Ep.25 – The Benefits of Remote Working with Chris Bruno

Intro [00:00:02] Welcome to the All About Digital Marketing podcast. The show all about digital marketing, digital marketing, digital marketing, digital marketing brought to you by Social NK, the digital marketing agency specialising in social media and content marketing for brave brands and forward-thinking SMEs. I’m your host, Chris Bruno, and as always, we’re here to bring you the most actionable tips, tricks, tools and insights to help you achieve more when it comes to your digital marketing. Subscribe to the show and be sure to share with a friend if you found something useful or interesting. You can find all the show notes and more information on www.AllAboutDigitalMarketing.co.uk.

Chris Bruno [00:00:53] Hi, everybody, and welcome to a very special episode of All About Digital Marketing. I’m Chris Bruno. I’m your host and I’m also the CEO and Founder of Social INK, a digital marketing agency. And today, I wanted to talk a little bit about the fact that we are a completely decentralised team and what that actually means and looks like. Right now, I’m sat in my hotel room in Bali and I’m currently recording a couple of episodes for the podcast, which is awesome. One of my favourite parts of my job. But I really wanted to talk a little bit about remote working, which a lot of people, especially freelancers, people in the digital space, have the opportunity to do. But not everybody really understands what that necessarily means. When a lot of people talk about remote working, they try to push it away or dismiss it by saying things along the lines of people sitting around at home in their PJs, people not wanting to actually work or people confusing working remotely or working from home with a day off.

Chris Bruno [00:01:51] And I don’t think that’s true of way too many of us. There’s a huge amount of people that are out there that are working from anywhere, whether they’re travelling at the same time, whether they do it from the comfort of their own home, whether they’ve built a small home office, for example. And I think that’s a huge positive. And I’m going to tell you a few reasons why. The first one for me is that I don’t believe productivity comes from being in an office or in a cubicle or even worse, one of those horrible sort of open plan bullpens that everyone kind of seems to have gone down the route of. Having 40 people around me that distract me, that I can hear their conversations and I can hear them talking or anything else doesn’t really help me when it comes to being productive. But it also doesn’t really help me in terms of creativity. Seeing the same place day in, day out, seeing the same people day in, day out, I don’t think is a way to boost that kind of creative spirit and that kind of creative way of thinking that helps businesses to actually identify more opportunities or to experiment and try new things. So from my side of things, I think this is a huge, huge opportunity right now for everybody. If you have that chance or that opportunity to be able to work from home or to be able to work from somewhere else, try to take advantage of it in the best possible way. Go to coworking spaces, work from a cafe, work from different places to try and see which works for you and to find what actually feels good to you as well.

Chris Bruno [00:03:16] As a creative kind of industry. For us, digital marketing, social media, content marketing. I’m amazed by the amount that ends up influencing me from everywhere that I go, places that I see, other people that I talk to, people that I meet. All of these things have an impact in what I do on my day to day and also what we do as a business ourselves. And I think this is something that’s absolutely imperative to so many, especially people that are starting a small business. If you get stuck cooped up at home or you’re not experiencing stuff, you can actually end up missing out or not realising, not capturing the important parts and the opportunities that are out there just by having conversations, just by meeting new people, just by having a chat. And that’s something that, you know, I’m not talking necessarily about networking events or anything else, but just finding different places, different areas, different environments where you can see how you actually work.

Chris Bruno [00:04:12] When people talk and give sort of remote working a bad rap. For me, that really isn’t true. We’re a completely distributed team. I’m currently in Bali, as I mentioned, and I’m actually recording this podcast from Bali. Very little equipment is required. I am in constant contact and communication with my team and my team are based a little bit all over the place in the UK as well. So we have Anna, who is our Head of Social, who’s based up in Hereford. We have Gareth, Head of Content, who’s based all the way down in Devon. We have James, my co-director, who’s actually based in London. Then we also have a development team that are based out of India that we work with on a daily basis. And the communication tools that are at our disposal allow all of us to be more connected than ever before.

Chris Bruno [00:04:58] But in a way that isn’t necessarily distracting or in a way that doesn’t necessarily conflict with what we’re actually trying to do. Technology has allowed us to work from anywhere and the opportunities and the realities of it mean that we can do anything pretty much from anywhere, especially when we work in the digital space. We can communicate, collaborate and engage with hundreds or even thousands of people online really easily through social media, through tools, internal communication tools, through collaborative working with Google Drive, with project management, with software like Asana. We are now allowed to be anywhere and to still have that communication and to still have that company culture whereby we are all in touch. We are all talking together. And actually we get the best parts of absolutely everything. Whether it is constant communication, whether it’s video calls, whether it’s normal audio calls, whether it’s actually getting that time and that little bit of headspace, whilst being abroad, to look at things from a different angle.

Chris Bruno [00:05:58] And I think that’s the most important thing I’m trying to say. If you’re stuck with your small business or your startup and you’re really pushing hard when it comes to, you know, trying to get things to work, trying to unblock those first couple of steps, those first couple of clients, whatever it might be. Occasionally it can be really, really useful to take a step back, change your environment, change your headspace and give yourself a little bit of time to work on the business as opposed to just in the business. And that’s something that I find hugely valuable to what we do as a company, to what we do for our clients, and especially when I do go away and I do get some time to be in a completely new environment whereby I’m not influenced or impacted by any of the usual things that I would see or hear or talk to or anything else.

Chris Bruno [00:06:43] And it allows me to just open up that part of my mind. So I think the real thing here is if you want to have a chance and you can get a chance to work remotely, I strongly recommend it. Remember, it doesn’t mean that you’re off. It doesn’t mean that you’re on vacation, but it does mean that you have an opportunity to really change your environment, which has a huge impact on what you do and how you do it. If you do work remotely currently, we’d love to hear more about it. You can hit us up on any of the social channels or on our website and we’d love to have a chat with you as well to talk a little bit about this and to understand and feel what people are doing and what works for them. Guys, thank you very much. Really happy to be doing this from Bali, as I mentioned again. And I’m super stoked to carry on being the host of All About Digital Marketing. And I’m looking forward to everything that we’ve got coming up soon. Take care.

Outro [00:07:36] The All About Digital Marketing podcast is brought to you by Social INK, a distributed digital marketing agency specialised in delivering results through online campaigns, whether it’s content marketing, social media, marketing, online advertising or web design. We’ve got you covered from strategy through to delivery. If you’re struggling with your digital marketing, get in touch today by simply visiting www.socialink.co