How Remote Work Became the New Business Standard with Liam Martin

Liam Martin [00:00:00]:
Remote work is here to stay. I’m probably preaching to the choir for people that are listening right now, but it’s here to stay and you have to be able to understand how to manage it properly. That’s probably the most important thing that I see with companies that are really having a lot of difficulty with remote and hybrid work is it requires a different management philosophy. I get into that in the book that we wrote two years ago. But to the AI part, AI is not going to replace you, but someone using AI will. So. So if you’re not doing those two things, adopting remote work and adopting AI, I think the next decade is going to be very difficult for you in terms of your work life balance and your career moving forward.

Frank Cottle [00:00:40]:
Liam, thank you for joining us for the Future Word podcast. Really excited to have you here today and really talk about Time doctor Running remote. In fact, I remember when you started running remote at, and your first meeting down in Bali and it was an absolute groundbreaker for a lot of things to do with remote work.

Liam Martin [00:01:03]:
Why don’t we tell us a little.

Frank Cottle [00:01:04 ]:
Bit, why did you start running remote? What motivated you for that? What is running remote? Explain that to everybody.

Liam Martin [00:01:10 – ]:
So, yeah, I’ll answer that first question. And Frank, thanks a lot for having me on. I really was frustrated around 2017, 2018, and that doesn’t sound very, very far back in the past, but in reality, when you think about remote work, it’s an entire generation ago. So we were trying to figure out how do we scale a remote company. So we had, and we still have one of my largest technology companies, Time Doctor which is a time tracking tool for remote teams. We had, I think at that time, maybe 100, 150 people. And we were trying to figure out how to get to a billion dollar company. So how do you do that? And really kind of just sit back. It was one of our company retreats that we were doing. How do we get to a billion dollar valuation in five years? I don’t know if you know eos, entrepreneur operating system, but we run off of that. So our big hairy, audacious goal is how do we get to that valuation. And so we just started googling stuff and we thought to ourselves, there must be other companies that are billion dollar remote first companies that exist. And we identified seven. Yeah. And it was, it was a very weird situation where we were trying to figure out, are there more of these companies? Obviously there were a lot more quiet ones that were in the background that weren’t as overt about that messaging. But we only Identified seven. And so what I did is I emailed the founders of those seven and thankfully I knew three out of those seven. And I said, have you ever been to a conference about remote work? And they said no. And I said, do you want to come to one? And they said yes. So we got everybody to come out to Bali. And I was telling you in the pre interview, my philosophy is a ready, fire, aim type of mindset. So I booked a venue without any website, any attendees. I just had three really good speakers that I knew would be great. And I thought, at the end of the day, If I lose 150 grand on this venue, but my team learns how to grow 10% faster, it will absolutely be completely worth it. And it was. So we, we got about 250 people for that first event and it grew from there. And we’re going to be doing the next one end of April in Austin, Texas.

Frank Cottle [00:03:37 ]:
And no, I remember when you did that. And I got, I got some promotional material when you were doing that very first one. And I thought, gosh, Molly, that’s great. And I made the mistake. I looked up the weather and I looked up this and that, and I decided that the surf wasn’t really good that season. So I wasn’t gonna go.

Liam Martin [00:03:58 ]:
Well, you know, there’s always next year. That’s what we tell a lot of people.

Frank Cottle [00:04:02 ]:
Made for the right reason. But no, as the whole remote working process has grown, you all have grown with it and I think been an elemental part of the messaging involved. So how do you think the evolution of remote work has really happened and where do you think it’s going to go? What do you think its constraints might be, whether it’s political or corporate?

Liam Martin [00:04:32]:
Yeah.

Frank Cottle [00:04:32]:
How do you see this baby that’s been born maturing?

Liam Martin [00:04:37 ]:
It’s a lot to unwrap. I think we should just jump back for a minute and really kind of talk about where remote work was versus where it is today. So pre Covid, about 4.5% of the US workforce was working remotely. And that’s US Census data, also backed up by Stanford data. One month later, March of 2020, we were at approximately 58 to 62% of the US workforce working remotely. Dependent upon the data set that you take a look at. That’s the biggest shift in work since the Industrial Revolution. Revolution, absolutely.

