EP026 - How to grow your business remotely with Leon van der Laan of Remode
About the episode
This episode focuses on business growth through operations. I had the pleasure of sitting down with a fellow remote operations consultant, Leon van der Laan, founder of Remode, and discussing how remote operations play a fundamental part in business growth.
About the guest
Leon van der Laan is on a mission to help 1M online entrepreneurs become next-generation leaders and run their businesses on autopilot. With 24 years of experience leading people and teams in companies, he founded REMODE, a boutique consulting agency helping founders with 1:1 consulting on strategy, organization, and leadership.
About the host
My name is Peter Benei, founder of Anywhere Consulting. My mission is to help and inspire a community of remote leaders who can bring more autonomy, transparency, and leverage to their businesses, ultimately empowering their colleagues to be happier, more independent, and more self-conscious.
Connect with me on LinkedIn.
Want to become a guest on the show? Contact me here.
Quotes from the show
Companies that can keep each other aligned asynchronously are the ones that do very well remotely.
The next generation of leadership is about empathy, adaptability, and flexibility. The leader goes introspective and fixes everything that’s not working in the organization.
The stronger your foundations, the higher you can build the building on top of it.
-
Welcome everyone, yet another day to talk about the future of work and the future of leadership. Today we will discuss operations, more importantly, business ops for growing companies. How operation in maturity can reflect back to your growth, how operations should be done for remote companies. To discuss. I have Leon van der Laan, founder of ReMode, a consulting company helping businesses build better organizations and operations. Hello, Leon, how are you?
Hi Peter. I'm very good and I'm very excited to be here on your podcast. I think we have a lot of shared thoughts and ideas in common on remote world. So yeah, super stoked to be here.
I appreciate your time for being here, and I think it'll be a great conversation because we are both operational experts and both coming from the corporate enterprise world. What's your journey? So how did you start? Well, not working remotely, but working in the remote space as well. Yeah. Your company is called ReMode. And during the precall you mentioned that you're coming from the enterprise, so what was your journey?
Well, let's start at the beginning, 16 year old guy carrying bags of potatoes around in a very tiny grocery shop in in Rotterdam, south of Rotterdam. Rough area, you know, don't go out there in the dark because it's dangerous. But yeah, I had a weekend job there. Six o'clock I had to report myself there to, you know, I worked with the vegetables and the fruits. So my mom worked at that time at the growing H&M company, the clothing company, fashion company, right? So they were recently established in the Netherlands, and she convinced me to come there and to join, join this business. I was like, yeah, I don't know. You know, I, it's quite good here in the grocery world, but I did it actually. And after three months they offered me a leadership role. What, I'm 17 years old. Yeah. But you're a good communicator. Okay, well let's try, you know, so I was given leadership function in the weekends, from Friday to Sunday. Lead five students, three girls, and two boys, and okay. So I will, you know, I will do that I thought. But that's when I learned that, you know, leading people or leading teams is actually quite a difficult thing to do. So I learned the hard way, what leadership means, and it also intrigued and inspired me so much that I decided never to go to university. I finished high school, stayed in H&M, worked my way up the corporate ladder moved away from the shop environment that I started and moved to logistics where I had actually mostly an office job because I had a management role. Here you go. Ready? A management office, usually the management sits in the office, right? But it was a very cool career. I grew my, my, my stripes and basically all kinds of different roles in operations management, regional operations manager as well. Taking care of like five warehouses, the day-to-day operations with the local managers there. And then eventually, one of the last things I did there was CFO of the East European cluster of logistic countries. So it was a massive operation, three and a half thousand people. Our biggest warehouse there was like the biggest in the H&M group back then. 120,000 square meter, like massive operation 24 7 whole year through.
Where was that? That was in Posnan, in Poland.
Hmm. Okay.
Yeah, so I lived in four countries for the con for the company, Belgium, Italy, Poland, and then of course the Netherlands, where I'm from. And yeah, that was all great and I learned a ton about leadership and organization because I see operation as part of the organization. We come, we come to that later, right?
Sure.
