On this episode of the RemoteTechPodcast series we interview Ben May from the Code Company. Ben shares his advice on building culture remotely as well as how he has scaled the Code Company from Hervey Bay Queensland to a worldwide audience. Hope you enjoy the interview!

Listen to the Podcast

Watch the Episode

Show Notes

Here you can source all the things we have talked about in the podcast whether that be books, events, meet-up groups and what’s new in the Newcastle tech scene.

• • Ben’s LinkedIn
  • The Code Company’s LinkedIn
  • The Code Company’s website

Find all local Newcastle Technology Events

• Event’s Page

00:00:16:10 – 00:00:25:03
Andy Howard
I’m Andy Howard from Remote Tech people and joining us today is Ben Maye from the Code Company then. Welcome to the show.

00:00:25:08 – 00:00:25:20
Ben May
Hey, Andy.

00:00:27:10 – 00:00:45:12
Andy Howard
Thanks for joining us today. Now, Ben, the Code company is a leading technical WordPress agency, one of only a handful I think, of of WordPress VIP agencies in in this region. Can you tell us a bit more about what the code company does?

00:00:46:08 – 00:01:14:09
Ben May
Sure. So we started a long time ago, back in the days of early WordPress. And over the years we’ve grown into a specialist in the media and publishing space building, publishing platforms powered by WordPress. So we work with media, publishing, content companies, all different shapes and sizes. And basically we use WordPress as a big piece of that as at the core of the technology stack.

00:01:15:15 – 00:01:26:18
Andy Howard
So publishing specialists. And you say you’ve said publishers of all different shapes and sizes. Could you give me some examples of the types of publishers that that you work with?

00:01:27:10 – 00:02:13:02
Ben May
Yeah, I mean, what’s what’s, you know, I guess really interesting about our work is, you know, for something that feels incredibly siloed and niche, the amount of range of different people we work with on a week to week basis. So, you know, whether we’re looking at somebody who, you know, like a pedestrian group that talks to, you know, a younger youth audience in the Australian market to her campus dot com, which is a publication for girls going through college in the United States and is, you know, user generated content and things like this through to more enterprise or corporate applications where, you know, we’re seeing the world of marketing and content kind of fuzing a

00:02:13:02 – 00:02:35:13
Ben May
lot more and content being a play in part of that. So, you know, we’re doing we’re doing stuff for full upstarts that are sort of trying to punch big, big companies that are trying to catch up with what more agile and smaller companies are working with. And yeah, it there’s a ton of variation in what we’re doing, but at the end of it, it’s all or content that we’re working with the back end.

00:02:35:20 – 00:02:56:20
Andy Howard
So it’s all publishing. It just takes many different forms. And. And where are your clients base? You’ve mentioned the pedestrian group who you work with locally. I understand you also work with with nine Mumbrella, some other large Australian publishers. Where are your clients based? Is it is it mostly in Australia? Do you have some overseas clients as well?

00:02:57:13 – 00:03:17:02
Ben May
Yeah, we started obviously being an Australian firm started here and a lot of our work has come out of Sydney and Melbourne as well. So you know, down in Melbourne we have, we worked with Crikey and private media and those, those people down there. We’ve also worked a lot with Arts Hub and Games Hub and, and that group as well.

00:03:17:02 – 00:03:37:23
Ben May
And they’re down in Melbourne, so we’ve got a lot of Australian based clients. But over the years, you know, one of the things that we’ve found, which I think is probably we’ve proven ourselves wrong a little bit, but one of the things we found was, you know, we were hitting a ceiling in Australia of the kinds of clients we wanted to work with and just the sheer scale that the US represents for us.

00:03:37:23 – 00:04:01:16
Ben May
So we started expanding more into the US market and working with publishers over there, you know, a small publication in the state of California has still got a sample size of twice the size of the entire Australian population. So, you know, we’ve grown over there. I think last time I looked about a year ago, we were sitting at about a third of our work coming from the US, and that’s continuing to increase every day.

