May 30, 2025 • 15 mins
Zach Boyette got a business class view of the world and decided to build a life, and company around the freedom to design one’s own life, not only for Zach the traveler, but all the employees, regardless of the design they choose, living anywhere in the world. As co-founder and CEO of Galactic Fed, Zach leads a 100% remote, 150-person global marketing agency. They designed the company from the bottom up around the principle of giving agency to employees to design they life they want to lead. At work, at home, and in their communities.
Built on a foundation of documentation, writing things down, no single point of failure. They’ve developed blueprints to describe in detail how to do various projects, from kicking off a client engagement, to interviewing new candidates.
And time together, the focus is on fun. Show and Tell, Games, and more. Since the work is digital, together time is used to strengthen the human connections.
Please join me in welcoming Zach Boyette to the Work 20XX podcast.
Where we’re reminded yet again, that it’s better to be one in a million, than one of a million.
Thanks again Zach.
Recorded 2025-April-29 at the Running Remote conference in Austin, Texas.
Special thanks to Liam, Egor, Ana, and Team Running Remote.
Zach Boyette: Remote, Design, Freedom, Games | Work 20XX podcast with Jeff Frick Ep46 from Running Remote
YouTube - Click Here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75Q077l_SRc&list=PLZURvMqWbYjmmJlwGj0L0jWbWdCej1Jlt
Transcript and Show Notes - Click Here
https://www.work20xx.com/episode/zach-boyette-remote-design-freedom-games-work-20xx-ep46
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
All right.
So we'll go in
three, two, one.
Hey welcome back everybody.
Jeff Frick here from Work 20XX on the road.
We're in Austin, Texas forthe Running Remote event
that probably I don't know,
a thousand ofthe smartest people
in the world of remote work
all in one placeat the same time,
who would imagine.
So we had to come down here
(00:20):
and reallywhat's important is
a lot of these lessons are applicable
whether you're fully remote,hybrid, distributed
all back in the office,it doesn't really matter.
It's really about managing people better.
And we're excited to have our next guest.
He’s Zach Boyettethe CEO of Galactic Fed.
Zach, Great to see you.
Good to see you too, Jeff.
Thanks for having me on. Happy to be here.
Yeah. So, whatdo you think?
What do you think of this scene?
Have you ever been to one of these before?
(00:40):
I have not.
I was invited to speak in 2020.
April 2020.
And I don't knowif you were alive then
but if you were anywhere in the world
you would know that April 2020 was not the time
to do a remote work conference
in real life.
in real life.
So that one was canceled.
I maybe went to speak,was invited to speak last year.
I maybe went to speak,was invited to speak last year.
I can't quite remember, but
I'm happy to make it here for the first time.
Excellent.
Yeah.
(01:00):
So tell people what is Galactic Fed
for people that aren'tfamiliar with the company.
Yeah, we are adigital marketing agency.
So we helpcompanies
run Google ads, Facebook ads, build great ad campaigns,
SEO, email marketing,build sites, that sort of stuff.
I started this company in 2018.
I've grown it to150 employees now
and we're in 31 countries around the world.
(01:21):
Originally, it was a big emphasis on startups
like early stage, seed, pre-seed, series A start ups.
But now we've scaled and we help
a lot bigger startups and companies
all the way up to the Fortune 20
try to grow faster with marketing.
Okay
And are you fully remote?
I think you’re fully remote
We're fully remote and about 50% asynchronous as well.
So a lot of our peopleare doing stuff
(01:42):
without other people doing stuff at the same time,
[Jeff] Right, right[Zach] doing it on their own time.
And you said 31 countries?
31 countries.Yeah.
Wow, what's the most ofin any one country?
What's themost people?
We're prettyspread out.
So I think maybe, maybe eitherthe Philippines or South Africa.
So I think maybe, maybe eitherthe Philippines or South Africa.
We have maybe 15 peoplein those countries
maybe a bit more in thembut that's the most
it's pretty distributedI'd say, between countries.