And yeah, the company wasn't really opened back in 2016, I guess it was for remote work. I was in Africa already back then. I saw that this was going to be the future and I tried to really land it at the leadership level, but without any success. That was one of the reasons why I decided there's more in this world than sitting on the same spot most of my days. I left the corporate, started consulting with instantly the idea like, I want to consult my clients remotely. So I was one of the early adapters to video and everything. I think it was Skype video that I used in the beginning. Yeah, very crappy. Didn't work at all, but somehow I managed right and out of there came to the pandemic hit and then I realized together with back then my co-founder that You know, we have an opportunity here because 99.9% of businesses have no idea what remote work means. So basically in nine months time, we build a six figure consulting business together and helping companies to go remote. That's hence where the first name also came from. Well, things evolved. We have the great return to the office. We can speak about that one as well. And now my consulting business is a bit shifted around. I still have that remote on the backside. Everything I do while consulting my clients on implementing company foundations and also improving leadership is through the lens of remote. Like, I don't care if you don't wanna close your office. I don't care if you work in the office. I wanted you think in terms of your organization, how can it function that I don't need offices to function? That is essentially in a nutshell what I help companies with.
That's, that's an amazing journey. Especially that you started from as you mentioned, logistics. Right? And anyone who worked in logistics they know that the operations within logistics are very streamlined. They have to be. And it's almost like transparent because you need to see everything in order to make sure that you know, how the goods are arriving, coming, going. This is a really transparent operational focused side of the business. So what I'm saying is not HR or something like that. So you mentioned that you work a lot with remote companies as well and leaders. What do you think, what are the biggest challenges that they face? What are the differences between is if there's any differences between a remote first operation? And non remote operations.
Yeah. I love that question. And actually I went in the past two years on the research really to figure out what is the driver, what the main driver, what's the main driver?
Why some companies thrive remotely and others not. My personal perception, my truth is, companies are that are able to keep each other aligned asynchronously are the ones who do very well remotely. So there are companies that already had implemented methods and communication agreements in the team that were not based on let's throw a meeting party together again because we need to discuss something. And at the end of the meeting party, they decide for another meeting next day to follow up. The companies that didn't do that, but kept each other aligned through asynchronous communication methods without having to expect instant response on everything they made the shifts very fast, and I think that's one of the key differentiators, which is it starts at the leadership of course, but it's also sort of reciprocity from the team in order to make that. That is, I think, what's the key differentiator.
Cool. I think the biggest question here is that how to make the change happen, especially if you're a consultant by the way, but let's, like, I mean we can treat it consultancy as a side stuff here but as a leader if you want to implement some sort of like a operational, remote operational finesse into your company mm-hmm. How should you start with the change? What are the steps? Because if I tell you that, okay, you actually need to install a little bit more transference, a little bit more trust, a little bit more a synchronicity. Usually, at least with my clients, usually I get the shaking head. Yeah, that okay, but how Yeah, it's like under steps.
Yeah, exactly. I've experienced exactly the same. And that is like, okay, you have a headache, take a paracetam. Like take a painkiller, right? Like we are trying to solve the symptoms of ineffective remote work that way. But we need to go to the core. And if you want to be very, as a leader, if you want to lead your remote team effectively, you need to double down on clarity around what is our direction of a company? What is our purpose, purpose and direction, right? Purpose is why do we do what we do? How do we believe is the best way to do it? Who are we helping by that? You can translate that into a mission and efficient statement. You can call it different in the end. People need a purpose. In an office that purpose, since we are humans and we have sometimes inexplicable connection with each other on an energetic level, I would even say that purpose is kept alive, sort of naturally. Tribal, I would almost say. Yeah. I think it's really the case. Back in those tribal days, we had a shared purpose unevenly that that was the absolute necessary stuff to make the tribe work. Right.
The purpose was we were part of the tribe, and whatever the tribe did it was the purpose.
It wasn't natural.
It was natural. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like an organism. Yeah, you didn't need to explain.
Exactly, you didn't need to explain it. It was felt by everyone. Just like Ants work. Have you ever seen ants work? It's like, yeah. Yeah. And there are millions of ants, but actually they make up together one organism. Everybody knows from each other what to do. That's amazing. That's what happens in an office or in the ants hive. I really, how do you call it?
I think it's Hive.