Frank Cottle [00:05:16]:
Bigger and faster.

Liam Martin [00:05:17 ]:
But the Industrial revolution took about 80 years and we did that in March. So it completely changed everything that we understood about work, how we interact with work in that shock, what I like to call emergency remote Work. I still think we still haven’t recognized the impact of that on work today. And I think it’s probably going to take at least until 2030 before we really kind of absorb it. So right now, today we’re sitting at dependent upon the data set that you look at 32 to 36% of the US workforce working either remote or hybrid. And that’s Stanford.

Frank Cottle [00:05:56]:
That number than a pure remote number.

Liam Martin [00:05:59 ]:
Yeah, exactly.

Frank Cottle [00:06:01 ]:
Interject something. In the time that you were starting running remote, we were seeing in the 16, 17, 19 16, excuse me, 2016, 2017 period, we were seeing a lot of companies and the battle for talent, the tech companies in particular, reaching out to people and recognizing that they got much better response and much better talent recruitment if they allowed for remote work. What we didn’t see was, and people were based on the battle for talent pre Covid, they were kind of teetering on the threshold, oh, should we do this? No, let’s just keep doing what we’re doing with the tech guys and you know, that sort of thing. Our gals, Covid kicked them in the butt right over that threshold. That’s our view. And we know from Randstadt data that they’ve provided that when they run an ad for a position, they get a five to one more positive response, five more applicants when they include the word remote and or hybrid as an option in the job description than they do if they don’t. So the battle for talent still favors remote and hybrid.

Liam Martin [00:07:25 ]:
Oh, absolutely. And we, during that time, 2021, 2022, we had the reverse problem. So we did not have Facebook and Google and all of these other technology companies competing against our remote work, our remote employees. So at that point we see it as a huge tactical advantage. We hired a guy that got 8th place on the Google Global hackathon and he got an offer from Google and he got an offer from Facebook and we offered him half. And, and he accepted through us. Because he was able to stay in Indonesia.

Frank Cottle [00:08:12 ]:
Yes.

Liam Martin [00:08:12 ]:
Which is where he still lives today, in Indonesia. Half of 300,000 is a ridiculous amount of money. And he’s very happy and he’s, he’s content to be able to remain there. But what was happening in 2021 and 2022 is all of a sudden all of these HR departments and recruiters identified technology companies that were remote before the pandemic and were absolutely assaulting our people. And we had never really seen that type of a talent crunch before where we were getting, some of our employees were getting offers that were 50, 60, 70% more than what they were currently making in our own company. And we had to tell a lot of them, even though they were great employees, you’ve got to take that position. We just can’t match it. So it was a huge talent issue for us. Now that’s kind of calmed down a little bit. But, but when we look at. I just hired for a position that personally is a direct report to me last about a month and a half ago, and I had 1600 applicants for a relatively basic position, kind of a, a, a position that doesn’t require that much experience. And it was, it was a job going through all of those candidates. We went through every single one without AI. We really focused on trying to make sure that we were honoring the candidates that were applying. But it is, it is tough. Or now, like when you are competing for a remote job, you’re not just competing with the people in your local area, you’re competing with the world.

Frank Cottle [00:09:45 ]:
The world. No, I think that’s a big shift. And I would agree. Going back to your hire in Indonesia, we made a decision years ago, early 2000, like 2000, 2, 3, 4, that we would hire the best person we could find. And we did not care where they were and we would not move them. And our decision was we looked at the cost of moving people and we have an internal philosophy that says family first. And so there’s an economic cost to moving somebody, but there’s a huge, huge family cost to moving somebody. Spouse might have another job that’s important or equally important, the kids are established a family, grandparents. It’s a massive thing to tell somebody to move from here to there, wherever it is. And we decided that that cost was even greater than the economic cost. And we couldn’t get the best people if we were disrupting their families. And therefore we made the decision to go and be a remote managed company back at that point in time. Also, you use your benchmark year 2021 as a change year. Historically, in one of our Companies had about 40% growth per year, year over year for 11 years. 2021 was 91%. Guess what? That company’s in virtual office.

Liam Martin [00:11:20 ]:
Right?