(02:03):
There's not a big spikein one place.
And I think that's goodbecause like culturally and stuff
it's not like abig swing towards
I don't know, Thanksgivingand Christmas in the States
because everyone's based here.
Right, rightno anchor.
So you were a Digital Nomad I saw part of your TED talk.
You lived out of a suitcase for a number of years.
So clearly it was a priorityfor you to get around the world.
And be, you know,kind of a global citizen.
(02:24):
Did you have that as an objectivewhen you started the company
at the beginning?
Was that a priority for you?
Yeah, so I became a digital nomad in 2016
and I was like,
oh my gosh, this is the coolest thing ever.
I’d never flown on a plane till I was 19.
I grew up on a small mountain in Tennessee, so
I really wanted to structure my life
in a way where I could see the world.
Where I could travel,I could go to new places.
(02:44):
What activated that bug?
You hadn’t been on a plane
and you’re 19 and suddenly you want to see the world?
I got my first job
I worked at Procter and Gamble out of college and
they had me, I don't know why
they had me when I was 22
fly all around the world,just kind of sitting in meetings.
fly all around the world,just kind of sitting in meetings.
It was a great gig,wonderful people, very smart.
I have no idea whythey brought me there.
I was in the south of Francein a lavender field
(03:07):
meeting with the heads upsome perfume plants.
I was in China meeting withpeople who make the
make the taste for toothpaste.
And I was like, wow, I really like traveling it turns out.
It was also easier that I was doing business class travel
with work things I,
I didn’t realizeit's a bit harder
when you're in coach.
Got out of that and I don’t know
I just realizedI really love traveling.
(03:29):
I really love meeting peoplefrom different cultures.
And I wanted to structure my lifein a way that lets me do that.
And also, I wanted to give otherpeople the opportunity to do that.
So I thought
I could build a great company remotely.
I could give people the opportunity to travel if they wanted
or just to have the flexibilityback with their lives.
Right
So how do you manage culture?
How do you manage engagement with so many people
distributed inso many places,
(03:49):
so many cultures, languages, time zones, etc.,
How do you focus to keepeverybody on the same page?
So for us, from a cultural perspective
like an actualcountry culture
I'll talk about that real quick.
Then I'll talk aboutthe company culture.
Country culturewe try to like
really get into thedifferent countries
like what would they do?
Like our HR team is constantly
celebratingthis and that
(04:10):
regional, national holiday and, like
really making peoplefeel involved
and making people feel like we careabout them and their background.
But as far as how we keeppeople engaged at my company
since we're all spread outand all over the place
we have a lot of like
really great systemsasynchronously to help people,
get their work doneeven when they're not together.
For examplewe have
we really care about time tracking
(04:31):
like time trackingsoftware is really big for us.
Because if you're giving people this freedom to
spend their timehow they want it
and to rarely have phone calls
you need them to give you backthe responsibility and accountability of
checking in with their time
giving you every 5 or 15 minutes worth of time
and reviewing that
and that allows us to checkyou know, not only are people
doing what we hired them to do,are they trying to pad their hours?
(04:53):
Or are they actually committed?
Which is this thing, you know,you hear about these companies
that have forgotten employees.
They wake up a year later
and they're like, wow, this guy,what does he do?
[Zach] You know, [Jeff] Right, right
[Zach] he's been collecting a paycheck [Jeff] Did anybody seen him?
four jobs.
But what we find, you know, in a less, really bad way than that
is let's say on average, it takes us
five hours to build a new GoogleAds account for a client.
(05:14):
And, Mary, it takes her two hours to build one.
And, Jeff, he takesnot you,
we’ll use a different name.
[Jeff] It’s alright, Jeff’s fine[Zach] someone else, Yeah.
Take me a long time.
Yeah. Jeff takes ten hours.
Hopefully I wasthe long guy
He’s never done thisbefore in his life, so
you know, we might conclude that
Mary is rushing.