00:04:01:16 – 00:04:30:02
Ben May
We’ve started to scale a small team over there and sort of calibrating constantly what our what our footprint will look like as we take on that market as well as continue to grow in the Australian market. I think the thing we didn’t realize is, you know, there’s there’s a lot of known clients to go after. And again, what I love about this industry is the unknown ones that come out of nowhere that are incredibly successful, healthy businesses, that the mainstream or just regular people like you and me would never come across.

00:04:30:02 – 00:04:43:19
Ben May
But, you know, there’s a there’s a community for, you know, professional coin valuers or something like that and, you know, have a huge market of and you know, also looking for help. So yeah, there’s plenty of work to go around.

00:04:44:21 – 00:05:00:15
Andy Howard
All of that. Is that what you mean when you say you’ve maybe proven yourselves wrong a little bit. Do you mean you’ve been taken by surprise somewhat at just the scale of publishers out there in the world that need the sort of help that the code company provides?

00:05:01:05 – 00:05:27:18
Ben May
Yeah, I think so. I think, you know, one of the oversimplistic things we thought through was, well, you know, we’re really working with so many of Australia’s largest media company or independent companies, so we sort of sit in the middle space. We’re not working necessarily with the highest, largest brands. We’re a certain size and we sort of have a sweet spot and we’re also working with people who have sort of grown a bit and can afford to engage that expertise in a sort of scale and fashion.

00:05:28:00 – 00:05:42:10
Ben May
And yeah, I guess we’ve probably thought one point we’ve, we’ve outgrown Australia, we need to move overseas. But both are true and both growing in the US and still continuing to have stuff that we never would have thought to come out in Australia as well. So that keeps it exciting.

00:05:43:13 – 00:05:51:17
Andy Howard
Absolutely. And you mentioned you’ve you’ve set up a team in the US. Can you talk me through where the code company’s staff are based?

00:05:52:04 – 00:06:17:16
Ben May
Yes, in Australia, which is 80% of our team, we’ve got people all up and down the East Coast as probably most of the population of Australia is really so from Sydney to I think we’re probably the highest, the Harvey Bay. We did have some people up in Cairns, but yeah, up and down the coast, a chunk in the sunshine Coast, chunk in Brisbane and a couple in Sydney as well.

00:06:17:16 – 00:06:45:18
Ben May
So our team sort of spread up and down there. In terms of the US, we sort of worked backwards from order of needs. So the most important role we wanted to have first was project management and kind of that point of contact for current work from there we then sort of went through the next most important thing is, you know, from a sales business development relationship perspective, someone who’s available a bit more than just what I am getting up early, which is fortunate that I’m an early person.

00:06:45:18 – 00:07:10:23
Ben May
So I, you know, I don’t mind doing that, but that’s not a long term strategy. So the second hire is been more in that sales account management growth sort of umbrella. And then our third one will be something in technology, I guess. So you know, a lead developer to have sort of that skeleton crew over there to represent us and the rest of the team that’s back here doing the majority of the day to day.

00:07:11:07 – 00:07:31:08
Andy Howard
So you have a distributed team across multiple countries. You have a distributed client base across multiple countries. Can you talk me through how you manage the collaboration, both internally amongst the team and then also externally? How do you collaborate with clients that are based all over the place?

00:07:32:05 – 00:07:52:02
Ben May
Yeah, I think one thing that we’ve done fairly well is pick what regions as well we want to work in and not sort of just say we’ll work with anyone everywhere. You know, anyone in Australia will know that you can’t work with both someone in Europe and the US on the same day. It’s a very long day, a very long time spent trying to both.

00:07:52:03 – 00:08:13:08
Ben May
So, you know, we’ve resisted and sort of push back when we’ve had people we want to work with in Europe or the UK or wherever, anywhere on that side of the the planet, because it just doesn’t work that we can do early, middle and late shifts. So one thing was, yeah, it definitely restricts sort of North America and Australia to sort of main time zones we work with.

