IAM1453 – Co-Founder and CMO Helps to Further Outsourcing and Insight Into How People Work

Liam Martin is the co-founder and CMO of TimeDoctor.com, and Staff.com and is a co-organizer of RunningRemote.com the largest conference on building remote teams. After working with remote employees for over 10 years, Liam works on furthering outsourcing and is passionate about how to gain insights into the inner workings of how people work.

• CEO Story: Liam started as a teacher, but found out that he was not good at it. Pursued his grad school and started a business doing online tutoring which led him to cofound TimeDoctor.com to solve issues between the student and the tutor – and that made the business scalable. Expanded into other businesses like Staff.com and RunningRemote.com.
• Business Service: TimeDoctor.com not only measures the time they work but also the tasks completed.
• Secret Sauce: Mission advantage – not focused on profit work but for the purposes of what they can learn about it. Product advantage – real passion to pursue insights into productivity.
• CEO Hack: Time Doctor & Twist App
• CEO Nugget: Focus on what you're really good at and double down and triple down. / Working harder will move you forward.
• CEO Defined: Responsibility and freedom (business owner)

Website: http://timedoctor.com
Other Site: http://staff.com
Other Site: http://runningremote.com

Episode Link: https://iamceo.co/2018/10/26/iam094-co-founder-cmo-helps-to-further-outsourcing-insight-into-how-people-work/

Check out one of our favorite CEO Hack’s Audible. Get your free audiobook and check out more of our favorite CEO Hacks HERE

Transcription

The full transcription is only available to CBNation Library Members. Sign up today!

Please Note: Our team is using the AI CEO Hacks: Exemplary AI and Otter.ai to support our podcast transcription. While we know it's improving there may be some inaccuracies, we are updating and improving them. Please contact us if you notice any issues, you can also test out Exemplary AI here.

00:08 – Intro

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEO's without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkness values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is to the CEO podcast

00:35 – Gresham Harkness

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast and I have a very special guest on the show today, Liam Martin of TimeDoctor.com, Staff.com, and runningremote.com dot. Liam, it's awesome to have you on the show.

00:46 – Liam Martin

Thanks for having me, man. I really appreciate it. I also really appreciate that you pimped out three different URL's of mine.

00:51 – Gresham Harkness

I had to. You're doing so many things. So I had to make sure to let everybody know all the awesome things that you're doing. Liam is the co-founder and CMO of timedoctor.com staff.com and is a co-organizer of running Remote, the largest conference on building remote teams. After working with remote employees for over ten years, Liam works on furthering outsourcing and is passionate about how to gain insights into the inner workings of how people work. Liam, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

[restrict paid=”true”]

01:21 – Liam Martin

Absolutely.

01:22 – Gresham Harkness

Awesome. Let's do it. So the first question I have was just to hear a little bit more about your story and what kind of led you to co-found and co-start your organizations.

01:30- Liam Martin

Sure. So I was probably like a lot of people that are in their thirties, I was finishing grad school around 2008, or 2009. I don't know if you know what happened around then, but kind of economy completely collapsed and I was going to actually was teaching a class in university and I thought I was just going to pursue a career in academia. That was really my goal. And then I taught my first class and very quickly realized that I was absolutely horrible at teaching.

I remember I started the first class, I started with about 300 students and ended up with around 150 by the end of the semester. That's really bad, by the way. I got some of the worst professor reviews in the entire department. I remember coming into my supervisor's office and I said, I don't think I'm very good at this. And he said no you're not. And I said, so where does that leave me? He's like, well, you've really got to get good at this teaching thing. If you want to actually enter academia you have to do this for about ten to 20 years before you get to do anything fun.

So I instead submitted a master's thesis. I was at a grad school and then entered another tier of my life, which was doing online tutoring because I figured out that I really liked teaching, but I didn't like lecturing, and that actually turned into a business. So I had dozens of online tutors throughout North America and Europe that were teaching people primarily their pre-med prerequisites to be able to make sure that they got really good marks on those premed prerequisites.