She's, you know, not doing it good.
Or maybe she has some new novel genius way to do it.
(05:35):
And Jeff probably just doesn't really know what he's doing
he’s a perfectionist.
And we wouldn'tbe able to test that
unless we were tracking their time.
Right, right.
One of the things you mentioned
I think it might have been in the TED talk
is that we're allprobably spending
too much time in meetingsand not enough time writing.
And Darren Murph, right
who is the godfather of this whole thing
actually has a Guinness Book of World Record
for writing blog posts,which is pretty amazing.
(05:55):
But really, this whole idea of getting information out of your head
in a place that it can be more easily shared.
I wonder if you can share.
How do you execute thatday to day within the company?
Yeah, so for us,
writing blueprint documents is a really big thing, so
I'm big on not having these
personality dependentinstitutional
like knowledge holders where
if one person just disappeared,
(06:17):
you know, rage quits
gets hitby a bus,
[Zach] goes on mat or pat leave.[Jeff] Right, the old bus problem
then like, you're like, oh my God like
we've had a hole blownin the way we do things.
Like, anytime we onboard someone,we won't know what to do now.
So forus instead,
when I first started this company,
I spent the first few years
I had lots of weird, kooky rules.
One of them was
everyone had to spend 10% of their time just documenting,
so that was usually four hours a week on Fridays
(06:39):
people would just bewriting down
how we do things.
So, you know,
what's the blueprint for how wekick off a new marketing account?
How do we onboarda new team member?
How do we let somebody goif they're not doing well?
And as a result, we havethis great system
for how we do things.
So thatmeans that
as we scaled from, you know
20 to 50 to 100 to 150 employees,
it wasn't just like I was hiring good people
(07:01):
and throwing them into the meatgrinder to do things their own way.
I have, you know, 50 new talentedemployees doing this one function,
and they do it my way,the Galactic Fed way,
not their own way
which has beenreally useful.
So you’vetalked about
the power of the thirst to explore.
And you've alsotalked about really
the power of human connection.
And that's why we want to get together
(07:22):
and yet you travel a lot.
You were, you know, solo
out wandering the world
and now you'vegot these people
distributed all over the place.
How do you manage
the human connectionside of this
which, as you saidis so, so important.
Why I set the company upremotely to start is that
we give peoplethe option
to build their lives in the ways they want,
and rather than forcing them to have the human connection
(07:43):
in sort of the,you know
20th century waythat we built it
which is you commutefor an hour
and you show up in this place and
you sit therenext to these people
and then you do it that way.
We allow people to buildtheir lives how they want.
If they want to travel full timelike me, and explore the world
they can do that.
If they want to get deeper with their community
they can do that.
From a company perspective though
how do we make these people
(08:04):
who are not talking to each other in real life ever
and rarely on the phonewith each other?
How do we make themnot clock in and out
and actually makefriends and such?
We do a couplethings for that.
One, we really care aboutdoing these async games
every month where
people might be sharing an example from their life.
For example, we did one recently that was like a
(08:24):
best workplacerig setup.
Okay
And, everyone in the Slack channel
would upload a pictureof their workspace
Okay
and one guy had this like
12 monitors
glowing keyboard
psychedelic cat posterson the wall
that sort of thing.
And he explained like
this is howI am.
Like, I kind of have a hacker ethos
and this is my background.
Another person showedthe veranda you know
(08:45):
her porch side beach side setup
where she works every day with the cool breeze.
In Croatia.
And that's,that's her setup.
And then everyone votes with Slack emojis
to see who has the coolest oneand they get a prize.
So we do some fun stuff like that.
Another thing we do every quarter
instead of the likeboring snooze fest
every leadershipbrings slides
(09:06):
and like saysthe numbers
from the last quarterkind of call.
We don't doany of that.
It's all bonding focused.
It's a show and tell.
