How Entrepreneurs Can Successfully Use A Remote Workforce

The new buzzword in business is ‘remote.’ The world is thinking more home base than an office worker. Who could blame anyone? What’s not to love about working out of your own house, in whatever clothes you want to work? You can have coffee as much as you want, not have to deal with chatty coworkers, and stay out of office politics. For years, many businesses big and small avoided the idea of full-time remote workers, citing the inability to monitor productivity accurately. Still, for the most part, remote workers proved them wrong over the last decade. The gig economy is on fire in America, so now it is time for entrepreneurs to get on board.

How can Entrepreneurs best use a remote workforce to scale as fast as possible? There are plenty of great benefits for a growing company that wants to use a remote workforce as well. First and most obviously, you aren’t paying for expensive office space. Cutting down on that much overhead is no doubt going to put available money in the right places for scaling up. Secondly, many remote workers use their office equipment to work with, mainly if they are contractors. You can also take that line item off of your expenses in those cases.

Entrepreneurs Who Use A Remote Workforce Find Coworking Spaces Beneficial

Small businesses and startups find plenty of assistance, support, and swagger by stationing themselves in coworking spaces, such as Industrious. These swanky office digs offer all the amenities of a top-notch company, perfect for those company meetings and client presentations, but keep the overhead expenses to a minimum by sharing the space and office support with several other small businesses and startups as well.

What is better than keeping the office team and space humming efficiently, and keep your remote workforce army on the battlefield to conquer your market? For scalability to be optimal, combining a remote workforce and the use of coworking spaces blends the best of both worlds. Many of these spaces will even let your remote workforce occupy the common areas of their locations when they need to be somewhere other than home or at Starbucks.

To Use A Remote Workforce Has Challenges To Be Considered

We’ve covered benefits, now onto the roadblocks that may detour your success if you are considering the use of a remote workforce. The most obvious being, if you are the kind of entrepreneur that likes to feel more in control, dealing with a remote workforce, will become challenging in no time flat.

Hiring the right people for such a role takes skill and know-how. It’s easy to get it wrong. You have to decide if you are looking for consultants and freelancers, or a real full-time team that happens to work from home. Most entrepreneurs looking to grow will find out that a full-time team is what is needed to make it happen. Full-timers take a financial investment to keep them, but they stick around. Freelancers have projects, they get paid, and they eventually move on. They are not married to your company or committed to your cause. To grow, you are going to need team players who care about the company’s success.

With full-time team members come the kinds of things they are looking for to stay long-term:

• A career path
• Possibly equity
• A paycheck
• Great benefits

You have to be able to tell remote workers you hire full-time what their pathway to success looks like at your company. You’ll have to be able to convey what commitment to your team looks like for them, not just you.

Many entrepreneurs offer equity as part of the pay structure. This usually happens to keep more cash in the bank, and less of it funneling out of the bank account in the form of payroll. This does not often work well. Being a paper millionaire via someone’s vision doesn’t pay the bills. Cash is king. If you want people to stay, particularly a remote workforce, offer them real, competitive salaries with equity as a bonus for sticking around.

What is top talent looking for besides competitive wages? Benefits. This is where many entrepreneurs drop their pen. How can they afford to scale, run lean and mean, be able to offer benefits? Many entrepreneurs try and wave around equity in their company in place of benefits, so how does this work?

Great benefits may be easier to offer than you think. PEOs are an excellent solution for providing competitive benefits to your remote workforce without killing your profits, especially if they are dispersed throughout the U.S. or even the world.

Trying to deal with HR management with a remote workforce in several states is almost impossible without a PEO. PEOs co-employ your remote workforce, so they are responsible for ensuring compliance with the IRS and state and federal labor laws, so you don’t have to stay up at night worrying about it. What entrepreneur isn’t looking to get that off their plate? Oh, and they do payroll processing too.

You Really Can Have It All When You Use A Remote Workforce

What might have seemed like an impossible dream can be a reality when you combine employing a remote workforce and a PEO. If you want to scale quickly and run as cash flow positive as you can, a PEO is the best option. For more information on how a PEO can work for your company, contact us today.