Frank Cottle [00:11:21 ]:
Okay. So that, that’s when everybody cemented their decision towards this remote work process. And now people have backed away from it. The pendulum has swung into a hybrid model more than a pure remote model. We don’t have the government requirements, we don’t have the pandemic fears, all those things, but we do have the common sense and the economics. Where do you think that’s going to settle out. Are we going to be remote or hybrid one day a week, two days a week, three days a week? Where do you think that pendulum is going to swing and stay?

Liam Martin [00:11:56 ]:
Very, very complicated question. And I’m not an academic, but I do have a lot of them that come to running remote. So I get access to a lot of that data.

Frank Cottle [00:12:07 ]:
You’ve got the data?

Liam Martin [00:12:08 ]:
Yeah. So what we see is if you look at the Castle Systems back to work barometer, which is a really. I like that data set primarily because it actually is much more focused on commercial real estate. So it’s specifically trying to get people back inside of the office. And their bias is to be able to show that people are going back to the the office fundamentally. And they see that people are going back to offices about 50% from pre Covid levels right now. So that’s pretty well stabilized. But then if you take a look at the remote work survey study from Stanford, which is the one that I pay attention to the most we’re seeing over the last two and a half years, approximately 36 to 32%. So it’s essentially just flattened out completely. And my perspective is the other variable that not many people really take a look at is if you are a brand new company, if you’re a tech startup, your chance of starting that company remotely is at 67%. And it was 18% pre Covid, which was even higher than the 4.5% that I was telling you about. So tech startups always kind of started remotely more often than regular companies. But that’s. There’s been that next jump and that next step. We’re at 67%. So I think that those companies that are little tiny companies today will become big boy companies in the next 10 to 20 years. And that’s where I’m really focusing my energy to be able to say my goal is to serve those organizations. Because I think there will be not just billions, but trillions of dollars for remote work technology. Stack companies like myself agree completely.

Frank Cottle [00:14:00 ]:
It’s interesting, I think, where the another telling anecdotal reinforcement of that is if you were to go into a venture capitalist, you’re starting, you’re one of those startup tech companies today and say, give me a million dollars and here’s my business plan. If your business plan said, oh, I’m going to hire a bunch of people in Chicago and I’m going to take office space in Chicago and I’m going to get furniture to put those in Chicago, blah blah blah, and then I come in and somebody with the same need, the same million dollars, and I’ve got an equally cool little tech company. And I say, well, I’m going to hire the best people I can. Here’s how I’m going to do it. And it includes remote hybrid, etc. I don’t have all those fixed costs. I don’t have the administrative time. I’m going to get the money. You’re not. Oh, yeah. Financial institutions that are investing today are choosing and purposefully choosing asset light companies that do not have fixed liabilities so that their money can all go into economic production over anything else. So even if socially we weren’t accepting this, if that’s the way investment decisions are being made and reinvestment and growth investment decisions are being made, you know what’s going to happen. This is not a secret. This is something that is going. It is happening. It will continue to happen simply because it works.

Liam Martin [00:15:37 ]:
Yes. And I have had a lot of private conversations with venture capitalists, like I mostly do, because I do a lot of angel investing and follow along with their rounds and they’ll tell me in confidence. We’re trying to keep as much of our cash on the sidelines as humanly possible because we don’t know what to do. And we’re seeing this evolution of a new organization in the tech startup world, which is we have a core team of, let’s say, five to six really, really smart people, and then we’re augmenting those with contractors as opposed to individual employees spending $25 million and moving everybody to San Francisco. That’s not really the model that works any longer. And you’re seeing smaller teams that are executing on larger projects with technology, but then those employees are located all over the world.

Frank Cottle [00:16:33 ]:
Yeah.

Liam Martin [00:16:34]:
And it’s a very exciting time because counterintuitively, in 2021, you probably, I would probably say that would be the peak of the valuation of a Series A funding round. And today that’s actually significantly lower outside of AI. So because we’re currently existing in the world of AI and all of that, you know, froth is coming up when you look at the valuation of companies. The highest valuation of companies were 2021 and 2022. Now those valuations are considerably lower because you just don’t need the capital any longer in order to be able to build those companies to the same scale. You don’t need to do it in San Francisco because you can hire them anywhere.