So Jeff would show upwith one object from his life
something, you knowit could be spouse, kid, pet,
ceremonial swordcollection, hot sauce,
whatever is important to you.
And you say,this is what makes Jeff, Jeff.
You know, this is what I care about this quarter
(09:27):
and this is whatI really love.
And that's just a good windowinto people's soul
to see this physical objecton the camera.
And it's also a good launching off point
for these affinity channels we have on Slack, like
parenting,photography, travel,
where people then hop in and say, okay,
I saw that Michelle also lives in Portugal.
She also surfs because she broughther surfboard to show and tell.
Let's chat in the surfing channel about
(09:48):
getting a surfing trip together with
different Galactic Fedemployees.
So you have active interest areas in Slack
dedicated just tothis effort.
Yeah, we have about 30 Slack channels
for all sorts of niche interests.
Cats is a really big one for us.
I don't know why.
We're a big cat culture at Galactic Fed.
I don't have one,but I like them so.
That’s great.
Yeah, all sorts of randomniche stuff like that.
(10:10):
Think of it,it's probably there.
Right
That's super cool.
Okay, so I got to ask you
How is Gen AIimpacting the SEO business,
both interms of
the generation of copy as well as,
you know, how people approachthe whole SEO challenge
in trying to bring attention to their stuff?
It's changing everything.
And I think it'syou know
from people who aren't moving fast enough to get on to it.
(10:32):
It's like a terminal threat.
But for those like us who are
you know embracing the future
and what things will look like
I think it's like 10x opportunity.
There's the side of it for my teamand the employee side.
And there's the sidefor the you know
market potential of what we do.
And I can talk aboutboth of those.
For us, from a team side of things,
it just allows us tomove a lot faster.
Obviously, if clients are hiring usto write content for them
(10:54):
because they want usto do that themselves
we take that promise seriously.
And we're not going to pump into ChatGPT or Jasper to
get some article really fast.
You know, weif clients hire us
to do a human writtenhandwritten piece of content
that still thrivesin a world where
you want to be 1 in 1,000,000, not one of a million,
[Zach] you know, not having[Jeff] Ahh, I like that line
not like that classicChatGPT writing
(11:15):
with the M dashes and stuffthat we can all recognize.
Right
You know, having something realand raw can be really valuable
especially if, as something we do often
is we’ll hire real like deep experts in a certain area
that's based on that company.
Let's say a mining companywants to hire Galactic Fed for help.
We might hire like a mining
like a green mining specialist
and have them writecontent for this client.
(11:36):
And that's something that ChatGPTor something couldn't get.
Right
That said, as well,
I think there's a really big opportunity now
rather than just figuring outhow to rank on Google
there's now all these other SEO like platforms.
ChatGPT, you know, Claude, whatever it may be
that companies are now looking to rank in. Right?
And so rather than this sort of
promise of the internetthat Larry Page invented
(11:56):
20 whatever years agowhen he made Google
which is basically that
the world will be divided by backlinks
you know the more authoritative backlinks
your company haspointing at it
the higher you'll rank on Google
the more organictraffic you'll get.
There's different signals now.
Now you know your companygetting mentioned in videos,
in podcasts, in real life, in the news.
(12:17):
These things all contribute to a company showing up well in SEO
and on the LLM results
not justbacklinks.
So there's a lot of stuffchanging here
and companies really need helpfiguring out how to adapt to that.
Otherwise they're liketop performing Google results
that got them a lot of money for years
are going to be at the bottom of the page
and they're going to makeno more money.
So it's almost like
(12:37):
like treat all theGen AI platforms
almost as like another Google cause you’re hoping
to show up in those things.
Absolutely.
How do you get into them?
How do you startto populate that data?
So for now, it's the same stuffthat you do for Google
since they're crawling theweb traffic in similar ways, so
Get good backlinks,get people mentioning you,
(12:59):
the types of things that aretypically good for Google SEO.