The problem that I had inside of that business was I couldn't scale the business any further because a tutor and a student would have discrepancies in the number of hours that they did. So I would bill a student for 10 hours, and then the student would say, I only worked with my tutor for 5 hours, and then I'd have to go to the tutor and say, hey, did you work 10 hours with the student? And the tutor would obviously say yes.

So I'd end up refunding the student for 5 hours and paying the tutor for the full 10 hours, and I would make no money out of that deal. So Time Doctor, which was one of the first businesses that I really got into that was pure software, was with me and my co-founder, Rob. And it basically completely solves that problem. So it very clearly quantifies exactly how long you worked when you're working remotely and how effectively you actually worked. That led to staff.com comma, our enterprise product, and then running remote, which is really a passion project for me and for the rest of the company, which is trying to figure out how to get more people to work remotely.

Our mission statement as a business is we want to empower people to work wherever they want, whenever they want. So that connects to software, that connects to conferences, and it could connect to a whole bunch of other stuff.

04:08 – Gresham Harkness

The future makes perfect sense. And I wanted to drill down a little bit deeper and hear a little bit more about, you know, time doctor and all the awesome things that you're doing with that organization.

04:16M – Liam Martin

Sure. So time doctor is primarily a tool that doesn't just measure how long someone worked, but what they did while they were working. So it measures all of the variables connected to work. So right now, I'm doing a podcast as my task, and I know that I've been doing this particular task for just, see here, 17 minutes and 32 seconds. At the end of this, I can compare this to all the other podcasts that I've done, and measure exactly how much time I spent on Zoom, Gmail, on Google Calendar, all of those different variables, and then signals will start to jump out of the data, so I can actually make myself a lot more productive.

So all of those things kind of just amalgamate, and we use a lot of machine learning to be able to also understand how people are productive and where they could become more productive. But fundamentally, it's a tool to, number one, measure what people are doing when they work remotely because that's a major component of barriers towards people really openly working remotely, particularly in the large corporate world. And then secondarily, on top of that, let's actually make you more productive while we're measuring all this data.

05:21 – Gresham Harkness

Yeah, and that makes perfect sense. And time is one of those resources that you don't get back. So I wanted to ask you now for either you or your organization, or maybe a mix of both, for what I call your secret sauce, what you feel kind of distinguishes you or sets you apart. So, do you have kind of an example for us?

05:33 – Liam Martin

Sure. I would probably say it kind of boils down to two variables, and I'm going to talk about one as a product advantage, and the other one, which is just sort of a mission advantage. The first one is mission advantage, which is we are not necessarily focused on how much money we make. And I think that that opens us up to other opportunities that we wouldn't have otherwise gone after. So, as an example, running this conference, we have this beautiful conference that we run in Bali. It was the first year that we ever ran it, last year, and it became the biggest conference on remote work in space.

And that was very exciting for us. So it was definitely something that kind of took us back. And for us, we weren't really doing this for the purpose of making money. We were doing it for the purposes of, well, we really want to learn about this, and we're genuinely interested. And then on our product side, for us, me and my co-founder have had a real passion for pursuing insights into productivity. I'm a sociologist by training, and my desire to unlock the secrets of how people work. The insights into work has been something that's been a very strong signal for us throughout the years that we've been working on these businesses. And I think that brings us into other directions that initially we didn't necessarily think were that important, but we really liked them, and we found out that they were critically important. Name and point.

We currently have the largest second-by-second work database on the planet that measures websites, applications, mouse movements, and keyboard movements. So that was useful to our customers, but it's infinitely more useful if you're trying to build an AI to be able to gain insights into how people work and how to make them more productive. We didn't necessarily think about that when we first built it. We just really wanted to build something for ourselves that would make us more productive. But now it's much more effective for us to be able to build out something like that because we have those insights that just for any data would cost tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of dollars.