Frank Cottle [00:17:21 ]:
Yeah. Barriers of entry have dropped down too, as a result of that overall, and today, any company of three people or more is an international company. They have an international client. They have an international team member. They have an international support structure. Every company, technology does not recognize borders. We may do so as nations, but technology doesn’t and payment processing doesn’t. Now there are so many service companies that will allow you to hire through them and process payments and taxes, et cetera. Internationally, which used to be a major. Not restriction, but constraint, so that only big companies can do it now small companies can do it. So there’s a lot of things that have come along. What do you think about the politics, though? I mean, the politics of return to office. Let’s go big company and government. Oh, you’ve got to go back to the office, because how do you think that’s going to hold out? And do you think that, that it’s anything but BS.

Liam Martin [00:18:41]:
I had a post last week that I put up where I used much more colorful words than that. Frank, I’m very frustrated at the politicization of remote work. I think it’s.

Frank Cottle [00:18:54 ]:
Well, let me stop you. Let me stop you right there. When we say politicization, if I get that word out, when we say that, do we just mean government or do we also mean very large companies making the same echoing statements or maybe the government echoing those very large companies and it’s all one group or one loud crowd, if you will, versus reality or the rest of world?

Liam Martin [00:19:25 ]:
I’m saying Pew Research came out with a study in 2023, 67% of Democrats like remote work versus 39% of Republicans. So there’s very clearly a shift there. Right. And then when I see what’s currently happening in the Trump presidency, he signed an executive order forcing all government employees back into the office, even though economically it’s actually probably a worse decision to make to be able to have everyone work back inside of an office. And then also.

Frank Cottle [00:20:00 ]:
Let me ask you, let me ask a question. Strategically, do you think that that decision is because they really want people back at the office or because they want people to leave their positions so that they can reduce headcount?

Liam Martin [00:20:13 ]:
Oh, yeah. So having someone quit, it’s motivation way easier than, than having. Than firing somebody. I. And there’s this old saying in business, which is whenever there’s some type of an economic disaster, you should never not take advantage of it. When you look at when there’s an economic correction, it’s an opportunity to be able to audit all of those employees and cut that 10% to make you that 10% more efficient. But they’re doing that in a way that is so much more intelligent, which is, well, let’s just get everyone back into the office. I remember, and you probably knew this better than anyone else when Marissa Meyer from Yahoo.

Frank Cottle [00:21:04]:
Yep.

Liam Martin [00:21:04 ]:
Who famously, their entire organization was remote and she ordered everyone back into the office. The real story behind that, the story that she was giving was it’s about collaboration, it’s about in person communication. But the reality is that the employees that were working at Yahoo. There were people that hadn’t logged into their VPN for five years but were getting a paycheck. They had no understanding what those people were doing. So the management was really, really bad in that organization. And she really had two decisions that she needed to make. Either get everyone back inside of the office and the people that don’t come back. We can then terminate for cause or start firing people and deal with a whole bunch of legal cases over the next three to four years. And I would have agreed in that situation. Order everyone back to the office. It’s going to be painful for the next six months. And what did Yahoo do two years later? They reinstituted a remote work policy and now a lot of their employees work remotely. So it’s very clear what they’re doing. But to me, the, the vitriol I probably would say comes from, from Elon Musk. And I still, I love Elon’s companies. I think Tesla is a fantastic company. I think SpaceX is an amazing company. I just, if I could speak to him right now, I would love to be able to talk about how remote work isn’t a moral issue, which is how he sees it.

Frank Cottle [00:22:36 ]:
Yeah.

Liam Martin [00:22:37 ]:
To me, it’s as if it’s, it’s this. It has the same correlation to like using a computer, using a Mac or a PC. Right. It’s just like it’s how we get our work done fundamentally at the end of the day. And I find it very frustrating that we’re pulling morality into remote work because to me, that was so far away from what it was in, you know, 2010 when I started doing remote work.

