Matt Bowles: Hey, everybody, it’s Matt Bowles! Welcome to The Maverick Show! My guest today is Liam Martin. He is a location-independent serial entrepreneur, author, podcast host, and cofounder of Time Doctor, which has become one of the most popular time-tracking and productivity software platforms in use by top brands today. The software was designed to help individuals and organizations dramatically improve productivity and reduce time spent on distractions. Founded in 2012, today, Time Doctor is a seven-figure remote-first business with over 100 staff working from 32 countries. Liam is also a co-organizer of the world’s largest remote work conference, Running Remote, an annual event attracting over 500 people from 40 different countries that teaches next-level, actionable strategies and tactics to manage and grow your distributed team. The conference is a gathering of business leaders who share what’s working for them in running remote-first organizations, and the goal is to provide education and tools that founders and professionals need to succeed in the future of work. Liam’s mission is to empower people to work wherever they want, whenever they want, and his writing on the future of remote work has been published in Forbes, Inc., Fast Company, Wired, The Wall Street Journal, The Huffington Post, and many other publications. Liam, welcome to the show!

Liam Martin: Thanks for having me, Matt. It’s interesting – I’ve done a lot of these podcasts, and I’m always blown away when people can kind of encapsulate your entire life’s work in a paragraph. I don’t know whether or not that’s good or bad, but I get a little bit of a flashback every time someone introduces me on a podcast, so, thank you for taking me back from the beginning of my career to the end today.

Matt: Well, I am super excited to have you here. You have absolutely done a lot of stuff and really contributed quite a bit to this entire location-independent entrepreneurial movement that’s going on here. I’m super excited to dive into a number of things with you, but let’s start off, first of all, by setting the scene in terms of where we’re doing this today because we are not in the same place. Where are you today?

Liam: I am in Ottawa, Canada, which is the nation’s capital, between Montreal and Toronto.

Matt: I know Canada pretty well. I went to high school in Buffalo, New York, right on the border by Niagara Falls, so we spent many a weekend up in Toronto, hanging out up there, so, much love for O, Canada. Today, I am actually in the city of Irkutsk in Siberia, and I am going through Siberia on the Trans-Siberian Railway. We left from Moscow, and we’re going to Ulan Bator, Mongolia, and I’m doing that on the Nomad Train, which is an organized program, so I’m rolling with about 30 other nomads, and we’re probably about two thirds of the way through the trip right now.

Liam: I had heard about the Nomad Train quite a bit, and my biggest concern was the internet situation. I guess you’d be able to tell me in person. Your internet sounds great right now, but how reliable is internet from point A to point B?

Matt: They actually really did a good job in thinking through the functionality of this, and I actually interviewed the Nomad Train cofounder, Maria Sirotkina, a number of episodes back. She’s an amazing serial entrepreneur who’s on the forefront of the co-living movement in terms of her business ventures and a number of other things, including cofounding the Nomad Train, so Maverick Show listeners know her. This is my first time doing the Nomad Train, and they’ve really given a lot of thought to that question. The answer is that while you’re actually sitting on the train while it’s moving, there’s definitely no guarantee that you’re going to be able to access the Wi-Fi or the data per se, but what they’ve done is they’ve structured it in such a way that you do stopovers for two or three nights at each of the major points along the Trans-Siberian Railway, and at each of the stopovers, they have access to coworking spaces. At every single stop, there is a coworking space, so you have access to the Wi-Fi and all of that. So, you basically know in advance exactly what the time blocks are. There are a couple of really long legs. The longest train leg was 37 hours, but usually, they’re 18 hours or less, and they include an overnight, so it’s not insane. You can really schedule your meetings or your calls because you know exactly which hours you’re going to be on the train versus the hours that you’re going to have access to the coworking space, so you can schedule that in advance, and they have broken it up pretty nicely so that people are able to work pretty efficiently, I’d say.

Liam: It’s such an incredibly romantic idea of taking that train across all of Russia, and something that I’ve always thought about, but that reliability has been an issue. It sounds like they’re doing a really great job. It’s interesting – whenever I go to some of these digital nomad events – and, I’ve been to quite a few – sometimes, the internet is great, and sometimes, ironically, for a digital nomad, the internet is not idea. I do eight to nine calls a day. It’s really the core component of what I do with my work, so that is so critical, but it sounds like Nomad Train has really figured it out.

Matt: Yeah, they’re definitely accommodating and structuring it in such a way that at least you know in advance when you can do the calls and when you can’t, so you can do that, but it’s been great, and everybody’s having a blast. It’s a super fun crew. There are about 30 of us here. They’re really interesting people, and the train experience is just amazing. I actually recorded a podcast interview on the train while moving from in the train car. It was just me and another location-independent entrepreneur that I wanted to interview, just having a bottle of wine as the train was moving, and we just had the mics out, recording the podcast, so it’s really been an awesome experience.

Liam: Are there any interesting characters? I think there’s always some drunk Russian guy in the back of the train that’s probably running around the cars and all that kind of stuff. That’s the romanticism of taking the train like that, right?

Matt: Totally. There’s a lot of local experience that you will get, both on the train and in the towns. What’s also cool about the Nomad Train experience is that it’s run by local Russian facilitators who come with you on the train so you have fluent Russian speakers with you at all times, and at each of the stops, you have a local city team – one or two people – who are from that local town in Siberia that are taking you on tours, taking you out at night, taking you to the restaurants and the bars, and all that kind of stuff, so it’s a really cool way to experience it.

Liam: That’s pretty cool. Okay, well, I’m going to go sign up.

Matt: I love it! We’ll drop a link, by the way, in the show notes for anybody else who is interested in the Nomad Train, and we’ll give you a little discount if you want to come on it, but it’s been an awesome experience. Well, let’s jump into this, Liam, because I want to turn the tables here and learn a little bit about you. Let’s just start with your journey to entrepreneurship. As you and I were having some of our preliminary discussions, a couple interesting things stuck out to me. One is that you and I actually share an academic background in sociology, which I thought was awesome and amazing, so I’d love to hear how that factored into your life trajectory. And then, you also mentioned to me that you were a competitive pairs skater, so I would also love to hear about that, and maybe just starting with that, where you grew up, the role that skating played in your life, what that meant to you, and how this whole journey eventually led you to location-independent entrepreneurship.

