13 If you want your virtual team to run like clockwork, then you need to know exactly what to look for in the hiring process. Listen in as Angela Ponsford & Deacon Bradley discuss the key attributes that allowed them to grow beyond a team of 30 virtual professionals across 14 countries & 5 continents.

BONUS: We plan to release more info to help people with the hiring process - and our Insiders will get it first. Join the list, and reply to the first email to let us know you're interested in more hiring stuff.

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12 We've all been there - email overload. But take heart, there's a simple three-part system that will get you through hundreds of emails in just minutes per day.

And you'll never drop another "email ball" again.

Change you email life with today with this highly actionable episode, and then get on our Insider list for more behind the scenes tips on running a business.

Download Our Free Guides

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11 Creating a new product is a hard job. Creating it with a 100% virtual team is even harder.

This week we take you behind the scenes of a new product we created and launched in just five weeks with a team of 13 people across four continents.

We get really practical and share soup to nuts how we organized things, how we communicated, and some of the key actions along the way that aided our success and efficiency.

Resources Mentioned In This Episode

Loom to make all kinds of videos on the fly

Asana to manage the projects (what we use internally for everything)

Sections to organize tasks into logical groups
Milestones to track the big... milestones 😎
Timeline to see how it all fits together
Custom Fields to track the status of a task
Rules to automatically move things along to the next phase

INTRODUCING: How To Scale Your Agency To $100K per Month (& Beyond)

We're hosting a webinar to show off the product we discuss in this episode. If you're an agency or freelancer who helps people with Facebook ads, then you're invited to this live training where we'll show you how we built & scaled Tier 11!

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10 A big fear of any manager is what to do when a team member doesn't do what you needed. In a virtual environment this fear is magnified so intensely that many business owners don't even try to build a virtual team.

In this episode we talk about the keys that have enabled us to build a worldwide high-performance virtual team. Discover the leading indicators to watch out for so you can address a hot spot before it derails a project or account.

You'll also find out specific tactics and phrases we use with our team to smooth things out and increase performance.

Resources Mentioned In This Episode

The One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard

07 Seven Tips For Virtual Managers - Part 1

08 Seven Tips For Virtual Managers - Part 2

09 Six Tips To End Slack Overwhelm

1-Click Slack Status Update

You can set five "1-click" status updates in your Slack workspace. Here are the ones we setup in our workspace at Tier 11.

To change the choices, click "Edit suggestions..." at the bottom of the status menu.

Download our Slack Power User Guide

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09 There’s a maxim I love about email that goes something like this…

Your email inbox is other peoples’ todo list for you.

If you’re not careful, Slack can turn into that on steroids! With a growing team of 40 across 5 continents, it can be a challenge to keep things under control in our business’s Slack workspace. We like to say, “The sun never sets on Tier 11,” because there’s always someone working somewhere. Which means Slack is always buzzing.

So how do you strike a balance between maintaining great communication with your team and never getting anything done?

In this episode, I share six tips you can implement in 15 minutes or less to end Slack overwhelm!

Become a Virtual Business INSIDER & get access to all our guides and behind the scenes tips.

Download our Slack Power User Guide

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08 Are you a virtual manager? We’ve got highly actionable tips to get you headed in the right direction.

These are things you must get in the habit of doing regularly or your team’s performance will suffer. Even if you’re an experienced leader, doing it in a remote environment takes a few tweaks to dial it in.

Be sure you also check out Part 1 of this episode (#07).

Resources Mentioned In This Episode

Radical Candor by Kim Scott
The One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard
03 Slack Tips for Virtual Teams

1-on-1 Questions

Don't stress about the agenda. Having a great agenda for a 1-on-1 is way less important than just doing the 1-on-1 in the first place. Remember, these are coaching calls.

If you're short on ideas or need a jump start to get over that "blank paper" fear, here are some of our favorite questions.

Ang's favorite questions:

What did you learn last week?
What were your big wins?

Deacon's favorite questions:

Tell me about your week this week. What's taking most of your time?
[describe problem], what are we missing?

Ralph's favorite questions:

What can I do to help you?
What do you have today? Problems, issues, etc.

Download our Slack Power User Guide

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07 Seven Tips for Virtual Managers Part 1

New virtual manager? We've got highly actionable tips to get you headed in the right direction.

These are things you must get in the habit of doing regularly or your team's performance will suffer. Even if you're an experienced leader, doing it in a remote environment takes a few tweaks to dial it in.

Resources Mentioned In This Episode

Dare To Lead by Brene Brown
Radical Candor by Kim Scott
Radical Candor Podcast
"Paint Done" - our favorite clarity prompt (from Dare To Lead)
The Effectiveness of Management-By-Walking-Around (HBS)

In The News: Some Fun Stuff This Week

Don't be this guy: Commissioner Resigns After He Threw a Cat During Zoom Meeting

Looking for a quick way to boost moral on your zoom calls? Maybe a goat (or llama) can help. Sweet Farms will drop into a meeting and surprise your team with one of their animals. Oh, and they're actually booked out quite a bit.

Goat-2-Meeting

Become a Virtual Business Insider and get all our guides as they're released!
Download our Slack Power User Guide

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06 Meetings are a necesity no matter the size of your organization. From our experience, meetings are even more crucial in a virtual environment.

Master the techniques and resources in this episode and you'll discover your virtual meetings are even more effective than your co-located meetings.

Resources Mentioned In This Episode

ScheduleOnce: for external scheduling (what we use)
Acuity Scheduling: for external scheduling
Caldnely: for external scheduling
Google Calendar sharing settings (G-Suite)
Wold Time Buddy
Skype Call Recorder

Classic "work from home" fail during a live TV interview 😂

Virtual Business Insiders:
Download our Slack Power User Guide

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05: It doesn't matter if you work in a co-located business or are part of a remote team, project management is crucial to coordinating efforts. We've used our fair share at Tier 11, and evaluated dozens more to find things that work for our distributed team.