07:37 – Gresham Harkness

Yeah, absolutely. And it's super interesting because sometimes you don't know where the industry necessarily is going to go. But it sounds like, again, you guys had that maybe if I can call it maybe intuition of what things you wanted to build and you tried to develop something for yourself, and the business kind of developed from that standpoint, but it helped because I guess it was kind of somewhat of a new type of industry. So maybe it wasn't like you had to go from A to B necessarily. There wasn't a direction to take it to that level. Is that correct to say?

08:03 – Liam Martin

Yeah, I think probably for anyone that, let's say, is running a business over a million dollars a year, I would, if you can take 10% of your budget and put it directly into pure research, because that's where you're going to get. If anyone has a million-dollar business right now and you're in software as an example, you pretty much could walk away with over half a million dollars a year in your pocket if you wanted to and you'd be okay. Maybe you'd get to two or 3 million over the next couple of years if you had a pretty good product. But if you take that money and you reinvest it back in the, then you can really have the opportunity to target a $100 million business or a billion dollar business.

And a lot of people go for the short win and cash out and say, yeah, I'm going to get a Tesla and get a big house, when in reality, at least for me, it's a lot more fun to go after these other passions of mine in work. And if one of them pops, you're doing really cool stuff. And that's the other thing that's neat about software too, is that we're doing stuff that governments can't do.

We're doing stuff that just, and you just even look at most of the tech startups today, a lot of them are doing things that maybe governments will catch on to in the next ten to 15 years. So you've got open. You've got open seas, and you can go out and do whatever you want over the next decade, and they're really not going to catch up. So it's a very exciting time and also a very profitable time if you know where to put your energy.

09:32 – Gresham Harkness

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. I wanted to switch gears a little bit and ask you for what I call a CEO hack. This could be an app or resource or a software tool that you use to be kind of super effective.

09:41 – Liam Martin

And efficient other than time doctor, obviously.

09:44 – Gresham Harkness

Yeah. Or you can. You can talk a little bit more about time doctors, and how people can use it, too.

09:48 – Liam Martin

No. So, like, I do use time doctor every single day. It's something that we use as a tool to improve our personal productivity and report back all of our data inside of our company. But I would probably say another one that has been not really well received. Or not, maybe not well received. It's just not known that much is a twist. So I've been using this new app called TwistApp, and it's by the makers of Duist, which is another task management tool. And they have a very interesting philosophy as it applies to instant messaging and remote work. And they believe that synchronous communication is actually really problematic to overall productivity.

And I would tend to agree with them. So we've been using Twist very recently inside of our company, and it's been great because I have not been getting instant messages at 03:00 in the morning that I have to then respond to. And it's this. I call it the distraction economy. Usually online products, the better they are at distracting you, the more money they make. And that's a little disingenuous when you look at where Facebook is right now, Instagram. You know, one of the major reasons why I think Twitter hasn't succeeded is because it's not as visual, it doesn't distract you as much.

Something like Instagram, in comparison, is very visual and it distracts you very quickly and easily. So whoever can distract you the most usually wins, and you are the one that ends up losing. Twist is kind of, in conflict with another very popular app for remote teams right now called Slack. So if anyone really kind of wants to just focus on work and remove distractions from their workday, I would say the twist is one of the best tools to use, and we've been using it at the company with significant success.

11:32 – Gresham Harkness

Nice, We appreciate those CEO hacks, and I think there are definitely things like you said, you know, whoever has the thing that can distract you the most and keep you distracted usually is the most profitable company, so to speak. So I'm glad you kind of touched on that. And I wanted to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. You might have already touched on this, but do you have any kind of additional words of wisdom that you would give to us as entrepreneurs and business owners?