Liam: Sure. So, very quickly, around the age of 12-13 – as we had already talked about before, I’m Canadian, and in Canada, you do one of two things. You either play hockey or figure skate, and at around 13 years old, they offered me the opportunity to skate around with a whole bunch of cute girls with short skirts, and I went with that option, for some weird reason. We ended up doing quite well. I think at one point, we were in the top 30 worldwide when we were ranked internationally, but unfortunately, around the age of 21, I broke my kneecap during a competition, and I was a carded athlete at that point, so they took away all of my funding and sponsorship, and then, that kind of just allowed me to look at my life in a different way and recognize what I should be doing next. Thankfully, on a prayer, I got into university because I had not actually completed high school because I had been training six to eight hours a day for pair skating. My goal was to be an international Olympic athlete. So, I got into university, and the interesting thing about competitive sports that I didn’t recognize is it creates such a sense of discipline inside of people that – and, I had such a huge chip on my shoulder because I had not completed high school. I ended up doing very well academically, and ended up getting very good marks during undergrad, and then going into graduate school at McGill University, which is one of the top schools in Canada and one of the top 30 or 40 schools in the world. So, I ended up doing that. I had been in university for almost 10 years before they ended up giving me my own class. Towards the end of their career, most graduate students start teaching classes, and this had really been my goal over those last 10 years of education. I wanted to enter academia. I ended up teaching a first-year sociology class, started off with about 300 students, and I ended the semester with a little more than 150, getting some of the worst academic professor reviews in the department’s history. I remember walking 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.” I said, “So, what should I be doing?” He said, “You’ve got to get really good at this teaching thing because you’re going to be doing it over the next 20-30 years, so either get better at the teaching thing, or figure out something else to do.” So, four week’s later, I threw a master’s thesis under his door, I walked away from a PhD, and I was out into the real world, and that actually turned into my first remote-first business, which was an online tutoring business. So, I realized that it was a lot more cost-effective to be able to tutor kids on Skype than it was to be able to tutor them in person, and that grew to dozens of tutors throughout North America and Europe. The problem we were having inside of that business – which was doing well, about $500,000.00 a year – we were having a major issue with regard to clearly quantifying how long a tutor worked for a student. We’d bill a student for 10 hours and the student would come back and say, “I didn’t work with my tutor for 10 hours, I worked with him for five.” So, we’d talk to the tutor and say, “Did you work for Jimmy for 10 hours?” The tutor would say, “Of course I did.” I’d end up having to refund the student for five hours and pay the tutor the full 10 hours, and I lost money on that deal. That was really destroying the business. Enter Time Doctor, which was the tool to completely solve that problem. Basically, it’s a time-tracking tool specifically built for remote teams. That totally solved that issue, so I started that software company with my co-founder, Rob, and eight years later, we’ve got 100 employees in 32 different countries all over the world.

Matt: Wow. So, can you talk a little bit more about the development of Time Doctor and what your process was as an entrepreneur in terms of solving your own problem there? But then, what was the process like to build that, think through all the different aspects of that, and actually deliver the product that’s available today? Maybe you could explain a little bit more about what the attributes of it are today.

Liam: Sure. So, before you even get started on a software product, you’ve got to scratch your own itch. That is so important when building a software product because you’re going to be living with this thing for years. There are going to be some dark times in terms of building a software company, and you have to have the passion to know that this is a problem that I had that was so deeply ingrained in me, so I’m very happy to be able to go through all this crap to be able to get to where I want to be. That’s No. 1. Make sure you’re scratching your own itch. With regard to Time Doctor, for us, it was that problem I had inside of my first business. I knew that if I’d had a tool like Time Doctor, I could have theoretically taken the business to $10 million, but I was stuck at that sub-million-dollar mark just because I couldn’t equate for these lost work hours. Basically, what Time Doctor does is I’m doing a podcast with Matthew right now as a task on my computer. I’ll then take that back to the podcast project that I have – so, I have about 387 podcasts that I’ve done over the last two years. I see it all inside of my Time Doctor. I know down to the penny how much each one of these podcasts has cost me, and more importantly, where I’ve put my time. How much time did I spend on Zencaster versus Gmail versus Zoom versus Skype versus Google Meet, and how much time did Vishaly, who is actually the one who preps these podcasts for me, spend on researching you, Matt, as an example, getting me that two- to three-paragraph document to let me know who you are, where you came from, the context of the podcast, and all that kind of stuff? All that is documented, and I know how much it costs me so that I can then know the exact ROI of anything that I do inside of the business for myself, and also for any other employee that exists inside of Time Doctor.

Matt: Right. And, for companies that don’t necessarily need to or want to, say, monitor their employees or things like that – maybe more of a results-oriented type of business, where they pay for deliverables as opposed to hourly – does Time Doctor still provide value to those types of companies?

Liam: Sure. So, the real kind of – I equate it to Fitbit for work. We use a lot of machine learning and artificial intelligence inside of the work that we do at Time Doctor to really understand not just how long you’re working, but how efficiently you’re working. Let’s say that you had 1,000 real estate agents, as an example, and you were able to tie that back to some type of CRM product, and you know who’s closing the most deals and who’s closing the fewest deals. You would rank all those real estate agents by number of deals closed. Our software would be able to tell you what makes a good real estate agent good and what makes a bad real estate agent bad, and we’d be able to tell you, “It looks like if you spend an extra two hours on the phone on average, you’ll be a much better real estate agent because the most successful real estate agents seem to be spending 30% of their time on the phone, and you’re only spending 15% of your workday on the phone.” So, we look at a lot of that data and try to figure out what the correlations are, and that allows you to become not just someone who works longer, which we don’t personally agree with – actually, in reality, the average U.S. workday is probably about two hours and 36 minutes by our data, and we have tens of thousands of data points in the United States. So, we realized that if you only spend about three hours working on the computer, you should probably go home, because you’re already really overperforming in terms of the actionable work that you’re putting in, and if you work more than that, it actually has really low returns past that point.

Matt: Right. It sounds like even at the executive leadership level – the CEO level and things of that nature – just for people to be able to really audit their own time in an organized way so that they can evaluate what they are doing as business leaders, and then reflect upon how much value they’re getting out of where their time goes, would be valuable in and of itself.

Liam: Right. I do that. I don’t know if they do the same thing in the United States, but in Canada, we have cheap movie Tuesdays. So, on Tuesday evenings, movies are half price, and I realized as I was looking through my data that my Tuesday afternoons and evenings were reporting really badly, and this is because at around 2:00 in the afternoon, the phone calls start. So, my partner Marielle will start calling me and saying, “Do you want to go to Batman or Superman?” I’ll say, “Well, I want to go to Batman.” She’ll say, “Well, we’re going to Superman. Does Fiona want to come to Superman?” “I don’t know. Maybe you should call Fiona.” “Should we go to the 5:30 showing or the 7:30 showing?” It was this constant interruption that was pulling me away from my flow state focus, and I realized that actually, taking Tuesday afternoons off improved my overall productivity, which is quite counterintuitive. No Fortune 500 company would agree with that, but yet, the data is very clear that me working less actually improves my productivity rather than reducing it.

Matt: That’s awesome. That’s really interesting. I think it’s important, though, that people understand that it’s not just about trying to create a work culture of monitoring staff, getting at the privacy and that kind of stuff, but it can be a self-reflective way to audit your own time and evaluate your own deliverables and your own productivity, and therefore optimize, and that there are different ways to use the software. So, I think that’s really interesting. I would love to also hear a little bit about the development of the Running Remote conference. I know you guys are coming up on your third one, I think, and I’d love to hear a little bit about the origins of that conference, what inspired you to create it, and what that conference is all about.

