Tips on Building Your Remote Marketing Agency

In this episode of Agency Journey, Tyler Pigott from Lone Fir Creative talks to us about building his agency and remote contractor team.

Tyler’s background started in the startup and corporate marketing world. After getting tired of it, he took time to reflect on what his next step was while he worked at a golf coach. It was here he eventually decided on starting Lone Fir Creative.

Here are a couple of his insights from the interview:

Building a Team of Trusted Contractors

Tyler decided to build his agency as a remote team because he wanted to spend time with his family. Starting off all on his own, he quickly felt the stress of the long hours and decided to start finding contractors to help him scale.

He now has a 6-8 person team that is both part-time and full-time contractors.

Here’s how Tyler built his team. He decided what were his agency’s strengths and enjoyed working on.

By focusing on this, it becomes easier to decide what talent you need to hire for the work you’re doing as well as what projects to say no to or what types of work you need to hand off.

It can be difficult finding trusted contractors though. Tyler recommends finding a network to dive into, such as HubSpot. In a community, quality talent will be referred around.

It’s also important to start contractors out on smaller projects to test how well they fit in with your organization.

Downsides of Remote Contractor Teams

One downside of contractors is client communication. Usually, with contractors, it’s harder to have them take full ownership of a client and on-boarding can be tricky. They’re there to take care of their work, and likely work with other clients aside from your agency as well.

The nature of a remote contractor environment also makes it difficult to create an internal culture.

Since contractors don’t have this loyalty to the agency, it’s difficult to build an atmosphere, especially remotely.

You can reach Tyler on Twitter or at the Lone Fir website.