But that said, the LLMs do look more for
what they call ‘entity based’ results, which is just
any time your company's nameshows up anywhere.
So againas I mentioned
podcasts, videoson the news in real life, press
even if your company's not linked there
(13:20):
the LLMs look just as closely
at these entities
of people mentioning theentity of say Galactic Fed
than justthe backlink
Right.
And you see in the not sodistant future that those will
usurp Google in terms of prioritizationwithin your go to market.
I don'tthink usurp
I think it’s just something differentthat we can do.
Just something different, okay
I think Google
(13:40):
Google is a very smart company.
It's one of the most valuablecompanies in the world.
90 something percent of theirrevenue is from ad clicks.
And those ad clicksare only valuable if
people are searchingon their platforms.
There's a lot of smart people there.
I'm quite confident they'll finda way to keep that traffic flowing.
It's just figuring outhow to change with the times.
I think that
you know, there will always be need for people
(14:01):
to get help from external marketingpartners, such as Galactic Fed.
But what companiesneed to be able to count on is that
we're not going to be selling them the same like tired crap
from ten years ago.
That just doesn't makesense anymore.
Right
We need to be doing the homeworkand going to the conferences
and reading the research papersso they don't have to.
Right
Well you know
Clayton Christensen, before hepassed away spoke at Google.
(14:23):
One of the Google Talks.
And he actually told him,I really worried about you guys
cause you’re doing so so well.
I'm really worried.
I’m really worried you're going to missthe next big thing that comes along, so
Innovator's Dilemmapay attention, you know
[Zach] Innovator's Dilemma indeed[Jeff] It’s not easy
yes it’s
Google is now realizingthey need to actually care
about this AI stuff that they shelved.
[Jeff] Forever ago, alright[Zach] Yeah, exactly
(14:43):
Well, Zach, thanks for spendinga few minutes with me and,
31 countriesthat's amazing.
You got it Jeff. Thanks for having me.
Thanks everybody for listening to.
Hope this has been helpful.
Absolutely.
All right.Thanks again.
He's Zach,I'm Jeff
You're watching Work 20XX.
Coming to you from Running Remote in Austin
And yes, it's hot here.
We’ll see you next time.
Thanks for watching
Thanks for listening on the podcast.
Take care. Bye bye.
(15:05):
Give it a clap
Cool.
Golly
That was good
Sweating like a pig
Yeah. Me too, man
Hey, Jeff Frick Here
big shout out to the podcast audience.
Thanks for listening in.
You can get show notes and transcripts at Work20XX.com
And that also has links to the videos as well.
Appreciate you listeningin on the podcast
(15:25):
Do reach out
say hello, like subscribeand smash that notification bell.
Thanks for listening.Take care. Bye bye.
All right.
So we'll go in
three, two, one.
Hey welcome back everybody.
Jeff Frick here from Work 20XX on the road.
We're in Austin, Texas forthe Running Remote event
that probably I don't know,
a thousand ofthe smartest people
in the world of remote work
all in one placeat the same time,
who would imagine.
So we had to come down here
(00:20):
and reallywhat's important is
a lot of these lessons are applicable
whether you're fully remote,hybrid, distributed
all back in the office,it doesn't really matter.
It's really about managing people better.
And we're excited to have our next guest.
He’s Zach Boyettethe CEO of Galactic Fed.
Zach, Great to see you.
Good to see you too, Jeff.
Thanks for having me on. Happy to be here.
Yeah. So, whatdo you think?
What do you think of this scene?
Have you ever been to one of these before?
(00:40):
I have not.
I was invited to speak in 2020.
April 2020.
And I don't knowif you were alive then
but if you were anywhere in the world
you would know that April 2020 was not the time
to do a remote work conference
in real life.
in real life.
So that one was canceled.
I maybe went to speak,was invited to speak last year.
I maybe went to speak,was invited to speak last year.
I can't quite remember, but
I'm happy to make it here for the first time.
