I have not set foot in the LatPro office for over a year. Living 2,000 miles away in Colorado came as quite a shock considering the perfect nine minute commute I previously enjoyed. Furthermore, LatPro moved to a new office in Plantation, Florida last week which I have not seen at all. And yet, despite the recession and level revenue, I see the company growing stronger.
How is this possible? Telecommuting from 2,000 miles away (for health reasons) is challenging, but it has had its silver lining. Our team has always been far flung geographically with key people in Delaware, Florida and Guatemala. But when I could no longer walk into the office and roam around at will, I felt significantly disadvantaged, disconnected and out of touch… at first.
Whether you would like to work from home more often, dream of getting away from your business for a couple months of travel or vacation, or just want to hire the best talent wherever you find it, these are tools I use every day that will take you there:
- ooVoo.com is a web-based video conferencing tool
- Base Camp is a web-based collaborative project management system
- SnagIt is a screen capture and graphic editor program. I started with version 8 and just upgraded to version 9 which is a fabulous improvement.
- Verne Harnish’s Rockefeller Habits is a management system we have used since September of 06 that relies on daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly meetings (we don’t do the monthly yet).
Okay, these tools won’t be of much use if you don’t have a great team of independent-minded, dedicated and loyal professionals as we do.
Have a look at these examples:
Above is a look at the project for our recent office move…
Below is a marked up screen capture done with SnagIt — these get e-mailed or attached to base
camp messages… if a picture is worth a thousand words, then a marked up picture is worth two thousand words!
{ 3 comments }
Very interesting post!. I have a requirement at the moment im doing some research into, its not related to my team, though some of our workers are located in different locations, we tend to be able to follow a pre-determined routine to get client sites delivered (we develop job board software by the way), what im looking into is related to training of the systems we deliver to clients who are located across the globe. I havnt found anything that fits the bill yet, but am looking for something that allows real time screen capture streaming video of a remote monitor, being displayed on a client machine, any suggestions would be appreciated.
Eric, thanks for this. I’m using snagit every single day and loving it.
** es ** Jason, I appreciate your feedback — keeps me going!
Hi Eric – what tools do you use outside of email and basecamp to share files with your distributed team?
We are currently using dropbox, but am interested with alternatives.
Any other tools you are using recently?
**es** Nic, base camp meets all of our filesharing needs very nicely.