Liam: Sure. So, for us, Running Remote grew out of frustration and scratching my own itch with regard to understanding where remote work is going. We were at our company team retreat about two and a half years ago in Boracay in the Philippines. So, every year, everyone in our company flies into one particular location, and we spend one to two weeks just working on what we’re going to do over the next year. So, we were in Boracay, and we said to ourselves, “We need to hire another 50 people this year. How do we do that? Are there any best practices with regard to remote-first teams?” Inside of remote work, remote-first teams are people who hire remote first, and the counterpoint to that are on-premise teams. For anyone who is an internet nerd, on-premise server racks are what we used to do before we had Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure. No one would do that today because it would be ridiculous, and we have the same concept with regard to staff. So, we had this philosophy that we wanted to be able to hire remotely and we had to hire a whole bunch of people. How were we to do it? We started googling stuff, we looked at stuff, and we said to ourselves, “Man, there’s nothing out here.” There’s a lot of information on how to hire your first employee, maybe how to hire a virtual assistant or something like that, but nothing at a larger scale. We knew there were a few companies out there that were hiring like this, so we said to ourselves, “Let’s do a ready-fire-aim type of situation.” We just cut a check for the venue. The first year, we did it in Bali, which was actually quite beautiful. It was a five-story bamboo tipi named Ubud, Bali, and we rented the space, and we said, “Let’s get a whole bunch of people to come.” Thankfully, we ended up getting a whole bunch of fantastic speakers who were responsive to what we were trying to do, which was really facilitating the growth of remote work. How do you really do that? There are a lot of people who have some interesting perspectives on it, but for me, I really think it boils down to getting Fortune 500 companies to adopt a remote-first work policy so that they can basically empower their employees to be able to work remotely if they want to. That’s where you really start to see remote work accelerate, so that’s the mission statement of the conference: To be able to get more of those companies to understand that remote work is not just a cool employee perk, but it’s actually a complete change to the way that we work, and I see it as a movement that is going to make people happier, less stressed, more productive, and easier to work with.

Matt: Well, let me ask you to expand on that a little bit and give your vision of where you see the future of work going over the next five to 10 years, both in terms of employees and staff as well as entrepreneurs and business owners. Where do you see it going?

Liam: Sure. I could make a very direct statement, if you want. We could go back to this podcast in 10 years. So, in 10 years, I think that the majority of people who work on their computer will be working remotely. I would probably say in 10 years, it’s going to be 80% of the workforce in the United States that works primarily on a computer – basically, people who work out of an office with a computer will be working remotely. The reason why I believe that is you can break down the unit economics of remote work. On average, a remote worker is 40% more cost-effective than an on-premise employee, and it’s a little more difficult to tunnel into those numbers. When you look at it, on average, a remote worker is about 22% more productive than an on-premise employee, and the other factor that not many people know about, which is really important for an employer, is that remote workers have a 30% higher retention rate than their on-premise counterparts. Do you know what the No. 1 reason for someone quitting their job is at any type of office job?

Matt: What is it?

Liam: It is that they have a disagreement with their manager or boss. That’s the No. 1 reason why people quit. It’s not about the pay, it’s not about the environment, it’s not necessarily about their coworkers, it’s their manager. They don’t like their manager or their boss. It’s inter-office politics. Remote work significantly reduces that, therefore making people happier, therefore increasing their retention. In the United States, whenever someone quits their job or you fire them, it costs $42,000.00 on average to replace a lost employee. So, when you boil down the unit economics, they’re 40% cheaper on average to be able to hire, and I see this catching on throughout the entire work industry. As of right now, we’re probably not in it, but within the next three months, we’re going to be in another economic depression or re-correction in terms of the global market, and that’s when I think these large corporations are really understand that they’ve got to cut costs. “Do we cut people or restructure the way we’re working? Let’s try this remote work thing. I think it will be successful.” And, that’s when it’s just going to take off.

Matt: So, in doing three of these conferences, immersing yourself so deeply in the space, and studying this so deeply, can you just talk about how, for the location-independent entrepreneurs or the aspiring location-independent entrepreneurs that are at the earlier stages of their business ventures, can you talk about any tips that you have for building and scaling remote businesses and how to think about that in terms of hiring and managing remotely?

Liam: Sure. I think the most important thing that I see when I deal with clients on the Time Doctor side and when I interact with companies on the Running Remote side is that you need to have your processes in place. Remote businesses have to act like big businesses faster. At any Fortune 500 company, if you have a thousand employees, you have standard operating procedures for absolutely everything, but if you have 10 employees, you probably don’t have a lot of procedures in place. However, if you’re remote, you have to actually do that. You have to put together your SOPs and make sure that they’re solid, and that sounds really overbearing because if you’re a small business owner doing $1 million a year in turnover, you may not have time to do those types of things. Well, there are a couple solutions for that. First, just use something like Google Docs. It’s super easy to get started. I usually look at the biggest time sucks on my day, how I can turn them into a process, and then actually document them, digitize them, and delegate them to somebody else so they can do them for me. That pulls an hour or two off my workday. Secondarily, on top of that, if you are looking for more complete processes or you want to go through this process in a deeper way, there are actually a ton of companies that are doing this already. There are two companies I can mention. One is Trainual. They actually have a SaaS product specifically for standard operating procedures for remote teams, so they’re a fantastic product to be able to check out. Another great story that we got from one of the years at Running Remote is Dmitriy, who is the cofounder of GitLab. GitLab has 800 employees, all remote – they’re a remote-first company – and if you go to about.gitlab.com/handbook, you will actually see the 3,200-page SOP guidebook for how they run GitLab. So, if you want to know how they do a product demo, it’s in there. If you want to know the stock options that you get when you join GitLab, they are in there. Absolutely everything is in there, and Dmitriy has encouraged everyone to steal everything inside of that guidebook so you can pull it out, you can literally grab that information, put it into your own standard operating procedures, and at least you’ve got something to work with, and then your team can work on that and make sure that you are at least moving toward a point in which everyone knows what they’re doing, and a human being is not telling them what to do, but a document is telling them what to do. That’s what we do inside of our business, and it’s so easy because I have people who directly report to me who have a 12-hour difference in terms of meeting times, so I can only meet with them for one hour in the morning and one hour in the evening. It’s so powerful to be able to actually have those SOPs in place to know what everyone is doing, and no one gets confused.

Matt: Can you also talk about your hiring processes, and maybe speak to it on two levels? The first is how do you conceptualize building a 100-person team like you have now from start to finish – employee No. 1, employee No. 10, employee No. 50, employee No. 100? How do you conceptualize scaling and hiring that many people in the order that you hired them? Also, what are your specific hiring techniques in terms of making sure you get the best fit and get the right team members in the right places?