Yeah, pile. I don't know. Mountain. The house of the ants.
Yes.
But now you're going remote. You're cutting that connection with people. Okay, problem. How are people going to feel that purpose still, that comes down to leadership. They have to double, triple down on the time spend in keeping that purpose alive.
Can I say the keyword here? Because we might feel that it's or you feel the same way and and that keeps the conversation going. That's intentional. Yeah. So because in, again, I love the reference on the tribes everything is natural. It's unintentional. It just happens. In remote work you have to invest time to intentionally to create, you know, there are several steps, policies, whatever. Yeah. But everything should be intentional. But, and I think that's, again, I, I want to dive deep into the core. How would I know as a leader that I need to have that intention? What are the signs as with a painkiller, for example, that tell me that I need to have a little bit more intentional leader? How would I know what should I do that, how would I know that I need to do something?
Yeah. Well, I will share you what I've seen at majority of the companies I've worked with, right? One of the things, one of the absolute most obvious things is people are working remotely, but they seem to work absolutely not the whole day, probably just a few hours. So why are they not working The rest? Yeah. We don't really know. Okay. Well that's what we need to figure out first. Like how come that they seem not to be able to fulfill their own full day and turns out that people actually don't really know what is next. Like if they have completed their work what should I do? Because they lack this connection to my work, to what is the bigger purpose in the organization. So when you, when you as a leader have the feeling like my people are not really working remotely, go introspective, how clear have I been about what are we trying to achieve this quarter? What are we trying to achieve this month? And what is everybody's part of that this week? Have we clearly communicated, stated, and planned for? Does everybody clearly know why that's the plan for this week and how that fits in the bigger picture? That is a sign, you know, you have to start with yourself as a, as as a leader there. Previously in an office, you can just throw a meeting where you feel like, oh, things are not going like they are. Throw a meeting party or catch somebody at the water cooler, right? Or emergency whatever, meeting. Or just go to somebody's desk and be intrusive there. And the authority of the managers being in the workplace, hence why offices were created in the first place. Huh. Of course, it was an infrastructure issue. Yeah. But it was definitely also a control issue because the first offices were just like a school classes rose behind each other with typewriters, let's say, or whatever not. And there was this guy, or well, mostly a guy actually back in those days sitting on a pedestal over watching the hall where the workers were. That evolves into bean bags, but the essential idea kind of is the same. So yeah, back to remote, that leader needs to look much more introspective, more aware. I call it next generation leadership, empathy, adaptability, flexibility. The leader that goes introspective and everything that's not working in the organization like I believe it should, is something that I should fix from my side. That's much more the case in the remote world.
And, sorry. Because, I totally agree. But one other thing is that I really want to find that core driving force for these people, because people are not very good in planning preparing for stuff. Usually they, most of the people, especially leaders, well, we can argue about what the difference between managers and leaders, but especially, Managers, they're more reactive to problems, right?
Yeah.
So they are not, they are, if you, if you tell them that, okay, so you know, we have this remote work, whatever you need to streamline a little bit more about the operations, yada, yada, in order to prevent this, this, this, this, this. Yeah.
Yeah. I will work on that when I see the problem. But yeah, but as a consultant or or external or whoever, internal as well. It's really hard to argue that if you would prevent intentionally you can prepare for a prevention you wouldn't even face with those, with those issues later on that you are reacting to.
Yeah.
So what would be the main driving force?
Well let's talk about reaction, because I think you're onto something here. What would make somebody react instead of proact? I will answer the question as well. Reacting needs a situation. Something needs to trigger the reaction, right?
Yes.
What is that? My belief is in organizations that don't function well remotely, that reaction is the manager checking in with the person whether or not the work is done. Whether or not there's progress being made, whether or not the targets are being met, whether or not the phone call has been made, we're talking micromanagement.
Yes.
Micromanagement is had nothing to do with bad evil managers who you want to press down the people in the team. Micromanagement has to do, in my opinion, with leaders, managers, not really feeling comfortable with leading people remotely because they're performance measured. So what they do, they try to reach out to their people. They just like in the ant house to make sure that they are bringing in the breadcrumbs.
Yes.