00:08:13:15 – 00:08:36:12
Ben May
We haven’t wanted to build a full round the clock team and things like that. That’s, that’s definitely, you know, if you want to do it then it’s definitely possible. But that’s a whole different kettle of fish in terms of like collaboration, I think that’s one of the hardest things to manage is, you know, sort of replicating that whiteboard experience in a room and sort of working through ideas and brainstorming and things like that.

00:08:36:22 – 00:08:56:07
Ben May
And sometimes we’ll try and do that if the opportunity arises that the team is is close enough or the client’s available to do it. Well, you know, sometimes we’ll just physically all jump on a plane and go do a few days in a workshop. Great for relationship building, great for just getting through a ton of stuff quickly, but also doesn’t always doesn’t work.

00:08:56:07 – 00:09:17:17
Ben May
If we’ve got a team in Australia and you’re in lockdown and can’t get to the US, you know you have to work through different technology that will allow you to to do the job. So, you know, we’ve worked with a lot of different things and you know, when you start when you start early on, you go through the the decision paralysis of so many different tools that are out there.

00:09:17:17 – 00:09:57:14
Ben May
And the irony lost on how much time wasted on trying to find productivity apps and things to optimize productivity and and perpetually looking and wasting time. So you know we’ve we’ve tried to keep the suite of tools we use to a minimum. You know, we can always try and experiment in the market changes if we’re looking at things like workshops and sort of discovery sessions and sort of those early days in engagement tools like Muro have been really good where, you know, you can sort of either screen share or everyone’s looking at the same thing and work through, you know, posted, noting and just sort of scribbling things down, uploading bits of documents and notes

00:09:57:14 – 00:10:15:23
Ben May
and stuff like that and really to have sort of that loose, unstructured workspace to begin with. Because sometimes anyone in any creative industry, when you start pulling in a thread, you don’t know which way that thread is going to go. And so having it all go into a Google doc, you know, in a for pages doesn’t necessarily make sense.

00:10:15:23 – 00:10:19:02
Ben May
Sometimes the way the information may present itself.

00:10:19:12 – 00:10:48:11
Andy Howard
Sure. And when you’re using a tool like Miro to to recreate that in-person whiteboard experience, how do you physically take these workshops? Are you really taking that offline practice? So the same sort of methodology and approach that you’d use if the team’s jumping on a plane and going to the US and running this in person, are you taking that same sort of facilitation and approach and literally just applying that online through tools like Miro.

00:10:48:18 – 00:11:10:04
Ben May
Yeah, I think to do certain things you need to navigate that are a bit more different, you know, virtually versus physically. Sometimes it’s a matter of calling out, you know, sort of ground rules around these sort of sessions and saying, you know, look, turn slack off, turn ten mobile devices off, things like that. If we’re here to do this, you know, it’s it’s going to be as good as the time you put into it.

00:11:10:04 – 00:11:31:08
Ben May
And if you’re sort of just treating this like another Zoom session and, you know, multitasking or answering a question on Slack and out of the question, then it’s going to result the same, you know, being digital. It does allow you to get away with those kinds of things. If you are sitting in a room together, be a lot more noticeable if you’re on Slack or replying to a few emails in the middle of a a workshop.

00:11:31:14 – 00:12:01:02
Ben May
So, you know, understanding that and sort of just having that honest conversation, but also then being realistic about structuring that, you know, thinking that you could do 4 hours on Zoom is probably unrealistic and going to result in people drifting off or getting distracted. So, you know, we’ve we, you know, constantly playing around with, you know, do we do more short bursts of sessions, do a session will go we work on a collaborate for an hour, come back, do another session, sort of break the day up, break sort of screen fatigue up as well then.

00:12:01:02 – 00:12:02:06
Ben May
So sitting there doing that.