Liam: Sure. That’s a lot, but we can go through it very quickly. When you’re at five people – your founding team – you don’t need any standard operating procedures or anything like that. You should be chatting with them almost every day. My cofounder is from Sydney, Australia. As I said before, I’m from Canada, so we’re on a 12-hour difference, and we still find time to be able to meet every single day and chat about things. So, have that team in place and really close-knit. Once you get 10 employees, that’s when you’re going to see different roles start to pop up so you can maybe start delegating some things inside of the business. Once you’re up to 50 people, you really have to have all your standard operating procedures in place. If you don’t have those in place, you’re probably never going to make it to 100. Once you’re at 100-150, that’s what they call the “tribe number.” Unfortunately, this is inevitable – they stop being names, and they start becoming just roles or numbers. So, everyone needs to have very clear metrics and KPIs so that they know what they’re doing, they know what their definition of success and failure is, and then, you can basically monitor that from a quantitative perspective. In terms of hiring, that process is relatively easy. There are a couple differences between remote and on-premise hiring. We use a tool called Breezy, which is actually really easy. It’s a simple application tool. Whenever we have a new job posting – we actually do have a new job posting that I’m currently working on this week, which is for customer success – we’ll go out to all of our different job boards – FlexJobs, Remotive, We Work Remotely, Tiny Boards, anything that’s a remote-first job board – we’ll put the posting on, and it all folds into Breezy so that all the applicants are in our project management system. We do not proceed with a short list unless we have a minimum of 100 candidates who have applied. We just know that we’re not going to find the quality of person that we’re looking for if we don’t have at least 100 candidates in the queue, and I’m looking at my current customer success posting right now, and we have 121 candidates, and it’s been three days, so we’re definitely in that place. The actual HR director will do an initial review of all the candidates, then I will do a review for culture. So, before we even look at the candidate – and, a lot of times, we actually remove their names from the application process because that will inevitably bias you. There are a lot of data to back that up. We look at what they have done that’s interesting, and more importantly, we look for an example of critical thinking because we work in a tech startup, and you need to be able to think critically and adapt to different situations. That’s basically our culture fit. The other obvious one we look at is whether they like working remotely and whether they’re okay with it. I remember an interview I had with a guy who was a fantastic salesperson, and he said, “Oh, I can totally sell Time Doctor for you, no problem whatsoever. I did $3 million in ARR last year at the last job that I was at, but I definitely want to work in an office. I think that working remotely is stupid.” I was like, “Okay, well, we’re not the right fit, obviously, because we’re selling a product for remote workers, so that’s not going to work out for us.” So, we figure out that culture fit. Then, we break that down to a short list of five to six candidates. Those five to six candidates are interviewed by at least three individuals, then we actually end up hiring a minimum of two candidates for a one- to three-month work stint, and we’ll tell them that two candidates have been hired and they’re not the final candidate. So, we pay them for that, and usually, we work with them for one to three months. During that time, we’re able to identify whether what they’re saying in the résumé is reality, whether they can execute on the work, and usually, we’ll be surprised by that process. Within one to three months, we end up with one single candidate after the three months of work, we have one last meeting, which is with one of their coworkers, their manager, and usually, either me or my cofounder Rob, and we all basically have a “Speak now or forever hold your peace” type of conversation, which is “Why shouldn’t we hire this person? We’re going to hire this person tomorrow. Can you tell me something right now that should stop us from making that decision?” And then, if everyone doesn’t say anything and they say that they’re great, they’re hired, and they become a full-time worker inside of Time Doctor.

Matt: Awesome. That’s a really important and comprehensive process, so thank you for sharing that. Just to expand upon the concept of company culture that you mentioned, I’d love to hear what company culture means to you, and also, how you see the concept of company culture evolving from perhaps what it meant in the traditional office space to what it means in a completely remote company, and any tips you have for remote entrepreneurs on the importance of company culture and how to build it in a remote environment.

Liam: Sure. This is actually something that I talk about quite a bit because a lot of people talk about culture all the time, but they don’t actually know what it is. You’re a sociologist, and so am I, so from a sociological perspective, culture is a shared collection of activities or things that you do that other groups don’t do. My definition of it is what would appear weird to other people that seems like a regular thing to you? We work remotely. That seems weird to the majority of people, but not to us, so that’s a component of our culture. Our culture is focused through our mission statement, and that is that we want to empower everyone on Planet Earth to be able to work wherever they want, whenever they want. All the products we have – Time Doctor, Staff.com, Running Remote – share that core mission statement, and if we get to a point where everyone on Planet Earth has that capability, our work as a company is obviously done, and we can all go home. Anyone who doesn’t believe in that mission statement is really not someone who aligns with our culture, unfortunately, and we’ve had to make a lot of difficult decisions that have been really problematic toward the long-term trajectory of the business – or, at least, the perceived long-term trajectory of the business – because of culture. We’ve had to let go of salespeople or development people who just really didn’t believe in what we were doing. We had a guy who was a relatively new hire who ended up going to one of our team retreats, and I think he had been hired for about five or six months. He went to one of our team retreats, he didn’t like the retreat, and he wasn’t getting along with everybody, so we sat down to a meeting with him in person, and within that hour, we realized that he shouldn’t work in the company, we both agreed to that, and we flew him back home. Those are the examples. You need to be able to get people on the bus and off the bus. The bus is your culture. You need to know whether these people are aligned with the weird things that you do and the mission that you have outside of just getting a check. Another thing that I did earlier on, which we really don’t do any longer, but was great to align people with the culture is within the first three months of working with somebody, we would offer them cash to quit. We would say, “How are things going? You’ve been working with us for three months. What do you like? What do you dislike? What do you think about remote work? What do you think about the company that we’re building? Here’s the deal: Do you want to keep working for us, or do you want me to just give you $5,000.00 right now, and you can leave?” We actually had two people take it out of the 60 people I offered it to, which was pretty funny, but that’s great because that actually gets those people off the bus. So, if you want to take the $5,000.00 right now versus what we want to accomplish, and you’re not excited about that or you’re not excited about the degree to which you wouldn’t take $5,000.00 to be able to keep working on this project, then we don’t really want you working inside of the company.

Matt: Wow. Would you also talk a little bit about how your teams collaborate across 32 countries and all different time zones? What sort of project management infrastructure and collaboration have you built in your company?