So what happens when a person sitting at home when that person gets within a few weeks already used to the manager checking in reaction, okay, well what happens when the trigger doesn't come? The reaction also doesn't and you get this negative loop downwards of people just sitting and waiting until there is a manager that gives them a trigger so that they can do again, something. That's the issue with leaders falling into that. Yeah. Reactive motives, I think that's how we can call it.
And proactivity is more vision, vision focused I think so when you're proactive or intentional, you're acting upon a vision that might will happen if you don't do this that you are doing right now, or upon a vision that you are trying to achieve in order to intentionally, proactively doing something.
Yeah. So let's say you're, you have great mountains behind you, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So let's say we. We are a bunch of people that were climbing to the top of the mountain there behind you. We don't have to walk all the roots up because we have specialists that know how to rock climb. Then we have specialists that know how to climb through the trees up the mountain, and then yet others swim upstream the river. That will be quite tough, but let's say they're able to do it. So if you are a manager that constantly runs around the mountain, And say, how are you going? Are you making any progress in climbing here? But next you have to go a little bit to the left, and then he runs to the other person. You have to go a little bit to the right and then yet he runs to the other person. Slow down a bit, a little bit because the other ones are not keeping up, right? That is what's happening in a remote organization. The new manager, the next generation manager, sets post signs everywhere on the mountain. For people to find their own ways up the mountain and when they, you know, when they don't have clarity where to go, then they can go back to the home base and figure out like, what should we do? I have a solution, let's go left instead of Right. And not depending on the manager. So in my opinion, the manager in a remote organization is less important on the management side of the people. The manager should manage the operation and make sure that the operation is designed and constructed in a way that people can find their own way up that mountain.
I love the analogy, and just to tie it into a actual, like competence setting, is that the manager's goal is to make sure that the tech stack is working. Make sure that everything that around the work, work happens. And also the people who are climbing the top, the the top of the mountain, shall we say, or working in the organization? They come first to the manager for a little bit of support. If they have any issues. Because the manager is the one who is walking with them to the mountain.
Yes.
Not around them, but the leader, you know, he might be sitting on a home. Figuring out the GPS coordinates and stuff, but still can be approached by others as well.
Yeah. Or the leader gives the arm to people and say I will follow you the next two kilometers up the mountain. You know? Yeah. Because I know that you're having a trouble here getting the mountain up. So I will be there to get you up the mountain. But yeah, that is all gonna change again with now that AI is on the rise, of course.
Yeah.
We need to discuss what are you doing in terms the consulting work. What do you think, what are the, if, if you can give five biggest steps that everyone can and should take to design a better, more intentional, more proactive business operations for themselves.
Okay. You're, you're speaking purely business operations. Yeah.
Well, operations and not leadership.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So absolute's first thing would say let's, let's call it a company wiki, I think that is a term right now, which is widely, widely accepted as a viable term. Everything that the manager knows or does, or everything that the organization knows or does, needs to be instantly accessible by everyone in the organization. That is like absolute number one where everything starts. Yes. And that comes from the onboarding of the person the first minute the person comes on that person has access to What is our purpose? What is our mission? What are our values? What are our goals? Who do we have in the team? You name it. Everything needs to be in there. Protocols that is already 50% of the remote organization is company Wikis. If you ask me you can be even built that inside a Google Drive. It doesn't have to be anything fancy. That's absolute step number one. Not talking about. I mean, that is what I help with actually in a later stage. The absolute first stage is creating the clarity on what is our mountain and what is our top of our mountain. But okay, let's assume that we have already defined that. Yeah. Now we want to translate it into operations. So number two is one source of truth when it comes to workflow management. I'm a fan of Asana. It's not a project management tool, it's a workflow management tool. If you don't know how to use Asana, then it looks like it's up just for projects, but actually you can build full automated workflows in there. Keep everybody aligned automatically. Yeah, if you're a power user on Asana I'm still learning though. But Asana is, is great for that. And when you're setting up a workflow management tool, you must make sure that everyone in the organization, I would say that is definitely number three. Your clarity on responsibilities and accountabilities needs to be triple as clearly defined as previously. And I was flabbergasted at seeing so many organizations I worked with in the past three years that when I ask her who is accountable for, I dunno, something simple as finance reporting yeah, sometimes he does it and sometimes she does it and like, okay, that that doesn't work in a remote organization. So wait, you have a workflow management tool, but if it's not clear who's responsible and accountable for all the pieces of the puzzle in the organization, stagnation on an operational level, right? Number four. The way how you measure your business in a remote organization is different as well. Without overdoing the way. You build up metrics because in the end, you can measure everything, but the question is, do I take decisions on my me measures? But in order to keep a feedback loop with everyone in the organization, everyone needs to see almost in real life how the company's performing. In the different business areas. So I think that even on a monthly level updated, it's enough for most smaller medium organizations. But your feedback towards people on how we are performing needs to be very clearly visualized data. How was our sales? How was our customer performance? How fast did we deliver projects? You name it, whatever is important for your business.