Excellent.
Yeah.
(01:00):
So tell people what is Galactic Fed
for people that aren'tfamiliar with the company.
Yeah, we are adigital marketing agency.
So we helpcompanies
run Google ads, Facebook ads, build great ad campaigns,
SEO, email marketing,build sites, that sort of stuff.
I started this company in 2018.
I've grown it to150 employees now
and we're in 31 countries around the world.
(01:21):
Originally, it was a big emphasis on startups
like early stage, seed, pre-seed, series A start ups.
But now we've scaled and we help
a lot bigger startups and companies
all the way up to the Fortune 20
try to grow faster with marketing.
Okay
And are you fully remote?
I think you’re fully remote
We're fully remote and about 50% asynchronous as well.
So a lot of our peopleare doing stuff
(01:42):
without other people doing stuff at the same time,
[Jeff] Right, right[Zach] doing it on their own time.
And you said 31 countries?
31 countries.Yeah.
Wow, what's the most ofin any one country?
What's themost people?
We're prettyspread out.
So I think maybe, maybe eitherthe Philippines or South Africa.
So I think maybe, maybe eitherthe Philippines or South Africa.
We have maybe 15 peoplein those countries
maybe a bit more in thembut that's the most
it's pretty distributedI'd say, between countries.
(02:03):
There's not a big spikein one place.
And I think that's goodbecause like culturally and stuff
it's not like abig swing towards
I don't know, Thanksgivingand Christmas in the States
because everyone's based here.
Right, rightno anchor.
So you were a Digital Nomad I saw part of your TED talk.
You lived out of a suitcase for a number of years.
So clearly it was a priorityfor you to get around the world.
And be, you know,kind of a global citizen.
(02:24):
Did you have that as an objectivewhen you started the company
at the beginning?
Was that a priority for you?
Yeah, so I became a digital nomad in 2016
and I was like,
oh my gosh, this is the coolest thing ever.
I’d never flown on a plane till I was 19.
I grew up on a small mountain in Tennessee, so
I really wanted to structure my life
in a way where I could see the world.
Where I could travel,I could go to new places.
(02:44):
What activated that bug?
You hadn’t been on a plane
and you’re 19 and suddenly you want to see the world?
I got my first job
I worked at Procter and Gamble out of college and
they had me, I don't know why
they had me when I was 22
fly all around the world,just kind of sitting in meetings.
fly all around the world,just kind of sitting in meetings.
It was a great gig,wonderful people, very smart.
I have no idea whythey brought me there.
I was in the south of Francein a lavender field
(03:07):
meeting with the heads upsome perfume plants.
I was in China meeting withpeople who make the
make the taste for toothpaste.
And I was like, wow, I really like traveling it turns out.
It was also easier that I was doing business class travel
with work things I,
I didn’t realizeit's a bit harder
when you're in coach.
Got out of that and I don’t know
I just realizedI really love traveling.
(03:29):
I really love meeting peoplefrom different cultures.
And I wanted to structure my lifein a way that lets me do that.
And also, I wanted to give otherpeople the opportunity to do that.
So I thought
I could build a great company remotely.
I could give people the opportunity to travel if they wanted
or just to have the flexibilityback with their lives.
Right
So how do you manage culture?
How do you manage engagement with so many people
distributed inso many places,
(03:49):
so many cultures, languages, time zones, etc.,
How do you focus to keepeverybody on the same page?
So for us, from a cultural perspective
like an actualcountry culture
I'll talk about that real quick.
Then I'll talk aboutthe company culture.
Country culturewe try to like
really get into thedifferent countries
like what would they do?
Like our HR team is constantly
celebratingthis and that
(04:10):
regional, national holiday and, like
really making peoplefeel involved
and making people feel like we careabout them and their background.
But as far as how we keeppeople engaged at my company
since we're all spread outand all over the place
we have a lot of like
really great systemsasynchronously to help people,
get their work doneeven when they're not together.