00:12:02:18 – 00:12:29:06
Andy Howard
Is there any sort of format that you’ve uncovered there that works best for you so far, like, say, doing doing an hour or so in in this collaborative whiteboarding environment with your client and then breaking off as a team for an hour or maybe two and then coming back and regrouping with the client and pushing it along further, Is that sort of is that sort of rhythm working for you or is there any other is there any other approach that seems to work well remotely?

00:12:29:21 – 00:12:47:09
Ben May
I think that’s been the best blend of different things we’ve tried is sort of that 2 to 3 sessions a day more, more broken up rather than sort of monolithic ones where people lose be tuning out by the end of it or just everyone looks like they just need to go sit in the sun, just wake up and come back to life again.

00:12:47:09 – 00:13:10:04
Ben May
So yeah, I think it’s knowing that the what we can do online is very different. Sitting in a room, what might take two days online as well. It might take two days in an office, may take a week online, and just having the permission that that’s going to happen. And then, you know, if we if we just be honest and say, look, we’re going to have a few hours, people can go do whatever they need to go do slack, go do email, things like that.

00:13:10:13 – 00:13:18:22
Ben May
And then we’re going to come back and having a more bursts of guaranteed time, rather than having unrealistic expectations that ultimately just let everyone down.

00:13:18:22 – 00:13:43:19
Andy Howard
So got it. And so workshops are one of those things where it sounds like sometimes they can take more time remotely than than in person. For all of these reasons. Is there is there anything from a client management or even a project production point of view that you’ve found where working remotely actually speeds things up rather than slows things down?

00:13:44:04 – 00:14:11:11
Ben May
I think in terms of the the ability to make things go faster remotely is definitely that people can work at different sort of different times, different spaces. People have more autonomy than sort of, I guess the traditional everyone does the same 9 to 5 and things like that. I guess Slack allows a developer or any resource to really shut themselves off to the world, actually be head down and have some work done.

00:14:11:20 – 00:14:45:03
Ben May
So in terms of a collaboration, the ability to sort of tap someone on the shoulder or pick up on visual cues or, you know, whatever sort of environmental cues there may be in those early days, once you start to get a bit of a rhythm, understand a project, understand a goal or a client or whatever else, the ability to sort of move at your own speed and just sort of be heads down and sort of control and manage your disruptions if you’re fortunate enough to be at home and, you know, have your own office or whatever else you want, you turn slack off and turn your emails off, you’re kind of in a bubble.

00:14:45:03 – 00:14:56:00
Ben May
You can go and work as much as you want, so you’ve got anywhere between there and pure distractions manage, you know, your own work, put work and output for anything.

00:14:56:09 – 00:15:09:22
Andy Howard
And, and in a productivity sense. Is there anything that you’ve found has has worked for the code companies staff or for you personally just to maintain this high velocity, high productivity work day?

00:15:10:16 – 00:15:34:03
Ben May
I think especially for, you know, businesses and because we work with businesses that are scaling, you know, things like the things like chaos come naturally to that arena. I’ve we’ve been working with some people who refer to digital agencies as no codes, which is a naturally occurring, chaotic, chaotic organization. And that’s purely by the nature of the work that we do, that it is naturally occurring chaos.

00:15:34:11 – 00:16:06:01
Ben May
So it’s our job to sort of manage and embrace the chaos because at the end of the day, people don’t come to us when everything’s just perfect. There’s a problem or they need something done rapidly or they’re thinking it through. At the same time you’ve worked in agencies, you know all about it. So you know part of that I’ve always thought, you know, especially when we look at some of our more, you know, chaotic clients and chaotic just in the fact there’s a lot of things going on is having a thousand kilometers between, you know, the business and actually someone who needs to get work done is actually a really great firewall sometimes.

00:16:06:01 – 00:16:33:12
Ben May
And being out of sort of restrict communications because, you know, I’ve watched firsthand businesses that do have internal resources as well as work with us. Those internal resources are getting dragged into to 60 different meetings, are getting five minute disruptions in the hallway. The ability, especially for us being technical and primarily development, you know, there is there’s charts and stats and you see that of that five minute interruption can result in 90 minutes of lost productivity.