How do we work in general? Like how do we collaborate? What kind of meetings do we have? What should we cut? What should we keep? Yeah. It's super simple.
Yeah. Yeah. How many meeting? Yeah, exactly. Like that's a good one. How many, how many meeting hours did we have last month? Yeah. How many hours have we been spending on just conversating? Whereas 70, probably 75% could be done asynchronously of those meetings. And the fifth one is actually something that I believe is less operational but should be built within the operation. And that is you need to make, as a leader, especially, you need to make your company culture an agenda item. So when I speak with companies, say, oh, we have a great culture in our company. Okay, really, I believe you on the word that you say. Show me your calendar. How much time do you spend per week on feeding that culture then? And there's nothing in there for months. Yeah we have a team event in three months. So that great culture that you have is basically based on hope that it'll be there tomorrow as well. But there are processes to be built inside the organization, operational processes to keep the culture alive. Culture is something organic. Right. It's not something we can measure, measure the culture.
And it's also fluffy a little bit, so it's like, it's really hard to think what it is actually. Yeah. But it's always there. You cannot ignore it.
So yeah, we have a great company culture. Oh, tell me, what is your company culture? Yeah. We play football, table tennis with each other. Okay. That is fun. Yeah, for sure. But it doesn't express your culture. Culture is again, like the ants. The ants have a great culture. How can you say? Well, they work fully in harmony with each other continuously. They have a high level of trust. They know from each other. They engage in conflict when it's necessary. They respect and appreciate it each other is different opinions, but they always choose, you know, the one that's best for the business that a sign that your culture is good. Not whether or not people have fun in the breaks. Playing eating. Yes. Eating a slice of pizza and, and playing tennis. Yeah. So, okay. That's great. What are you gonna do about it? Well, in a remote organization, communicate with the people that are working remotely. And that is , you need to make time as a leader and make sure that if you lead leaders, other leaders as well, other managers, that they also make time. 20% of their time should be around the people centered. Yes. So that changes the whole calendar of a manager, because now you are suddenly, and that's why I'm talking a lot recently also in my content about next generation leadership. AI can replace our operations in an instant in the future. Imagine Asana, powered by like we don't need people to think through processes anymore. But changing the human aspect in our organization's, empathy, vulnerability, flexibility, resilience, probably AI can mimic it, but it cannot replace it, at least not for the next decades.
I love the five points, by the way, but I want to reflect back on all of them with one thing is that, Everyone please, like, calm down. These are not new things. We might name it as new. Like now we have company Wiki. 20 years ago it was an intranet for most of the enterprise companies it's just the, the, the tool and the practice was always there. The only difference is that now we need to design these intentionally because otherwise there won't be anything happening organically in a remote environment. I agree with all the five points. These are super, super, super important.
Yeah, we can probably come up with another 15 or 20, but ...
Well I don't know how your clients are doing in terms of these five points, but according to my last 20 years working with other companies. And I mean, if they would be able to do at least like the first three points properly they would be growing so much better than, than nowadays. Like you said, who like the ba very basic question. It sounds super basic by the way, but not everyone is...
I love basics.
Most of the people don't do the basics One. Like who's doing, let's say you're an agency and who's doing the, the banner ads, or, I dunno, the brochure designs here. Well, we have her and, and Tim and them, and they are doing it together. Okay. But who's managing the very basic principle? Who is responsible? Who is accountable? Yeah. Those are two separate things, by the way. Yeah. Anyway people should do the basics so much better.
