Remote management of a services business?

November 26, 2020

by a searcher in Berkeley, CA, USA

I am under LOI for a services business (>$4m revenue) and was wondering if folks here have experience with remote management of such teams?

I know many tech businesses and marketing agencies are run fully remote. Staff in older economy businesses like landscaping, facilities management, machine shops etc are unlikely to be familiar with being managed remotely. Perhaps this is also a question about whether I am underestimating the difficulty of changing the culture in the team.

Thanks much for any thoughts!

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Reply by a professional
from Temple University in New York, NY, USA

This thread contains excellent advice on culture and management. I want to advise on establishing a network of virtual machines and email security protocols. In terms of VMs, employees will log into their VM and perform all company related work. The company will control installed software, accessible websites, ingress/egress of data, etc. If for some reason an employee leaves the business, you mitigate the risk of company data leaving with them. In our current remote culture, there is a multitude of risks with employees conducting work related tasks on personal laptops. Remote setups typically rely on heavy email usage. Email security protocols should be setup to reduce the risk of ransomware attacks.

If you are interested in having an offline conversation, feel free to email me at redacted

Reply by a searcher
from University of Akron in Houston, TX, USA

I run a service company. I would suggest “on the ground” leadership at least at first because you don’t know what you don’t know. In the early days most of what’ll you’ll learn about the business will come from informal observations, not formal conversations - which is what zoom lends itself to. You want to be able to show up to a job site with ice cream or water for your crews and they open up and tell you what the REAL DEAL is, not the sales pitch you read in the CIM. In a business like this, you’ll have to earn the trust and respect of your people especially the blue collar workforce. And it probably won’t send the best signals if they are working onsite/together and you aren’t. Hope this helps.

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