For examplewe have
we really care about time tracking
(04:31):
like time trackingsoftware is really big for us.
Because if you're giving people this freedom to
spend their timehow they want it
and to rarely have phone calls
you need them to give you backthe responsibility and accountability of
checking in with their time
giving you every 5 or 15 minutes worth of time
and reviewing that
and that allows us to checkyou know, not only are people
doing what we hired them to do,are they trying to pad their hours?
(04:53):
Or are they actually committed?
Which is this thing, you know,you hear about these companies
that have forgotten employees.
They wake up a year later
and they're like, wow, this guy,what does he do?
[Zach] You know, [Jeff] Right, right
[Zach] he's been collecting a paycheck [Jeff] Did anybody seen him?
four jobs.
But what we find, you know, in a less, really bad way than that
is let's say on average, it takes us
five hours to build a new GoogleAds account for a client.
(05:14):
And, Mary, it takes her two hours to build one.
And, Jeff, he takesnot you,
we’ll use a different name.
[Jeff] It’s alright, Jeff’s fine[Zach] someone else, Yeah.
Take me a long time.
Yeah. Jeff takes ten hours.
Hopefully I wasthe long guy
He’s never done thisbefore in his life, so
you know, we might conclude that
Mary is rushing.
She's, you know, not doing it good.
Or maybe she has some new novel genius way to do it.
(05:35):
And Jeff probably just doesn't really know what he's doing
he’s a perfectionist.
And we wouldn'tbe able to test that
unless we were tracking their time.
Right, right.
One of the things you mentioned
I think it might have been in the TED talk
is that we're allprobably spending
too much time in meetingsand not enough time writing.
And Darren Murph, right
who is the godfather of this whole thing
actually has a Guinness Book of World Record
for writing blog posts,which is pretty amazing.
(05:55):
But really, this whole idea of getting information out of your head
in a place that it can be more easily shared.
I wonder if you can share.
How do you execute thatday to day within the company?
Yeah, so for us,
writing blueprint documents is a really big thing, so
I'm big on not having these
personality dependentinstitutional
like knowledge holders where
if one person just disappeared,
(06:17):
you know, rage quits
gets hitby a bus,
[Zach] goes on mat or pat leave.[Jeff] Right, the old bus problem
then like, you're like, oh my God like
we've had a hole blownin the way we do things.
Like, anytime we onboard someone,we won't know what to do now.
So forus instead,
when I first started this company,
I spent the first few years
I had lots of weird, kooky rules.
One of them was
everyone had to spend 10% of their time just documenting,
so that was usually four hours a week on Fridays
(06:39):
people would just bewriting down
how we do things.
So, you know,
what's the blueprint for how wekick off a new marketing account?
How do we onboarda new team member?
How do we let somebody goif they're not doing well?
And as a result, we havethis great system
for how we do things.
So thatmeans that
as we scaled from, you know
20 to 50 to 100 to 150 employees,
it wasn't just like I was hiring good people
(07:01):
and throwing them into the meatgrinder to do things their own way.
I have, you know, 50 new talentedemployees doing this one function,
and they do it my way,the Galactic Fed way,
not their own way
which has beenreally useful.
So you’vetalked about
the power of the thirst to explore.
And you've alsotalked about really
the power of human connection.
And that's why we want to get together
(07:22):
and yet you travel a lot.
You were, you know, solo
out wandering the world
and now you'vegot these people
distributed all over the place.
How do you manage
the human connectionside of this
which, as you saidis so, so important.
Why I set the company upremotely to start is that
we give peoplethe option
to build their lives in the ways they want,
and rather than forcing them to have the human connection
(07:43):
in sort of the,you know
20th century waythat we built it
which is you commutefor an hour
and you show up in this place and
you sit therenext to these people
and then you do it that way.
We allow people to buildtheir lives how they want.
If they want to travel full timelike me, and explore the world
they can do that.