Liam: We collaborate very, very carefully. It’s actually quite hard, to be honest with you, to collaborate across 32 different countries. So, we have broken into cells. A lot of our development is located in eastern Europe, as an example, and a lot of our sales is located in the United States. A lot of our support is located in southeast Asia. A lot of our email marketing is located in Europe and Africa. We’re almost compartmentalizing different departments so that there’s more overlap, but at the base level, we all do video calls. It’s really important to be able to do as many video calls as humanly possible. I have a hierarchy of communication for remote teams, which is that in-person is better than video, video is better than audio, audio is better than instant messaging, and instant messaging is better than email. We want to always be able to move up that chain, and hopefully never roll down. As an example, if there are 10 messages that are exchanged on Slack, I will immediately try to turn that into a phone call as quickly as humanly possible because for me, I want to be able to make sure that we are moving the conversation forward. A lot of the time, these little instant messages and emails, these beeps and bops that we get, pull us away from our flow state focus and from being in the zone and doing the deep work that we need to be able to move the business forward. So, in essence, communication needs to happen as quickly and efficiently as humanly possible, and that usually ends up meaning moving up that communication chain as quickly as possible as well.

Matt: Awesome. Liam, I’d like to ask you a little bit more specifically about your sales team and any tips that you have for how remote entrepreneurs – business owners in particular – should think about building a sales department, anything from creating the right sales compensation structure, hiring the right salespeople, and especially, managing and optimizing a remote sales team.

Liam: I think I’ve failed at building a sales team quite a few times, actually. I think it’s probably cost us at least a couple million dollars over the last couple years in false starts, and I think we’ve got a model right now that’s actually pretty good and working quite well, but there were some very unique challenges to building remote versus building an on-premise sales team, and we’ve almost come to a quasi-hybrid model, fundamentally. For anyone who is doing remote sales at a really high level, I’d love to be able to hear more about it because for us, it’s been a very difficult part of our business. We basically started with me running out to southeast Asia because a lot of our clients are BPO companies, which are business process outsourcing organizations, and doing face-to-face sales. That was actually really successful – so successful, in fact, that we thought we should build a sales team. So, I went out and got a guy from San Francisco who I believe was doing sales for Oracle and doing a couple million dollars a year in sales, and I brought him to Manila and set him up with a condo. I spent three months working with him. He had a sales team of about eight or nine people who I had actually built up before him, and after those three months, I handed him the keys to the team and said, “Here you go. Make me tons of money.” Three months later, he came to me and said, “Hey, I can’t do this anymore. This isn’t for me. I’m going back to San Francisco.” That was a real kick to the teeth because it was a quarter of my time out of the game, and I also had to re-adopt that team back inside of the organization, so I had to lead that team again, and for anyone running a remote tech company, realistically, you definitely wear a lot of different hats, and I thought I had put the “VP of sales” hat down, but unfortunately, I had to pick it back up again. I worked on that for about three to nine months. We tried different team leaders inside of that organization, tried a lot of different methods, and we basically boiled it down to the current team leader right now, who is Mick. He developed a process where we take a salesperson that we might want to hire – so, we’ve got SDRs, BDRs, AEs, and our research team – and we pull in all of our AEs – and our SDRs and BDRs, actually – into a physical office for three months. So, if someone wants to work with us, they’ll actually get flown to Canada, they work with Mick personally for one to three months, and they either need to hit their quota – actually, one of two things will happen. Either you’re going to hit your quota and go back to your country of origin within three months, or you will not hit your quota and you will go back to your country of origin within one to three months without a job. So, their goal is to actually hit a quota in front of Mick, and then, once they can hit that quota, we send them back to that country of origin and they work that particular territory. That has seemed to work for us up until this point, but again, sales are one of those things where – we originally have a self-serve SaaS, so our lifetime value is relatively low, it’s only a couple of thousand dollars, so it’s a difficult model to run a sales team off of, but it has been working because of this new tweak that we made, which is really doing that face-to-face time with that salesperson, and once they can work successfully in front of Mick, then we have the confidence to send them back to their country of origin, and generally, they keep their quota after that point.

Matt: When you say “territory,” are they selling remotely, or do they have an actual geographic territory within which they are selling?

Liam: So, they are selling remotely in the sense that they’re all selling from their computers, but they have a territory based on their time zone, so that’s the way that we do it. Also, all of our Colombian sales happen through our Colombian salesperson, which sounds pretty logical, right? Our Brazilian sales, which are in Portuguese, happen through our Brazilian AE, so that’s another massive advantage for being remote-first. You can actually just deploy different territories, and you know that when you pick up the phone, it’s actually going to be a Brazilian, Portuguese-speaking guy answering the phone.

Matt: Right. Can you talk a little bit as well about how your sales and marketing teams work together in terms of generating the leads for the salespeople and what types of marketing tactics are working for you right now?

Liam: I think it would be a little disingenuous to say that we have lightning in a bottle. About 70% of our business is through referrals, and if you’re not there now, then how do you get to that? That’s probably the question that you really want to get to. So, we’ve really overcommitted on SEO – maybe not overcommitted. Our biggest funnel is SEO right now, and I actually think in terms of dollars and cents, if you own a business over 10 years, SEO is still the most cost-effective way to be able to acquire a customer. When you buy Facebook ads, as an example – which we still do – you’re literally renting leads. You’re buying leads this month. But, with SEO, you build the content, you rank for a particular keyword that you know your customer is going to also search, and then, you basically pick up those dividends over the months and years from that particular keyword. So, it takes a while to be able to set up, but once it’s up and running, it really does produce fantastic dividends. Outside of that, we have the Running Remote conference. I actually think conference marketing is pretty hot right now, and if you have the free cash to be able to commit to it – it’s a big commitment. I believe the first one cost us $200,000.00 to start, and we ended up breaking even, but that’s a big commitment to be able to start out, and if you don’t have that type of cash, I would definitely have it in reserve, but the conference has been another way for us to be able to build out partnerships with even larger partners that wouldn’t have spoken to us in the first place that now speak to us because we run a conference on remote work.

Matt: Could you share any specific SEO tips for business owners who want to improve their SEO strategy or want to deploy more resources toward SEO, per the advice you just gave? What tips do you have for effective SEO strategies?