00:16:33:17 – 00:16:57:05
Ben May
By the time you get back into that flow state, things like that. So for us in development, having that firewall been out of sight, right, I’m working on something for the next 4 hours. Turning off my notifications and just getting on with it is probably the biggest thing. And I as often a benefit for us to say, look, your internal resources are having a efficiency problem because you know, you know, no one’s safeguarding the time from the rest of the team.

00:16:57:05 – 00:17:00:20
Ben May
They’re just getting, you know, pulled out in every, every direction possible.

00:17:01:09 – 00:17:33:15
Andy Howard
It is a beautiful thing about remote work, just that the space, that pure distance can create that level of isolation and then cut off from from some of that inherent chaos that can consume the day to day. If you if you’re right there on the ground in the firing line, it’s nice to have that protection. And are there any other, I guess, habits or tips that that you’ve formed or the team has developed to just stay on track when when working remotely?

00:17:33:15 – 00:17:53:09
Andy Howard
I mean, you’re the CEO, the managing director of of the car company. You’ve got you’ve got staff in multiple countries. Is there any shares from you just on how you manage to run a distributed workforce and maintain that visibility and and help these the whole operation run productively?

00:17:53:20 – 00:18:11:09
Ben May
Yeah, I think any business and I mean we’ve always been always been remote in the sense we were never in a we were never close to our clients like, you know in a regional I’m in a regional area, none of our clients are in this area, let alone in this state for the last 5 to 10 years anyway.

00:18:11:21 – 00:18:36:16
Ben May
So as you as you have sort of, I guess, checks and balances of running the business, those checks and balances sort of have to be, I guess, have a certain amount of trust built into them. A lot of people always, you know, when you talk to agency owners four or five years ago, you know, just mind would explode when you talk about remote as this foreign concept and, you know, you’d get questions like, oh, how do you know anyone’s doing any work?

00:18:36:16 – 00:19:00:22
Ben May
And this sort of stuff which you know, is a very oversimplistic question to ask. But in reality, if if work’s not getting done, if clients are complaining that work hasn’t been delivered, that’s when you’re going to know the work’s not being done. So it’s it’s been an interesting, I guess, starting point that’s helped a lot of people think about the future of work in that whole conversation, which is a whole conversation in the self of, you know, there’s 40 hours a week at a desk.

00:19:00:22 – 00:19:18:14
Ben May
I mean, your working life, you know, you can get get something that was meant to be 10 hours on an an hour is you know, the values being created and things like that. But that’s a again, it’s a whole different discussion in terms of those checks and balances. I think it has to be built on built on trust and good faith that people are working on, you know, working what they’re doing.

00:19:19:00 – 00:19:47:05
Ben May
Obviously, again, we work in software. We can see things like code being committed, even, you know, work in progress, leveraging Agile in the most important parts for us around transparency and openness. We have stand ups with our internal team, but also with our clients. So our clients will see what we’re working on today. If they knew how to, they could look in GitHub or Bitbucket or wherever the work is, but also just, you know, it’s essentially that feeling of like we’re in the same office together.

00:19:47:05 – 00:20:02:03
Ben May
You’ve, you’ve engaged us for the next six months to work side by side, building something we’re not going to go off. You know, that that old agency model of a PM is going to take all the notes. They’re going to copy that, send it to a developer. No one’s ever going to talk to each other and hope for the best.

00:20:02:04 – 00:20:19:03
Ben May
Everyone’s in the same room together. So if you’re not working, then it’s going to come. That’s going to come out pretty quickly and pretty obviously, but it’s also just a better way to work and sort of follows our whole open source, open transparency ethos about everything when we’re working together.

