It's all about you guys. So, I actually think about this revolving door thing, and I'm like, okay, if the door could be a little less revolving, sure. But imagine if the door was super heavy to revolve. It would require tons of energy. So, if it's going to be a revolving door, why not put less energy into it? That way, at least I get it to be an evolving door, but without all the effort and energy. And, of course, it would be good to make it a little less revolving as well. So, yeah, I just wanted to put that out there. But go ahead.

Tanyette, as someone building partnerships for the company, I imagine you work across the world, trying to develop key partnerships that bring talent, new partners, and sellers to your platform. How has remote work changed the way you work as a partnership director?

Well, I think it's more expansive on a personal level. Many things are covered, and for some of our contractors, I feel like I'm in a flow state more often. There are more opportunities for innovation and innovative conversations because we're not limited to a single geography. Now, we can have partners from all over the world, especially startups in Scandinavia and mainland Europe looking to enter the US market. They can leverage our products as partners. So, it's exciting to know that the world is much bigger. Personally, it improves my quality of life, and I can find what works best for me. I find that I'm more inspired as well. From a sustainability perspective, my carbon footprint is cut in half since I no longer have to commute like I used to in my previous job. In my previous career of 15 years, we had to come in a lot, but towards the end, I was already working remotely more often even before COVID. They had a model to retain their reps for more than five years, with most of them being legacy reps for 15 years. So, there's an alchemy to creating a strong team where it's not a revolving door. I witnessed that in my career. Likewise, the same goes for our team. We're spread out across the world, and in fact, I haven't even met many of the team members myself. I'll finally meet them next month when I go to San Francisco. I'm based in New York, so it's also helping reduce my carbon footprint. I can walk everywhere now instead of having to drive everywhere like in Washington or California. It's been nice with this shift to remote work culture.

Lavie could you tell us more about how your company was founded? Where did you get the idea and what made you start working on it?

Sure. Let's talk about carbon footprint. I started Empire Energy 13 years ago primarily to reduce carbon footprint. It's a great industry to be in. Energy regulation began in the US in the late '90s. I kind of stumbled into it by accident, which was strange. But I really enjoyed what I was doing. In the first four years, I focused on building customer engagement teams and tried many different things to figure out how to build these teams. I had zero experience and didn't even understand customer engagement at the time. I came from a real estate background, managing properties and running operations, which was quite different. Trying to figure it all out on the fly was a challenge. Like, how do A good number of times, primarily from this couple of outfits, is one outfit. Like, I totally got burnt by them doing some shady things. So, a lot of experiences that I went through there, and I'm thinking to myself, "This is, you know, I have a lot of look-at connections at the time and still a connection, like I'm a personalized connection at a large network, and this is like super burdensome for me, like figuring out all these things out. Like, how the heck am I supposed to be doing all this?" And, you know, I did it, and you know, it took years of development, of figuring everything out, and I put it all together. And today, we have over 175 people. You know, full-time W-2 salespeople. I'm saying we have that, and then we have other salespeople too. But, you know, we have customer success teams, but it was really an uphill battle. Like, what average SMB, you're not figuring this thing out so quickly, and it's very difficult to tap into, you know, to hire in-house or to hire overseas. And it just needs to be like this one ecosystem, like this one platform, where you can, like, tap into it. And, you know, based on the industry that you're in, and based on the accent that you need, and the language that you need, and availability, and the rate that you're looking to pay, you can just click, click, find the people, onboard them, and get to, you know, doing whatever custom engagement activity you want to do. So that's kind of like led me, you know, to the idea of, like, you know, we should create this marketplace, this ecosystem of customer engagement.

Yeah, it sounds like a classic entrepreneurial story. You kind of, you know, you're in the problem yourself, and you realize it firsthand and start trying to figure out a way to, you know, solve that. And you realize a lot of people have the same problem, actually. So, yeah, there might be a market there for you to deal with it. Yep.

We actually have a question from the audience as well. Elena, I hope I'm saying that right. She asked about professionals. How do you find a company to work remotely? How do you find a company to work remotely, yeah, not just in sales, but like, in general?

She, it sounds like she might be looking for, you know, as a professional, where can I find jobs that are strictly remote?

Yeah, so if we're talking about sales specifically, she could sign up on Overpass as a contractor and then connect with the marketplace. It's on overpass.com, become an agent. But if you're talking about how do you find remote jobs outside of sales, I don't know. I'll tell you that maybe, yeah, there's a lot of different listings. It depends on what industry she's in, that, yeah, that's a good point. Maybe she'll come back to us with that, and we could revisit that later. Yeah, I mean, if you look at the work as a contractor, if you're looking more for shorter-term gigs, like, there are marketplaces out there, like Upwork or Guru or Freelancer. They're very good for, like, if you're looking to do design or development, programming, copywriting, that type of stuff. Like, good work, I can do more customer engagement, like sales-type of work. That's, that's what we're shot.

Oh, yeah, I know a lot of people that do that full-time. So Types, roles, and types of roles, and also, uh, types of um, uh, you know, just dynamic. I think it's important for you to be under one roof. Yeah, I agree. Um, yeah, I can see more of a hybrid approach, maybe because, you know, I think there is some good work-life balance, especially depending on the job role. Of course, not everybody unfortunately gets the opportunity to work remotely because the work requires you to be in a physical place. But, um, you know, I could see a hybrid work role too in the future because I do think there are some good work-life balance when some people get to do that at home. But I do see a shift back to the office, at least partially, as I agree. Um, because the collaborative nature of being in the office is just pretty effective. So, um, yeah, totally. And like, you know, it's interesting, our content strategists would work on this project, and she needs to be like, "No, she works here in our Brooklyn office," and she's just like, "Okay, I gotta focus, get this thing done," and she's like, "Okay, I'm gonna work from home, you know, the next day, two days, whatever it might be." And then, you know, so yeah, totally. So, you'll have that, you know, that shift where it's like, "Okay, in-office collaborative," but then when I'm just, like, need to get the head into something, knock it out, then I'm gonna work a little bit from home. So, you have that, you know, happening as well, even with the type of, type of, uh, roles that are more collaborative by nature. And, uh, we got Tanya back. Great, yeah, great. Um, we'll get you right into it again. We have another question for you. Um, what are some pitfalls that companies and entrepreneurs should look out for when hiring remote employees? Um, is there any potential red flags or negatives that you've heard of in the past that company owners or managers should address when hiring and managing remote workers?

It starts from the intention behind when you're hiring that person, right? If you're clear about who that hiring persona is, how it's in alignment with your internal culture, how you're going to support them, then you have a higher chance of having success with that hire than when you're just bringing them in with a transactional mindset of managing team members. Because when you're a startup, you want to hire people that are going to inspire you equally, that are coming in, they see the vision, they want to grow with you. That's a way more exciting place to hire from. So, I think the pitfall starts in the intention of how someone's going in to hire in the first place before we throw it on the actual person that's being hired in. And a lot of times, we find people hiring, and they still don't have their processes all thought out, right? They're bringing someone in, and it's still like this deer in headlights moment where they don't even have their sequences all the way down. Then they're not empowering the team. And these are things that I have seen with Overpass. One of our biggest differentiators is that it's not just about customer engagement, but also customer experience. We layer in a team of 20 growth consultants to handhold a potential founder through this process or a business owner that's already overwhelmed. Thanks, Andy, this has been great. We appreciate you bringing us on for this interview.