Liam: Sure. There is actually an entire free amount of content that we give away at www.youtube.com/runningremote. I believe it’s about three hours of me and my content editor sitting down and breaking down everything that we do, but I’m going to give you the short version – the five-minute one – which is that we make sure we’ve structured the team properly, and then, by extension, they all have very clear compass metrics – KPIs – that are associated with every aspect of SEO. So, we have our content editor, we have our SEO manager, and we have me, and basically, those first two people report to me, and every month, we get together and build out all of the keywords that we’re going to deploy over the next month, so we’re always about a month ahead. We take those keywords, and we know whether we rank for them by using a tool called Ahrefs to be able to check all that data and what we could rank for that keyword. For anything that has a keyword difficulty of below 20 out of 100, we can usually rank in the top 10. Also, is this a keyword that our customer is actually going to search for? Recently, we just ranked No. 1 for “virtual assistant companies.” If you run a virtual assistant company, you probably are going to want to use Time Doctor at some point, so that’s definitely a keyword we would spend time working on. So, we write all those articles up by our contract writers. I think we have about a dozen contract writers right now. We put out bounties for all those keywords and they write those particular articles. They have to be a minimum of 3,000 words, but realistically, it has to be more than 3,000 words to rank well in the search engines. Once that is done, we take it to our linking team. Our researchers use Ahrefs again, and they identify a minimum of 500 linking opportunities for a keyword. The way that we do that is we grab the top 20 results off the SERPs, which is “search engine results page.” You type in a keyword like “virtual assistant companies” and look at all the people on those pages. Not only do we grab the people on those pages, we basically turn those 20 SERP links into email addresses. We also grab all of the people who have linked to that page, and we grab all of their email addresses. Those generally work out to about 500 people. Then, we throw that into a tool called BuzzStream. BuzzStream is basically a social CRM, so if I’ve interacted with you before and someone else actually wanted to reach out to you, once you type in that email address or URL, you could actually pull in that context, so that we know we’re not stepping on each other’s toes, and we just start an outbound campaign. The way that we do that outbound campaign is we usually do two to three minutes of research into each person we’re going to be reaching out to, saying something like – and, this is usually what most cold email outreach is like – “Hey, Human X, I really liked article X, and you linked to it at this time with this link. You should link to my thing. It’s better.” That generally doesn’t work. You’re probably going to get a success rate of one to three percent, which is actually not that bad. Our success rate is 10 to 15 percent, and the way that we do it is we usually say, “Hey, Person X, we saw that you linked to this article from this article, and we would love it if you could link to our article. We’ve actually already prepped the link or the paragraph that you can add inside of your article. Based off of your site, we also saw that you’re really trying to rank for this particular keyword, and we can actually rank for that keyword because we already have an article that we think is co-associated with the article that you want to rank for, so we already went ahead and put in a link for you. “So, we’ve literally given you a link. You can check it out. Here’s the page; here’s where we link to. We are a DR78 site, which is a very powerful website, and we’d love to be able to work with you.” That usually gets a much higher response rate because we’ve given them something before we’ve asked for something, which is a lot more transactional, and a lot of SEOs will say, “Well, these guys have already linked to me, so of course, I’m going to link back to them.” Once all of that stuff is done, the way that we measure that is through our linking team. We have a metric called “cumulative domain authority.” If you run an SEO team and you just tell people to get you backlinks, they can absolutely do it, but it’s going to be for DR10 to DR20, which is basically a measurement of how important your website is. Google is 100 and a brand-new website is 1, so they’re going to get low-difficulty websites to link to them. That’s actually a pretty bad measure. What we decided was to actually add in the domain authority as the way to measure success. If you get a link to a DR10, that’s 10 points. If you get a link to a DR86, which I know we just got yesterday from Salesforce, that’s 86 points. So, we add up all those points, and we basically run it like a sales team. At the end of every month, somebody gets a bonus for the highest cumulative domain authority. That’s about it. The much longer version is actually on www.youtube.com/runningremote, where we have the entire course, but that’s it in a nutshell.

Matt: Awesome. Well, we will link up to that full video on YouTube in the show notes so folks can just go to www.themaverickshow.com and just go to the show notes for this episode, and we will put up the entire extended video there. I know that I’m definitely going to watch it myself for sure, so we’ll have that linked up in the show notes. Could you talk a little bit more about the Running Remote conference and the next one that you guys are going to do? Where is it, when is it, who is it for specifically – who should attend – and what will they get out of it?

Liam: Sure. So, the next one is going to be at the end of April in Austin, Texas, and I’ve learned that you really have to define who your customer is not before you really figure out who your customer is. This is for building and scaling remote teams. You’re not going to learn anything about being a freelancer or being a digital nomad. This is very specifically for people who manage remote employees or are interested in switching over to a remote-first work policy, and we’re going to be talking about a ton of stuff about how to hire people, how to make sure that they’re happy, and remote company culture. We’re also going to shine a lot of light on big stories connected to remote work to show that it’s possible. As an example, last year, we had Marcie Murray, who’s the director of support at Shopify, and she talked about how she went from zero to 2,000 remote support reps in under three years. She had no remote work experience whatsoever, and they went to, in essence, what is now a remote-first company. A lot of people don’t know this, but Shopify has many more remote employees than they do employees in an office. So, it’s not just for small businesses, it’s for much bigger businesses, and I actually see this conference as a meeting space for what is going to be a massive shift in the way that we work, which is working remotely. If you want to understand that trend before it becomes something that everyone has to do, this is definitely the place to get your crash course.

Matt: Awesome. We’re going to link up to that as well in the show notes, so you can just go to one place and get all the links to all the stuff that we’re talking about, including all the details on the upcoming Running Remote conference. Liam, just to switch gears here, I want to ask you about travel.

Liam: It’s my favorite subject, man.

Matt: I love it, man. There are different ways people can exercise their location independence. Some people just choose to work from home, but some people choose to travel the world and see the world, and I know you have done a lot of traveling. I want to start off with a macro-level question to begin with and just ask you why you travel. What do you get out of it? At this point in your life, what does travel mean to you?

Liam: Oh, boy. I can tell you what just came to my head immediately, which might sound a little weird, but I think it makes me less of an asshole. I think it makes me a more interesting individual that is not just stuck in my little slice of culture, which is Canadian culture. I’m able to expand out into different ways of looking at problems and different ways of dealing with issues. I think that travel adds more layers to your onion, and I think that those types of people are generally people I like to spend a lot of time with, and I think that they think deeply about issues, they think about issues from multiple perspectives, and I generally like hanging out with those people. So, I’m realizing, “Well, wouldn’t I want to hang out with myself more often?” If I was a person at a party, I would want to hang out with somebody who’s been to 60 countries as opposed to someone who’s been to two, so that’s the gift that I think travel gives you. It makes you a more interesting – and, I might even say kinder – person.

Matt: And, how are you currently structuring your lifestyle in terms of travel cadence, how much you’re traveling, how long you’re staying places, and how you’re selecting the places you’re going?

Liam: I use two methods for that. I do a lot of small trips for work. I think I’m going to be in Dublin, Istanbul, Cairo, San Diego, and Vegas over the next month, just two-day zips, and that’s for work. But then, I can get a little bit of a taste of that environment, figuring out whether or not I want to be there in the longer term. My long-term commitment is to spend a minimum of three months – usually in the winter, starting around January and ending around March or April – in another country. Last year, I think we did it in Playa del Carmen in Mexico. The year before that, I think it was Bali. The year before that, I think it was the Philippines. I think it was also Medellín the year before that. We just choose a location and go there. When you talk about being a digital nomad, for me, being a digital nomad is super fun, but it’s also a massive distraction. I don’t travel places on a very quick basis. I’ll usually spend a minimum of one month there, and that allows me to be able to get a one-month rental, which is a lot more cost-effective, but also just allows me to get into the flow of actually living there like a local, which I also think adds such an interesting extra component to the way that you see a particular culture or society. So, once you can get into the trend of “Hey, I’m going to go to this coworking space or coffee shop every day, and I’ve got my little apartment, I’ve got good internet, maybe I hang out in a café or go to this local restaurant and start to develop a relationship with the people that are in my local area,” that’s when you start to understand what a culture is all about, and I don’t think you can do that when you’re popping in for one or two weeks. I basically like longer stays – one to three months per year.