00:20:19:10 – 00:20:42:11
Andy Howard
Great Share And how have you managed to to foster the culture of the code company remotely? You’ve been you’ve been distributed since since day one. I feel like you’ve been in business for over a decade by this point. How have you managed to to foster and and grow this culture in a in a remote first environment?

00:20:42:23 – 00:21:17:15
Ben May
Yeah, I think in the earliest days, like the first couple of employees, we were all in the same office, like in those really early days. And I guess we were we were working remotely without clients because we weren’t going in for face to face meetings and we weren’t sort of popping in. So we were sort of remote. The agency was remote, but we all face to face, I think finding I mean, any anything in this world is finding sort of people who share similar values and understand why we’re going a certain direction and, you know, sort of have been out to have I guess that’s that core team, the old guard of the business that

00:21:17:15 – 00:21:39:20
Ben May
was there in the early days that has been out of sort of help foster that and grow that as we’ve brought other people in. A lot of people have come in and they’ve all got different definitions of what sort of success from this looks like, whether it’s, you know, going surfing at lunch or been out of walk the kids to school in the morning versus doing what it like working the days or the hours or whatever else that that sort of works around their lives.

00:21:39:20 – 00:21:58:15
Ben May
So I think we’ve been pretty good at finding people along the way who you buy into that and see, you know, I don’t want to drive 3 hours a day in and out of the office or whatever else and the trade offs that that affords. So I don’t think we’ve had too many issues along the way, really, with with people buying that, buying that sort of dream.

00:21:58:15 – 00:22:18:18
Ben May
And I think part of that is sort of seeing and being lived out by the rest of our team. You know, we use things like in Slack, a whereabouts channel where people will sort of checking in the morning if they’re off to do the school run off, you know, for 2 hours. It’s not a business of like 25 individual contractors who all I spoke of siloed away from each other.

00:22:19:04 – 00:22:38:06
Ben May
It’s it’s sort of a very collaborative open forum. So, you know, when you see, you know, me going out for an hour or, you know, someone else in sort of the management team off to pick their kids up or, you know, and come back for an hour at night to finish off the day. You understand, like that culture is very open and transparent and it’s not sort of one set of rules for some or others.

00:22:38:06 – 00:23:00:06
Ben May
And there’s no resentment, I would hope, full of people, you know, well, I’m here working, I’m stuck here, I can’t leave. But, you know, so-and-so is going to the gym or whatever else because everyone’s got that flexibility. And ultimately, if they can be accountable to themselves and make it work, then who who are we to micromanage their day and sit over their shoulder that they’re working 9 to 5?

00:23:01:01 – 00:23:30:17
Andy Howard
Yeah, it sounds like it sounds like everyone at the code company feels like they have the permission of flexibility and that that sort of permission and and behavior around culture is is top down and you’re sharing this through your whereabouts channel in in Slack that sort of feels like a really nice way to make it very clear and transparent that flexibility flexibility is all is allowed here and it’s not just allowed, but it’s embraced.

00:23:31:00 – 00:23:50:09
Ben May
Yeah. If you if you think if you played back the other way around, as long as you’re attending meetings that have been scheduled, if you’ve got a meeting with a client and you’re showing up to that, the work that’s getting assigned for a day or a week or a month is getting delivered. It doesn’t matter if you’re doing that on, you know, middle of the night or weekends or whatever else, you know, all of that is kind of arbitrary.

00:23:50:15 – 00:24:18:18
Ben May
So you’ve got that flexibility if you want to take a Friday afternoon off because you’re just not feeling it and you’d rather go and watch TV than do that. And if you want to catch up the next day or catch up the next week, as long as those things are being managed, then you know, as long as people have a bit of autonomy and accountability, then they’re they’re free agents, I guess in that sense, which I think is a pretty obvious thing in hindsight, when you look back at the works getting done, what what benefit does it mean to say you have to you have to push through a migraine and work all afternoon because

00:24:18:18 – 00:24:20:19
Ben May
we need to get the work done or whatever else?