11:54 – Liam Martin

I think that there are two major variables that make you a successful entrepreneur or person in general, but I think it actually particularly applies to entrepreneurship. You either have a work ethic or you're intelligent. So it's one of those two things. And you can read a whole bunch of books that will make you wiser, but it won't actually improve your hardcore just IQ generally. So everyone tries to get better at things that they're not good at, and I would suggest that you do not do that. Instead, just focus on what you're really good at and double down, triple down on it. So if you're not really good at data analysis, as an example, then don't do data analysis.

Hire someone to be able to do it and just work really hard on the things that you are really great at. And you really have to know who you are to be able to know that type of information. I know myself, I'm very quantifiably, and I have a very quantifiable mindset, so I prove everything with data. I'm not as much of a people person, so it's a little bit more difficult for me to be able to create partnerships. As an example.

Well, I have a partnerships manager, someone who actually works with me, to be able to handle the human side of the business, and then I can focus on what I'm really good at. So I had to give you that nugget. It's just focus on what you're really good at. And then once you figure that out, work as hard as you possibly can to be able to maximize it.

13:13 – Gresham Harkness

That makes perfect sense. And, yeah, that's great information. I wanted to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which is kind of the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And I wanted to ask you specifically, what being a CEO means to you.

13:24 – Liam Martin

You asked me that question a couple of weeks ago, and the first thing that popped into my head was responsibility, because there are almost 90 people right now that are in the company, and my responsibility is to make sure that those people don't lose their jobs. Number one. That's the kind of the first emotional snap that came into my own mind. But then I would also say the freedom to do whatever you want, whenever you want, however long you want, with whoever you want. But that's more of a business owner mindset that isn't necessarily the CEO that works inside of it.

But if you're the founder and the CEO, that's a big advantage. And our founder and CMO, in my case, me and Rob, you know, we can choose whether we want to wake up in the morning and go to work or if we want to just sit on the couch and eat Cheetos all day long and watch Ozarks, which, by the way, the second season just came out. It's really good.

14:10 – Gresham Harkness

I heard.

14:11- Liam Martin

So you can just make those decisions and you have the responsibility to the people that you work with to be able to make sure that you're writing the ship. At the end of the day, it really comes down to just making sure that you don't build a business that you hate because then you won't be coming in as often and you'll be doing more Ozark binges instead of focusing on what you really love. But I would say it's my responsibility. But responsibility that I welcome because I'm very excited about what I do in the morning. Something that I get up for and very rarely do I not want to go to work.

14:43 – Gresham Harkness

Makes perfect sense. I love that definition. And Liam, I appreciate you truly for taking some time out of your schedule. To do was pass you the mic, so to speak, see if there's anything additional you want to let our readers and our listeners know, and then also how best people can get a hold of you and find out more about time doctor.

14:57 – Liam Martin

Sure. So if you want to learn more about time, doctor, just go to timedoctor.com. If you want to join our passion project, go to runningremote.com, which is something that I've been very excited about learning over the last couple of months. Just doing a deeper dive into remote work. And if I can leave anyone with just a couple of points of wisdom, in my opinion, working harder is always something that will not pull you back. So if you work an extra hour today, it's only in a worst-case scenario, that you're going to stay exactly where you're at right now. But the chances of that happening are incredibly low.

So if you work an extra hour today, that's what I would suggest you do. Stop listening to podcasts other than this one, stop going onto YouTube videos other than this one that you might be watching, and focus on an extra hour. And be mindful of the distraction economy where trillions of dollars have been spent to be able to try to distract you with what you really want to do, which is continue to build your own business. Focus on that. Keep going. Don't stop until you hit the target, your life. And that's something that I just constantly see, and it's always, in my opinion, the biggest barrier to success.

16:08 – Gresham Harkness

Makes perfect sense. Well, awesome. I appreciate you, Liam, and we'll make sure to have those links in the show notes so that you or anybody can follow up if they're interested. But again, I truly appreciate your time and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

16:19 – Liam Martin

Thank you.

16:20 – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

[/restrict]