Listen in as we share the foundation of what makes a good project management solution for a virtual team.

Resources From This Episode

Podio: Great for structured workflows (our first tool at the agency)
Trello: Simple, agile, powerful. Big projects or small, we love the power and speed of Trello.
Asana: Incredible cross-team functionality & communication tools (our current choice at Tier 11).

03: Slack Lessons From A Worldwide Virtual Team

Show Notes:https://thevirtualbusinesspodcast.com/05-project-management-for-virtual-teams

Virtual Business Insider
Download our Slack Power User Guide

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04: Zoom is such an integral tool to building a high performance virtual team. Before zoom we were a bunch of co-workers and loose acquaintances. But with Zoom we've become close friends (complete with inside jokes and worldwide meetups).

Listen in as we share some of our best tips for using video chat in your business (as well as some advanced tips from Ralph near the end.

Resources Mentioned In This Episode

Zoom! Hands down the best video chat for virtual teams
Zoom scheduling privileges (for assistants)
Zoom integration for Slack

Make sure you install the Google Chrome extension to one-click turn a Calendar meeting into Zoom meeting.

Great microphones for remote meetings

ATR2100-USB: Plug & play, great sound, entry level price point.
Yeti USB microphones: High quality plug & play mics for remote meetings.
BlueParrott B450-XT: excellent noise canceling for on the go calls

Our favorite camera for video calls:

Logitech C920 HD: Higher quality than built in cameras, plus the added flexibility to reposition it more naturally.

Funniest Zoom moment from Tier 11

This one you have to read to believe. Head on over to the show notes to see a screenshot and have a good laugh.

Show Notes for Episode #04:
https://thevirtualbusinesspodcast.com/04-keys-to-a-great-zoom-meeting-experience-for-your-remote-team/

Virtual Business Insider
Download our Slack Power User Guide

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03: Slack is the glue that holds your remote team together. And just like real glue, it can either work miracles or be a total sticky mess! We've done it both ways, and in this episode we share the key elements of our Slack setup that make it an easy to understand & operate machine (even with over 50 channels and counting).

We've seen this done wrong in so many businesses, so please listen in before your team goes back to email and text messages!
Resources Mentioned In This Episode

Using emojis and emoticons in Slack
Adding custom emojis in Slack: Add some culture to your team!
Slack Shared Channels: share a channel with another business’s Slack team 🤯

Virtual Business Insider
Download our Slack Power User Guide

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02: A successful virtual team is built on a strong foundation. The tools we discuss in this episode makeup the core of how we communicate and organize our work across a worldwide team.

Although it will be easy to get up and running quickly with these tools, if not used properly they can turn the dream of a virtual team into a total nightmare!
Resources Mentioned In This Episode

Video Chat:
Zoom: the best video chat available
Google Hangouts: totally works, just not our favorite for pros.

Team Chat:
Slack: The best all around chat tool hands down.
Microsoft Teams: Great if you’re already a Microsoft shop

Documents & Shared Storage:
Google Docs
Dropbox
Box: A bit more “enterprise-y” than Dropbox.

Project Management:
Asana: What we’re currently using.
Trello: A damn good product.

Knowledge Base:
Tettra: Amazing integration with Slack.

Virtual Business Insider
Download our Slack Power User Guide

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01: Our team, Tier 11, has been run as a completely virtual business from the start. We’ve grown from just Ralph and a VA, into a thriving team of nearly 40 located across 5 continents, 14 countries and counting.

Your hosts, Deacon Bradley (VP), Angela Ponsford (VP), and Ralph Burns (CEO & Founder) share the story of how they each went from the corporate world to starting and leading a worldwide virtual team.

Check out our upcoming episodes as we build the must have foundation of your virtual team.

And get on the Virtual Insider list to get our guides & resources.

Virtual Business Insider
Download our Slack Power User Guide

Virtual Business: Recent Episodes

Deacon Bradley, Angela Ponsford, & Ralph Burns

12 We've all been there - email overload. But take heart, there's a simple three-part system that will get you through hundreds of emails in just minutes per day.

11 Creating a new product is a hard job. Creating it with a 100% virtual team is even harder.

10 A big fear of any manager is what to do when a team member doesn't do what you needed. In a virtual environment this fear is magnified so intensely that many business owners don't even try to build a virtual team.

07 Seven Tips For Virtual Managers - Part 1

08 Seven Tips For Virtual Managers - Part 2

09 Six Tips To End Slack Overwhelm

09 There’s a maxim I love about email that goes something like this…

08 Are you a virtual manager? We’ve got highly actionable tips to get you headed in the right direction.

03 Slack Tips for Virtual Teams

07 Seven Tips for Virtual Managers Part 1

06 Meetings are a necesity no matter the size of your organization. From our experience, meetings are even more crucial in a virtual environment.

05: It doesn't matter if you work in a co-located business or are part of a remote team, project management is crucial to coordinating efforts. We've used our fair share at Tier 11, and evaluated dozens more to find things that work for our distributed team.

03: Slack Lessons From A Worldwide Virtual Team

04: Zoom is such an integral tool to building a high performance virtual team. Before zoom we were a bunch of co-workers and loose acquaintances. But with Zoom we've become close friends (complete with inside jokes and worldwide meetups).

02: A successful virtual team is built on a strong foundation. The tools we discuss in this episode makeup the core of how we communicate and organize our work across a worldwide team.

01: Our team, Tier 11, has been run as a completely virtual business from the start. We’ve grown from just Ralph and a VA, into a thriving team of nearly 40 located across 5 continents, 14 countries and counting.