How to Build a 7-Figure Remote Marketing Agency

Andrew Dymski hosted this episode, Ryan Malone’s second time on the show. Ryan founded SmartBug Media, an inbound marketing agency that at the time had 40 people across 17 states and Canada and no office. Andrew wanted the specifics: what to nail down first, how SmartBug hires, how 40 remote people stay in sync, and why the agency tracks time.

Don’t go remote to save money

Ryan drew a line between calling yourself remote with a few contractors and running a real-size remote business.

One of the mistakes that a lot of people make when they start thinking about a remote company is that they think, oh, I’m going to go save a bunch of money on office space or whatever. The truth is that if you’re going to actually build a culture of your team, you’re going to spend a lot of money building the culture, maintaining the culture, developing your team… I would encourage people that are looking for it as just a cost savings measure to think of it more as a cultural advantage and a sustainable advantage rather than some type of an economic gain.

(Listen at 2:18)

SmartBug uses contractors only for overflow. Everyone full-time is an employee who, as Ryan put it, invests eight to 10 hours a day with the company and deserves to be invested back in.

Nail down the ideal employee profile, then never stop hiring

The first thing he’d have an owner do is define an ideal employee profile. Remote work filters for a particular kind of person.

It takes a different type of animal to work at a remote company. We typically look for people whose social life is not defined by the office environment. If you find somebody who they can’t wait to come in on Monday and go cube to cube and talk about the weekend… that doesn’t work really well in a remote model.

(Listen at 3:37)

What does work: someone with their own social life who wants family time and challenging work without hand-holding. With the profile set, recruiting never switches off. For several roles SmartBug keeps a short backlog of interviewed candidates who know they have an offer when the next spot opens, which means always posting for the roles it always needs and being transparent when there’s no opening yet. The filter: “We don’t look for people who are looking for a job. We look for people who want to work here.”

Hiring manager first, references second, panel last

After a resume screen and a phone screen by SmartBug’s internal recruiter, the order is deliberate.

If the hiring manager feels like it’s not a fit and you did it the backwards way, which is to let everybody else interview them before the hiring manager, then you’ve wasted a lot of people’s time and you’ve also kind of disrespected the candidate because you’ve wasted their time as well. So we do the hiring manager screen first. Once the hiring manager screen is done, we do reference checks next because… during reference calls, you often uncover information that you want to talk about more on interviews.

(Listen at 8:26)

Candidates do their homework on you too. If you’re hiring marketers, you have to eat your own dog food, or they’ll wonder what you do for clients. Ryan’s favorite part of the week is the stand-up, where a good 20 minutes is people complimenting each other’s work, and that spills onto social media.

Build systems around the handoff

In an office you can lean over and ask for clarification. Remote, at scale, you can’t.

You need to have effectively a process for everything that you do at your company, whether it’s large or small. And I would encourage people to focus on the handoff… You need to make sure that the handoff from person A to person B has enough context and detail so that the person that gets the next step of the deliverable has the information that they need in order to be successful.

(Listen at 14:55)

SmartBug runs on Teamwork, with templates for every process, a role on every step, and time logged against each step so an overrun can be judged a one-off or a systemic problem. Outliers get reviewed monthly; the systems themselves get reviewed quarterly.

Time tracking for a fair work week, not surveillance

Andrew asked how you resist the urge to look over 40 shoulders.

Some agencies think time is a dirty word. We don’t. We track time not because we want to know what people are doing… We have this concept of a fair work week. So we feel like people should be able to get everything that they need to get done in 40 to 45 hours… We work really hard to make sure that it’s not a sweatshop so that people have time to go create life memories because, hey, that’s our mission.

(Listen at 18:32)

He’d recently talked with an agency owner considering software that photographs each employee every three minutes.

If you’re going to hire somebody to be a part of your company and you don’t trust them enough to actually let them do their job without recording their screen or taking a picture of their chair every three minutes, then you probably need to spend more time focusing on your hiring model rather than software to monitor people.

(Listen at 20:19)

Related: 15-minute increments on paper are close enough, since the goal is catching a deliverable that’s three times over budget. SmartBug also skips the account manager role, because clients pay for a strategist and get offended when a go-between screens their questions. Ryan’s last tip was “don’t be a control freak”: hire smart people who want to work for you, give them guardrails, and “give them a chance to be a hero and make sure that you let the world know about it when they are.”