I would like to call 'em foundations.
Or Foundations. Yeah, yeah.
You know, basics sounds like, okay, so we're going to degrade ourselves, but foundations can always be stronger because the stronger your foundations, the higher you can build the building on top of it. So every engineer out there who does a technical inspection on buildings start with the foundation, and that's what businesses business leaders should do as well. Always keep on looking at your foundations because the cracks will appear and you need to fix them.
I love this analogy, and again, pain point, you only see when the ends up cracking. So, That you don't want to wait for the building collapse.
Exactly.
What do you think, what do you feel the future for operations? You mentioned ai.
Yeah.
Now I know everyone is more visionary when it comes to five to 10 year plans. But if you can, what do you think? What happens this year and next year? It's a shorter term of visionary thing, so it's harder to.
Yeah.
But still, what do you feel in terms of the market moves and Yeah. And the future?
2020 was a good year for the remote advocacy because it forced companies to experiment and explore remote work. And I think overall the conclusion of it is that, you know, there is an increasing percentage of the global workforce that will actually choose a remote company over a office first company. However, still the great return to office happened, right?
Yes.
Companies are calling people back to the office and I think that's the sort of like that was the first wave, but I think that in the next two years, the second wave is coming because if you design a remote organization well, It is also a more cost effective organization because you reduce the amount of meetings, you reduce the amount of distractions that you have in the office, and you can replace the ideation of people together in a space and having the human connection, you can replace that with intentional events for that, right? But now we're going into a downturn and people even say we have a recession by the end of the year and next year that's going to put the second wave of remote workplace because companies need cheaper labor, so they will look over the borders for cheaper people so we get more international. And that forces the organization to rethink again, how are we going to operate remotely? So I think we're gonna see a next wave in, again, companies coming up for, we need to redesign our organization as a remote first. And having said that, the cost saving aspect of a well operating remote first organization is going to more attractive for companies as well as a sort of second reason why in the next two years we will see an increase again in companies going remote and actually starting to close down offices rather than just keeping offices on the site. I believe that's gonna happen now more. I'm not saying a hundred percent of the companies I read an interesting article that we are now 40% or something is hybrid and or remote first. And 60% is still office based. That percentage is gonna increase quite rapidly. Maybe not by double, but maybe to 50, 60%. That's what I believe.
Well I always ask this question last from everyone how they, how they see the future and everyone is especially within the remote work community, they feel that this year is and then, and maybe the next year is the teenage years, shall we say. So figuring out what the heck is happening and what to do. They do believe that remote will stay. But I think you are one of the most optimistic ones which I like a lot because I think it means a really great business boom as well for consultancies and for people who know and want to know how to manage operations. Because on the second wave there won't be any figuring out thing. So there will be a pain and there need to be a painkiller to do that and to manage that. So I think you are right.
I don't know. Let's see what happens.
Well, I hope you will be right. I don't know about the market conditions.
Yeah.
I do know, by the way, one thing, is that one of the biggest expenses for any company two things. The office and and the people like, you know, like. Yeah. And now that we have international payroll companies, employer record companies and, and so on and so on, it's so easy to actually hire people like full-time employment, not just contract, freelance, whatever.
Yeah.
Anywhere in the world in their preferred local currency.
Yeah.
And if you can offer just 10% more for everyone and you have the talent. And and the second most important cost is the office. And I think one of the main reasons why we see a huge back to the office movement is because big, especially corporates, they are very invested in real estate leases and so on. Yeah. So that will definitely.
Yeah, I think so too.
Cool. Great. That was an inspiring conversation. Thank you for the great analogies and the great examples. Where can people find you?
I'm mostly active on LinkedIn, actually. I post daily content around these topics that we spoke about today. Leadership, organization, productivity as well, even some biohacking. But mostly I would say leadership and organization. Yeah, so I'm always open for a chat there. Connect with me, drop me at dm. If you just wanna have a chat around your organization, I'd be happy to give you some helpful insights.
Perfect. Leon, that was an amazing conversation. Thank you for your time. Appreciate coming.
I appreciate a lot being here. Thank you a lot, Peter.