Matt: Yeah, I agree with that 100%. I agree with your rationale, and that’s exactly what I do as well. So, sometimes, I’ll do a quicker-paced experience or event, like this Nomad Train experience on the Trans-Siberian, which is obviously moving at a quick pace, but as soon as that’s done, I’m going to go to Bangkok for a month, then go to Bali for a month, and I’m going to live places for that one-month-plus period for all the reasons you just said. I agree with that entirely. Let me ask you this: What have you found to be the biggest challenges with the nomad lifestyle of working while remote, while traveling, while living in other countries, and how have you learned to mitigate or control for those?

Liam: Well, I would say the biggest one is protection from loneliness. I think that people get pretty lonely on the road. This seems to be a trend that I’m seeing with a lot of digital nomads. The first way that I protect myself against this is I travel with my partner of the last six years. She and I travel the world together. This is something that I think is important for my mental health. Secondarily to that, I just create those connections as quickly as possible. Ten years ago, none of this stuff existed. Today, you’ve got Salinas, you’ve got coworking spaces, you’ve got Regises, you’ve got WeWorks – you can get into a coworking space somewhere and almost immediately make those types of connections, which I think is really great in suppressing the loneliness factor of working remotely. Outside of that, it’s just realizing that you have everything in place, so you can stay productive and fight all of these other variables. I find that distractions are probably my biggest challenge right now when I’m working as a digital nomad and traveling, because I want to do all of these really exciting things, but I have to put in my eight or nine hours a day, and I’ve made it a form of discipline for myself to be able to say I’m going to go into a coworking space, show up at 10:00, and only leave after 4:00 p.m. It allows me to have a good framework in place to know that I’m still doing this no matter what. It doesn’t matter what great opportunities come by; I’m going to make that hardcore work commitment, and then, outside of that, I can do whatever I want.

Matt: Awesome. I’d like to ask you to expand on your productivity habits and tactics a little bit. I’d love to start by asking if you have a morning routine. Are you on the same timeframe every single day? Do you have evening routines? How is your day structured to optimize your productivity and your output?

Liam: The biggest thing that I do is the day before, I write down everything that I’m going to do the next day. What I’ve done recently, which has been a fantastic growth hack for me, is to put it into my calendar. I showed up to this meeting because we had both set it in our calendar, and I knew that I was going to show up for this particular meeting because I want to respect your time and everyone else’s time in putting together this meeting. I do the same thing for pretty much everything else. So, after this, I actually have a block of about an hour to answer emails. I’ve done three podcasts this morning, of which you’re the last one, I did our company all-hands meeting at 7:00 a.m., and after this, I’m doing email for an hour. I’m blocking that out, and that’s been such a huge productivity hack where I respect my personal time blocks as much as I respect a meeting time block. That’s been huge for my overall productivity. Secondarily, once I’m actually in a separate location, as I said before, I’m going to make sure that I’m sticking to all of those things that I’m doing, and then, obviously, I have Time Doctor, which is tracking all of this data, so I’ll be able to go back and say, “How much time did I actually put in, and am I deploying my time effectively, or am I just staying busy?” That’s one of those things that a lot of people unfortunately have, where they’ll just stare at their computer, play around with Facebook and YouTube all day long, but they won’t actually get any work done. I can see that with Time Doctor and know what ratio of my time was productive and what ratio was unproductive. I usually stick to an 80% productivity metric every day.

Matt: Awesome. How do you handle stress, both in your personal life and in business and as an entrepreneur? Any business owner is quite familiar with this concept of the entrepreneurial roller coaster, where things go up and then go down. When you have a major business setback or something that is really stressful, how do you 1). Manage and handle stressful situations and stressful moments, and 2). Approach a business problem or setback?

Liam: Outside of Lagavulin and crying, I think it’s really important to not put all your eggs in one basket. You need to be able to make sure that your self-definition as a person is not just one-dimensional. So, if Time Doctor is down, as an example, and we haven’t hit our quarterly targets, then am I really down in the tubes about that, or am I thinking to myself, “Well, Running Remote is actually doing quite well, and that’s a high point,” or “I was really good at doing squats this month, and I hit a new PR in my squatting at the gym”? You need to be able to have all those different variables in place to protect yourself against one thing going wrong because something will inevitably go wrong, and you just don’t want that to be your world when it does go wrong. Outside of that, I use critical thinking. That’s probably one of the best frameworks that I’ve encountered for understanding how to get out of difficult situations. Just google “critical thinking framework” and you’ll probably be able to go through that entire process, but one of the biggest ones is “What assumptions am I making from my conclusions?” I always think about that when I have a problem that’s happened inside of the business. Why didn’t this campaign work? What assumptions was I making inside of the conclusions that I made that were incorrect, and can I study those and understand whether or not some of those are correct? Maybe they are incorrect conclusions that I’m drawing on, and I need to change that to be able to be more successful. Outside of that, just keep a happy perspective. Make sure that you have people around you who can keep you up, because a lot of times, when you look at entrepreneurship, you are the person who is running everything, who’s responsible for 100 different employees, their salaries, their wellbeing, and their families, so it’s a very important responsibility, and it’s important to counterintuitively not let bad things get you down too much when you end up having something negative happen inside the business.

Matt: Awesome. All right, Liam, at this point, are you ready for the Lightning Round?

Liam: Sure, yeah, I’m all set. Let’s do it.

Matt: Let’s do it, man!

Announcer: The Lightning Round!

Matt: All right, what is one book that has significantly influenced you over the years that you’d most recommend people read?

Liam: Peter Theil’s Zero to One. It is the best framework you can think of for building a very large business, and you should definitely read the book, but the idea that exponential businesses are the only ones that you should build is such an important thing if you want to build a tech product. So, figure out a big blue ocean of customers, something that’s very different, and then, completely dominate that market and become the No. 1 player in it.

Matt: All right. If you could have dinner with one person who’s currently alive today in any field, who would you choose, and why?

Liam: It’s going to be kind of funny, but Peter Thiel’s business partner is Elon Musk. They both built PayPal together. I would have dinner with Elon Musk. I actually think he’s the da Vinci of our time. He’s not the most sociable person from what I’ve read and seen about him, but I think he thinks about things in a way that no one else is currently thinking of. His First Principles concept is such an important framework that I use quite a bit in understanding how to do business, and I just love his vision of the products that he’s building and the companies that he’s building because he’s solving a lot of the world’s problems. I think in a thousand years, no one will really know who someone like Steve Jobs was, but we will remember who brought us to Mars, made us energy-independent, and moved the world off of gas cars to electric cars.