00:24:21:00 – 00:24:28:19
Andy Howard
And how often do all of you meet up in in the same place, or how regularly are team members in the same room together?

00:24:29:03 – 00:24:46:10
Ben May
So we’ve still got a couple of little pods that will probably catch up occasionally. And that’s, you know, people who geographically close. Before COVID, it was probably a bit of a different thing. The last year or two has been a bit of a logistical problem, trying to organize things, but we’ve tried to do sort of two main sort of catch ups.

00:24:46:10 – 00:25:06:13
Ben May
Are you everyone’s in the same room and whether that’s all, you know, picking the most central capital city and everyone shows up there for two or three days to just even sometimes to co work, sometimes we sort of tried to do a mid-year co-working session just a few days of going to lunch and that sort of stuff, as well as more projects and things like that.

00:25:06:22 – 00:25:23:15
Ben May
And then sort of towards the end of the year, sort of what we call like workshops where you know, people are showing what they’ve been doing or sort of, you know, latest technology or software or whatever that may be, and just sort of using those as a few days to sit back in and share and reflect on things that have worked a.

00:25:24:03 – 00:25:38:23
Andy Howard
Nice, good habit. Then just in closing, any thoughts from you around the future of work and potentially how the code company might look to shift the way you’re working remotely over the next year or so?

00:25:39:10 – 00:26:03:17
Ben May
Yeah, I think a lot of good stuff’s happening in that space and sort of decoupling work from, you know, the Industrial Revolution kind of concept of of workers and how we do that, you know, people who are moving to four day week but just still doing the 37 and a half hours over four days. That’s five days. And sort of having that flexibility, you know, as a professional services firm, cutting 20% of your hours.

00:26:04:02 – 00:26:24:21
Ben May
So it just means cutting 20% of your billable hours and revenue. But there’s lots of different ways coming, coming into the sort of more common, commonly accepted by clients that aren’t sort of scaring them off. Obviously, as an agency, if you just say, oh, wages a functioning chaos business where everyone does whatever they want, it doesn’t feel very stable and dependable.

00:26:24:21 – 00:26:44:22
Ben May
And that’s something that if you’re providing a vital service, you want to definitely emulate, that you are a dependable partner to, to, to work with for the time to come. But I think I think the confluence of COVID has been a level set for a lot of businesses. We’ve realized a lot more can be done hybrid or fully remote.

00:26:45:14 – 00:27:04:16
Ben May
I think hybrid is a great mix of that, especially if people if businesses are doing that right for the right reasons, but also what can be done fully remote, realizing that, you know, actually we don’t need to work with someone who’s down the streets, you know, that doesn’t actually save doesn’t that doesn’t create any less risk in a project or an engagement.

00:27:05:10 – 00:27:33:07
Ben May
And that you know, the saying I heard a while ago, which is stuck with me when I explain to people why we go down this path of remote is talent is distributed, opportunity is not. So you know, 15 years ago, if you were a brilliant software developer, you had to move to Sydney or Brisbane, Melbourne to be employed and be paid sort of what you were worth if you lived in a small regional town, you know, middle of New South Wales, there’s not a lot of high end software engineering jobs.

00:27:33:07 – 00:27:54:23
Ben May
So businesses that can capitalize on the fact that talent is everywhere. There’s not just talent in major cities. Talent exists everywhere. That’s that’s why you’re going to be able to, you know, take advantage of the other problem we have at the moment, which is workforce shortages and finding suitably qualified people. You know, and if we’re all looking in the same places, then we’re going to drain those wells.

00:27:54:23 – 00:27:59:12
Ben May
But if we’re starting to look outside that, that’s where more opportunity will lay for sure.

00:28:00:05 – 00:28:05:15
Andy Howard
Absolutely. Then that’s been a very insightful discussion. Thank you so much for your time today.

00:28:06:14 – 00:28:07:14
Ben May
Pleasure and great to chat.