Frank Cottle [00:23:06]:
Well, you know, you could, you could flip that very easily and say, no, it is a morality question issue overall. It’s just you’re on the wrong side of that morality. You know, if you want to, if any time you bring up morality, you have to say, well, who’s the judge of what’s moral and immoral? And there’s oftentimes, and almost always a flip side to the judgment that is being made for the same purpose, for the same moral reasons. If you Will. So I would say, okay, Ilana, there’s a morality question. I just say you’re on the wrong side of morality in this case. And I’m like, I’m a fan of, and some of some of the things that they’re doing for the purposes they’re doing them, not just necessarily how it’s being done.

Liam Martin [00:24:02 ]:
Sure. And, and I will definitely state like I’m pandering to the other side. I like remote work. I think it’s the right way to be able to work. However, I have a lot of data to be able to back that up. And if someone could come to me and not pull in a philosophical debate or a moral justification or an ethical discussion, then I’m all for it. If we want to have a facts based conversation about remote work, we’re just not having that conversation. And the last three or four months, as I’ve been going into calls like this with people like you, not obviously exactly like you, but people that are anti remote work essentially, it’s been very frustrating to be able to say, well, you know, their retention is 50% better, employees like it more, they’re 13% more productive. And I can spur on, I can spout off hundreds of these statistics, but that doesn’t matter fundamentally when we’re having an ethical or moral discussion, which is why I find it so frustrating.

Frank Cottle [00:25:05 ]:
Well, I think because the data does support the position you’re taking, that the only way to defeat data is to ignore it and go with a rationalizing moral argument. Because you can’t have a data based argument and win it. So if you want to win the argument, and again, I think that there’s ulterior motives, headcount issues, a number of issues that are driving a percentage of that particular argument. Not just with government in the US right now or maybe elsewhere also, but with a lot of large corporations you’re.

Liam Martin [00:25:44 ]:
Seeing, I mean, just in San Francisco the numbers were 32% vacancy rate for corporate real estate and SF 23% in New York. And that’s from CBRE, that’s their own data. Right. So we’re seeing this huge push and pull from, I’ll name them directly, the commercial real estate industry that really doesn’t want this to continue.

Frank Cottle [00:26:07 ]:
Yes.

Liam Martin [00:26:08 ]:
And historically, commercial real estate has been one of the bluest of blue chip stocks that you can own. Right. If it’s an asset, that’s corporate real estate. Last 100 years, 150 years, that’s been a rock solid backbone of people’s portfolios. And now that backbone is is deteriorating very, very slowly, I would say. And that’s another big reason why I think it’s, we’re seeing this propaganda pop up with regards to remote work.

Frank Cottle [00:26:37]:
Well, and take companies like J.P. morgan as an example. How much if you think the commercial real estate vacancy factor is 20% in Manhattan, JP Morgan’s commercial office space that they occupy, their vacancy rate is probably closer to 60 or 70%.

Liam Martin [00:26:59 ]:
So to just add on to the JP Morgan angle, when you think about 20% of their, or 60 to 70% of their corporate, of their personal corporate real estate being vacant, I think that’s actually a very small issue. Corporate real estate is non collateralized by a huge degree. So when you want to go buy a house, you have to put up capital, right? You have to put up 5 to 20% of that asset and then you pay it off over 25 years. Corporate real estate is just recapitalized. So the value of that property goes up every 10 to 15 years. And then you go back and you recapitalize and you pull, pull out cash. And that’s really how corporate real estate works. Today that machine is breaking down and I thought it would fall apart way earlier than it has. It’s, we’re starting to see those cracks occur. But, but the person that holds the bag are the banks. Really, they’re the single largest holder of commercial real estate.

Frank Cottle [00:27:59 ]:
Absolutely. And you know, if you want to go, and I don’t want to go down the rabbit hole, commercial real estate too deeply, but the lender with the development company or the property company has covenants in their lending agreement that talks about the valuation of the building at the time the loan was made. Valuation, that building drops. Then the property company has to top up the their equity, so to speak, against a depreciating asset, which they don’t have the capital to do because their lease rates are down, et cetera, et cetera, they raise their capital based on valuation. So this is definitely a bank, insurance company or a financial institutional problem as much as a real estate problem.

