a couple of folks that set up who are, you know, homeschooling their kids and traveling around the US and staying in various places and sort of exploring alternative lifestyles and other ways.

Speaker 1

40:55

That's a lot. That's a lot to take on, isn't it?

Speaker 2

40:58

But it's great that we can enable that. But you have to be really self-driven and motivated. This isn't the kind of thing where you can gallivant around the world having a good time and occasionally calling into a meeting like it's a full-time gig you better really focus on it or we're gonna part ways right quick right yeah, and I think that that's a.

Life in a Distributed Agency

Speaker 1

41:20

It's a great point because the still think there's a lot of work. I mean this is partly why I set up this podcast. There's a lot of work that needs to be done in terms of showing people how how many serious I'm really sad I have to say this how many serious distributed businesses there are out there and you know it's serious work, it's people are doing great things in in the world. I mean, I was looking at your, your client client roster. You know the likes of ted politico google, reddit, intuit these are. You know the likes of TED Politico Google, reddit, intuit these are. You know serious distributed teams, remote businesses. It's a serious. You know, if you're going to take this on board, go all in.

Speaker 2

41:58

You know, I mean sometimes we've even given the top developer as well. But like the distributed part of 10 up is is in many ways the least interesting part of what we're doing, and it's just agency management. So, the same struggle. I mean, I've spent the last 20 years in various agencies. Exactly all the same challenges All of those agencies had are the same ones that we face.

Speaker 1

42:26

How do?

Speaker 2

42:27

you balance capacity against demand? How do you make sure that you sell enough work for the people you've hired and hire enough people for the work that you've sold and keep those two curves constantly in balance? How do you maintain quality while still growing right, Because you don't want?

Speaker 1

42:39

to lower your bar to hire more people.

Speaker 2

42:40

But you also can't keep the bar so possibly high that there's no one available to hire, so you've got to manage that. And keep the bar so possibly high that there's no one available to hire, so you've got to manage that. Clients, perennially, are going to do things that clients do, so they're going to turn left when you need them to turn right. They're going to zig when you want them to zag.

Speaker 2

42:55

They need assistance. They need help. That's why they come to us as a consultancy. All of those challenges are the same Managing employees, helping them get out of their own way and be successful and sort of clearing the path for them is the same kind of work you would do in a co-locating Sure. We just happen to do it remotely. People sometimes you know it's funny, probably because I have a PhD in English and spent a lot of time thinking about words People talk about remote or virtual. There's nothing virtual about a set of employees who are just as real and tangible in the physical world as anybody else. There's nothing remote about Tenop.

Speaker 2

43:31

I'm as connected to my team as I am to everybody else now We've had to kind of start using the term remote work, because it's the one people use yes. Language. But you know, that's why I always prefer distributed, like a computer network system, like the web is distributed, distributed. There's no center to the web. The web is everywhere. It's a mesh right. It's distributed in that sense, um, and so that's kind of why we liked that term. But after a while you realize everybody else is calling it remote.

Speaker 1

43:56

Yeah, yeah, it's a bit is the right word misnomer the word. The word remote is is a misnomer because, like you said it, I think you know some of the best remote businesses and best remote teams are more connected than their co-located counterparts.

Speaker 2

44:14

Which is not true other than by geography right.

Speaker 2

44:17

And you all I mean everyone listening to this, whether they work in a remote team or not has relationships with people in other parts of the world that they're not physically close to but are still very close to. It's the same thing in a remote team, right. We're just as connected to our employees and coworkers as we are in any other context. They just don't happen to commute to the same office every day, and you know it's hard. Back when I was at Optaros, we used to talk a lot about open source and sort of demystifying myth that the enterprises had around open source, and one of the things that we used to talk about is like at the end of the day, it's just software. It's software that has a particular kind of license. All the software you use on your computer has a particular kind of license, right, microsoft Word comes in a license, just like everything else does. The open source license has some particular things about it that enable a certain kind of distributed development, but at the end of the day, it's still software development. Engineers writing code and submitting patches and compiling and defining features and designing and all the things that we know about software development still apply. It just happens to be done under a different kind of working relationship.