Matt: All right. If you could give one piece of advice to your 18-year-old self, knowing everything you know now, what would you say to 18-year-old Liam?

Liam: So, I’d know everything I know now?

Matt: Right.

Liam: Okay. “Liam, there’s going to be this thing called Bitcoin. Buy as much of it as humanly possible, and once it gets up to about $15,000.00-16,000.00 USD, sell it all.” That’s the piece of advice I would give to myself.

Matt: That’s amazing. That’s a great answer. All right, we’re going to leave it at that. That’s an awesome answer. That is a very creative way to approach the question. All right, we’re going to close it out with a few travel questions. What is one travel hack or travel item that you always bring with you on a trip? Either way, I’d like one piece of travel advice.

Liam: I’m going to give you a two-parter. The best piece of software is TripIt. It allows you to conglomerate all of your different travel tickets into one platform, so if you email yourself a ticket, it will just push it into TripIt. The tool that I used the most for travel, which I’ve loved, is my Anker USB-C 20,000-milliamp-hour backup battery. It charges not only my phone, but my MacBook Pro through USB-C, and with a fully charged laptop, it’s probably going to give me about 30 hours of work time. There is no international flight I’ve taken that has beaten this battery yet. It’s the best physical battery to take with you.

Matt: Awesome. Liam, what are your top three favorite travel destinations that you’ve ever been to?

Liam: No. 1 is Ubud, Bali. It’s so relaxing there, and very spiritual. I’m not a very spiritual person, but I loved Ubud. Their lifestyle is very relaxed. The second top location is probably Montreal, Canada. It’s one of the best places in the world in my opinion. That’s why I spend a lot of time here. The third location would probably be… Just in terms of a location, I had such a fantastic time at the Great Pyramids in Cairo. I’m a history buff. I just love looking at these things. I remember the first day that I ended up being there, I had a hotel room that allowed me to look on the pyramids relatively up close, and I sat there from maybe 4:00 in the afternoon until 10:00 at night, just staring at these things. No matter how big you think it is, it’s bigger when you see it, and it’s just amazing that these things are 6,000 years old, and they’ve survived all of human civilization, and they’re still here. I love looking at those things, and I’d look at them all day long if I could.

Matt: That’s amazing. Egypt has a really special place in my heart as well. I lived in Cairo for about nine months, and it was in the first year that I started nomading, and that was about the third time that I had been to Cairo, and when I lived there for nine months, I got to explore all of Egypt, and there is a lot more amazing and epic stuff as well in other parts of Egypt when you get to explore even more of the country, so I totally agree with that one. By the way, for people who are going to Bali for a long-term stay, do you recommend Ubud over Canggu or other places in Bali?

Liam: I do, but it depends on what type of person you are. If you want to get quiet and relaxed, Ubud is the place to be. If you want to hang out with a lot of other digital nomads, if you want to have tons of different coworking spaces, CrossFit gyms, and party, Canggu is absolutely the best place. Ubud is the opposite of that. There is no party, which is great for me, because I’m just a relatively boring guy. I like a pool, I like a nice villa, and that’s my philosophy.

Matt: Awesome. All right. Last question: Liam, what are your top three bucket-list destinations, places that you’ve never been that are the highest on your list of what you most want to see?

Liam: I’m very interested in checking out Dublin, actually, which is top of mind because I’m going there in two to three weeks, which is going to be cool. I’ve always wanted to go and travel Africa and do a real safari through Africa – maybe “safari” is the wrong word, but travel to a couple different countries in Africa. I think it’s one of those continents that we don’t really pay attention to. I’d love to be able to check that out. I think my third one – you see, the beauty of running a remote business is I can just choose and do it. In January, I’m going to go on a tour of India with a couple other people in the company, and we’re going to be working all together. That’s another one that’s been on my bucket list, but I’m going to be locking them all down – at least, two out of the three – within the next year.

Matt: I love it, man. That’s awesome. I studied abroad in Dublin, lived there for a year, went to Trinity College, and I’ve been back a number of times. It’s a super amazing city. I’m sure you’ll have a blast. If you want recommendations for Africa, I actually just spent five months in Africa. I was in South Africa, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Ghana, and Senegal for about five months. It was super amazing. I wanted to see West Africa because last year, I was in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania, and got a real taste of East Africa, so now, I’m totally hooked. I’m planning my next trip back to see more of it because it’s an absolutely spectacular continent. If you want any tips, hit me up for that, my friend. I want to thank you very much for being here and going as deep as you did with all of the behind-the-scenes stuff for how you do everything that you do, and I want you to let people know how they can find you, follow you on social media, and learn more about what you’re up to. We’re going to link up everything you say in the show notes, but go ahead and tell folks how they can get ahold of you.

Liam: Sure. If you want to check out Time Doctor, go to www.timedoctor.com. There’s a 14-day trial for that. www.runningremote.com is the conference. If you want to get in contact with me, I believe that one of the best forms of social media that exists today is YouTube. We’ve put together a ton of free content on www.youtube.com/runningremote. All of the talks are actually completely free from Running Remote, and they’re being put up there, so you can check that out, and if you comment, if you send me a message through YouTube, I’ll be back to you within hours. It’s the new project that I’m working. I think that these platforms like Facebook and Instagram create too much distraction for me, and I find that YouTube is the most honest version of social media. I feel the ability to be able to communicate to people and have real connections – YouTube is creating a fantastic environment for that, so I’ve been all in on YouTube for the last couple months.

Matt: I love it. Awesome, man. All right, we’re going to link everything up in the show notes, so you can go and get all of those links to everything we discussed in one place, www.themaverickshow.com, and just click on the show notes for this episode. They will all be there. Liam, thank you so much for being on the show, man. This was a blast.

Liam: Thanks for having me.

Announcer: Be sure to visit the show notes page at www.themaverickshow.com for direct links to all the books, people, and resources mentioned in this episode. You’ll find all that and much more at www.themaverickshow.com.

Would you like to get Maverick Investor Group’s whitepaper on real estate investing for digital nomads, how to buy U.S. rental properties from anywhere in the world, and finance an epic international lifestyle? Just go to www.themaverickshow.com/nomad. The report is totally free and available for you now at www.themaverickshow.com/nomad.

Do you want to learn how to travel the world for a year plus with carry-on luggage only and look good while you’re doing it? Go to www.themaverickshow.com/packing to see a free recorded webinar and learn exactly how Matt does it. He shows you the luggage he uses, the specific items he packs, and the travel brands he likes most. Even if you’re just looking to go on shorter trips but pack more efficiently and eliminate your checked luggage, you won’t want to miss this. You can watch the free recorded webinar at www.themaverickshow.com/packing.

[End of Audio]

Duration: 80 minutes