Liam Martin [00:28:42 ]:
Well, and the negative complication or the negative consequences for the owner of that commercial piece of commercial real estate is. Well, I’m not, there’s nothing. Backing this up really sucks. Bank. Here are the keys. Come after me. Right. Of which they can’t because there’s no, there’s no asset that’s backing it up. It’s the valuation of the property. So when you look at that long term, I mean that’s nowhere good over the next 10 years, what in London.

Frank Cottle [00:29:13]:
One of the solutions that we’ve seen practice because they’ve had a more volatile marketplace over the years reacting to different things is the. In London, a big solution is conversion of the utilization from commercial to residential because the residential demand was greater than the commercial. And in Manhattan, valuation wise, that’s still true. Just how quickly can it happen? So it will happen. We’re going to see rebuilding of cities. That’s a whole nother topic and everything. Yeah, but we definitely will see that as we get towards the end of the conversation. Quick thoughts. Automation and AI and the future of work. It’s part of our lives now. I’m subscribed, you know, I’m an old guy that shouldn’t be a tech guy, but I’m subscribed to Both Grok and ChatGPT and I use them daily, multiple times, times, each one of them in primarily research. I don’t know anybody that isn’t impacted by this and work today. Do you think that this will create that the efficiencies gained from the utilization of AI and business processes will decrease the need for a certain type of employee, which will exacerbate the commercial real estate problem and change the future for it? Totally.

Liam Martin [00:30:46 ]:
Unfortunately, yes.

Frank Cottle [00:30:49 ]:
Unfortunate though.

Liam Martin [00:30:51]:
Yeah. So this is one that, you know, if I’m honest, there’s going to be a lot of jobs that are going to be lost due to AI. However, if they can move themselves into more creative pursuits, stuff that is really exciting to them, that just lights them up, then that’s even better. And I’m going to give you a very specific example. ChatGPT 3.5 came out and I’m a pretty good copywriter. I’ve put my 10,000 hours into writing ad copy, emails, social media scripts for YouTube videos, all that stuff. And we started testing my email newsletter copy versus ChatGPTs and we identified that it was the same conversion rate, same open rate, same click through rate. So I had a bit of an existential crisis where I said okay, well the things, the thing that I’ve spent the last 10 years getting good at, which is writing convincing copy is no longer anywhere near as relevant as it was for ChatGPT. Now I do things like this right, where it is a one of one task that only I can complete. And before that I was really focusing more on the copy side. So there’s, where there’s directions where people can go, I think. And I’ve been having some really interesting debates with people. I have a very good friend of mine who is the creative director at UBISOFT and he makes, like, all of the Assassin Creed games, absolute AAA titles that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to produce. And one of the things that he was telling me was, I’ve put my 10,000 hours into being graphic artist, but I literally put my 10,000 hours into creating characters by hand on paper. But he now teaches at a few universities, and he said, I would never tell an undergraduate student to put that time into building those images or to. To. To essentially becoming an artist when you can create those same characters through AI and they can be generated and they can be deployed inside of a game. But the issue that he has right now is, and I think this kind of flows into everything thinking about this for quite a long time is its taste. So the ability for him to understand a good character on a computer screen versus a bad one was developed through those 10,000 hours?

Frank Cottle [00:33:31 ]:
Yes.

Liam Martin [00:33:32 ]:
Just like me, I understand the difference between good copy and bad copy. So I Now look at ChatGPT that produces copy for me, and I’ll say, we’re not quite there yet. Whereas someone who doesn’t have that experience can’t do that. Don’t know how to bridge that gap yet, but it is definitely a gap that we’re going to experience. As I would probably say, the next 10 to 20 years, that talent, that skill set will be gone forever. It’ll be the typewriting. You know, we’re going to move from typewriters to personal computers, and then maybe there’s something there, maybe the market’s going to adapt. I don’t know how to cross that chasm right now, but that’s probably the biggest thing that I see.