Speaker 2

45:21

I feel like the same is true of agency work in a distributed agency. We're still a web strategy design and engineering firm helping companies communicate to audiences, whether that's on the media and publishing side, which is where we sort of grew up and cut our teeth, or more on the corporate marketing side, where we're now working with sort of Microsoft, starbucks, facebook, et cetera, uber in how they get content effectively on the web in front of the right audiences at the right time in the right medium in a way that's compelling and fits their brand standards and gets people to take action. That's the same mission I've been on for the last 20 years. It just so happens that we do it in a way that's distributed. The work that we're doing is the same Same work, same challenges, same kind of design processes, same kind of engineering processes, same kinds of code reviews and design reviews and same kinds of QA. It just isn't all done by people sitting in the same building at the same time Sure.

Speaker 1

46:16

And talking about work, just one final question for you, John, because it's been intriguing. What's the most unusual? Have you worked in any unusual places yourself?

Speaker 2

46:28

It's funny. So once a year we get our entire team together for the All-In Summit, which is kind of a week-long, literally everyone from the team in the same location for three days of kind of corporate sessions and training and goal setting and review of where we've been and where we're going, and then two days of team building in their smaller teams all put together into one week, and this year we had a Family Feud game.

Speaker 1

46:59

Not heard of that.

Speaker 2

47:01

So based on a popular US game show in which you try to guess, so we surveyed 100 people and you have to try to guess what their answers were to this question.

Speaker 2

47:10

So one of the questions was what's the most unusual place you've ever taken a client meeting? And the answers were fairly interesting. I bet it was from my car, which happens if people are commuting or whatever, or need to be on the road for one reason or another. I've taken some calls from my car, which isn't great for video calls. It's not bad for audio because you can put on hands-free, of course, yeah.

Speaker 2

47:33

For video. It's a little funny to see kind of your car seat behind you. Second is from other clients' offices. So it's not at all unusual if you need to be on site with a client and need to duck out and do a meeting with somebody else right, Clients with whom you have a good relationship you can actually be very explicit about that and just say, hey, is there a conference room I can duck into for the next hour to do this? Call Clients with whom it's a newer relationship. I might be more cautious about that as a CEO but it's not unusual for some of our team to have to do that. Starbucks's coffee shop is a popular answer.

Speaker 2

48:05

I actually use a company called Regis which is oh yeah, yeah, we work traditional space, so I have a Regis business lounge membership and when I travel I typically find a Regis to go into to do meetings from. So I've done that. I guess the most interesting one is there's one connected to the corner, connected to the Geneva airport in Switzerland, that you can actually get to. You do have to go outside, but like you can walk to it from one end of the airport and it's sort of connected and you can go into that Regis, you know, on connections between flights, that's probably the most interesting one that I've been in.

Speaker 2

48:45

But I've done that in, you know, five or six countries, certainly in 20 or 30 different cities around the US. And Regis, although it's in some ways maybe less sexy than something like WeWork, it gets less attention, also just has much broader coverage. So they're sort of everywhere. And in Manhattan there are probably 30 of them between 20th Street and 40th Street and that's where I spend a lot of time. Even though I'm based in Boston, a lot of our client base is in New York, so I spend a lot of time there.

Speaker 1

49:16

Yeah, there's lots of them, isn't there? There's lots of them, yeah.

Speaker 2

49:21

Otherwise I legitimately do the vast majority of my work from this room here.

Speaker 2

49:25

Right legitimately do the vast majority of my work from this room here, right, right, um, and I don't feel a need to go work from coffee shops or libraries or co-working spaces or whatever I feel like. I prefer the control that I have here. I can have my multiple monitors set up, I can have my white board. I can, you know, get my coffee when I want to, that I like at home. I, you know, can have lunch with my wife and, you know, take the dogs for a walk, and you know it's just much more pleasant to me to be here.

Opportunities at 10up Agency

Speaker 1

49:51

It's that flexibility, isn't it? And, like you said, you can shape your own work lifestyle. You know, whatever you want to call it, it's just, it's just such a beautiful thing. But, john, it's been, it's been wonderful speaking to you. I wanted to thank you so much for your time and I would encourage, like John was saying earlier on, 10up is about to go through a round of hiring, so I'd encourage you to go to 10, that's the number 10, 10.upcom forward slash. What was the forward slash? Again, careers. So have a look at that.

Speaker 1

50:30

Um, I will also leave a link in the show notes as well which will direct you directly to that page. Um, and also as well, john mentioned distributed, not disconnected his talk that he did. I want to link to that as well, john, so I'll get the link from you, um, at another point. But thanks so much for joining me. Uh, john and um, we'll be keeping in touch. We'll be keeping an eye on what ten up is going to be doing in the forthcoming months, especially during the hiring period. And, um, we will. I'm sure we'll speak to you soon great, thank you.