Frank Cottle [00:34:12 ]:
Well, using the same example, even at all work, we’ve, I guess I’ll say, shifted our emphasis from writers to editors. Editors have that 10,000 hours for taste. In our case, they’re very, very good. And they can take copy that’s been created. We don’t create anything directly 100% from AI, but we are. Everything is AI enhanced. So instead of having 10 writers and one editor, we’ll have three writers and three editors. And we’re still making an advance and putting out twice as much copy or content. But it’s all at that quality standard. And that’s one of the things that AI allows you to do, is to restructure. And you never can get rid of the intuitive, creative side. If you do, it’s all vanilla. It’s awful. Even if it’s structurally correct. You’re missing lots of points. It doesn’t matter where it’s written content, visual content, the development of programming work. To create technology, you have to have a creative stop spark. But you can do the uninteresting work much faster and less costly. And you know, a robot never goes on strike. You might need to lube it or update every once in a while. It doesn’t go on strike. It doesn’t need. You don’t have to pay taxes on their production. You don’t have to do a lot of HR things with that. And I’m just using the fantasy robot example, but that’s where we’re headed is will people that the robot replaces end up being robot repair people. And so we really don’t lose any jobs, we’re just more productive. Yeah, I and may, maybe there’s a swing there. We just don’t know till we get there.

Liam Martin [00:36:22 ]:
For the first time ever, I saw this deck just came out last week. It was a pitch deck for a company that I was looking at investing in. And usually you’ll start to see in pitch decks over the last year or two that they’re using AI as one of their employees, their founding team. But now this is the first time I’ve ever seen this. Their CTO is an AI and their senior engineers are humans. So we may actually see a point in which, when you think about it, it’s actually a very smart way of thinking about how we, we do things. They essentially said the AI is writing the code and then we have senior engineers that are understanding where the code is going wrong and essentially are running the taste, the qa, the quality assurance of that particular code. And that’s how it’s going out. But our engineers don’t write code anymore.

Frank Cottle [00:37:20 ]:
Yeah.

Liam Martin [00:37:20 ]:
And I just thought how crazy is that as a concept to get your head around?

Frank Cottle [00:37:25]:
But you know, our technology team is fairly small. But that’s what we, that’s exactly what we’re doing. You know, we’re hiring a couple more senior people to over overlook the AI programming, if you will, coding that can tweak it and adjust it to our needs because it’s faster and entrepreneur. Honestly, it’s more interesting to the people that are employed. Pounding code is mind numbing. So getting somebody that can be creative, that can edit, that can drive the business purpose more effectively to much more interesting job. So your product managers and your senior engineers, just like our writers are, reduce the number of writers and increase the number of editors. It’s the same thing. This process is going on. Gosh. Any closing, we’re getting running time here. Any closing thoughts you want to share with everybody. Liam, you’ve really had a lot of data, a lot of very interesting points.

Liam Martin [00:38:34]:
Boy. I would probably say that remote work is here to stay. I’m probably preaching to the choir for people that are listening right now, but it’s here to stay and you have to be able to understand how to manage it properly. That’s probably the most important thing that I see with companies that are really having a lot of difficulty with remote and hybrid work is it requires a different management philosophy. I get into that in the book that we wrote two years ago, but to the AI part, AI is not going to replace you, but someone using AI will. So if you’re not doing those two things, adopting remote work and adopting AI, I think the next decade is going to be very difficult for you in terms of your work life balance and your career moving forward.

Frank Cottle [00:39:25 ]:
When you take your new position, you need to bring along your AI assistant. Along with that helps you be productive. I agree with that. And on the. The direction we’re going, you know, I’m in Texas here and I say, so you just got to learn to ride a wild horse because that’s what it’s going to be for a while. And managing it is learning how to management manage it, rather than do I or don’t I. I agree with you. That’s. That’s the issue.

Liam Martin [00:39:58 ]:
Yep.

Frank Cottle [00:40:01 ]:
Liam, thank you very much. Really appreciate your time today. I know you’ve got a great thing going with Running Remote and Time Doctor is also a hugely successful and valuable technology company and all the other things you’re doing. So I’m very grateful to you for the. The time you spent with us today, and I’ll probably hit you up for some ideas later on for sure.

Liam Martin [00:40:24]:
Yeah. Hopefully I’ll see you at Running Remote and we can chat in person.

Frank Cottle [00:40:28 ]:
Look forward to it. Take care.

Liam Martin [00:40:30 ]:
Bye.