If they want to get deeper with their community
they can do that.
From a company perspective though
how do we make these people
(08:04):
who are not talking to each other in real life ever
and rarely on the phonewith each other?
How do we make themnot clock in and out
and actually makefriends and such?
We do a couplethings for that.
One, we really care aboutdoing these async games
every month where
people might be sharing an example from their life.
For example, we did one recently that was like a
(08:24):
best workplacerig setup.
Okay
And, everyone in the Slack channel
would upload a pictureof their workspace
Okay
and one guy had this like
12 monitors
glowing keyboard
psychedelic cat posterson the wall
that sort of thing.
And he explained like
this is howI am.
Like, I kind of have a hacker ethos
and this is my background.
Another person showedthe veranda you know
(08:45):
her porch side beach side setup
where she works every day with the cool breeze.
In Croatia.
And that's,that's her setup.
And then everyone votes with Slack emojis
to see who has the coolest oneand they get a prize.
So we do some fun stuff like that.
Another thing we do every quarter
instead of the likeboring snooze fest
every leadershipbrings slides
(09:06):
and like saysthe numbers
from the last quarterkind of call.
We don't doany of that.
It's all bonding focused.
It's a show and tell.
So Jeff would show upwith one object from his life
something, you knowit could be spouse, kid, pet,
ceremonial swordcollection, hot sauce,
whatever is important to you.
And you say,this is what makes Jeff, Jeff.
You know, this is what I care about this quarter
(09:27):
and this is whatI really love.
And that's just a good windowinto people's soul
to see this physical objecton the camera.
And it's also a good launching off point
for these affinity channels we have on Slack, like
parenting,photography, travel,
where people then hop in and say, okay,
I saw that Michelle also lives in Portugal.
She also surfs because she broughther surfboard to show and tell.
Let's chat in the surfing channel about
(09:48):
getting a surfing trip together with
different Galactic Fedemployees.
So you have active interest areas in Slack
dedicated just tothis effort.
Yeah, we have about 30 Slack channels
for all sorts of niche interests.
Cats is a really big one for us.
I don't know why.
We're a big cat culture at Galactic Fed.
I don't have one,but I like them so.
That’s great.
Yeah, all sorts of randomniche stuff like that.
(10:10):
Think of it,it's probably there.
Right
That's super cool.
Okay, so I got to ask you
How is Gen AIimpacting the SEO business,
both interms of
the generation of copy as well as,
you know, how people approachthe whole SEO challenge
in trying to bring attention to their stuff?
It's changing everything.
And I think it'syou know
from people who aren't moving fast enough to get on to it.
(10:32):
It's like a terminal threat.
But for those like us who are
you know embracing the future
and what things will look like
I think it's like 10x opportunity.
There's the side of it for my teamand the employee side.
And there's the sidefor the you know
market potential of what we do.
And I can talk aboutboth of those.
For us, from a team side of things,
it just allows us tomove a lot faster.
Obviously, if clients are hiring usto write content for them
(10:54):
because they want usto do that themselves
we take that promise seriously.
And we're not going to pump into ChatGPT or Jasper to
get some article really fast.
You know, weif clients hire us
to do a human writtenhandwritten piece of content
that still thrivesin a world where
you want to be 1 in 1,000,000, not one of a million,
[Zach] you know, not having[Jeff] Ahh, I like that line
not like that classicChatGPT writing
(11:15):
with the M dashes and stuffthat we can all recognize.
Right
You know, having something realand raw can be really valuable
especially if, as something we do often
is we’ll hire real like deep experts in a certain area
that's based on that company.
Let's say a mining companywants to hire Galactic Fed for help.
We might hire like a mining
like a green mining specialist
and have them writecontent for this client.
(11:36):
And that's something that ChatGPTor something couldn't get.
Right
That said, as well,
I think there's a really big opportunity now
rather than just figuring outhow to rank on Google
there's now all these other SEO like platforms.
ChatGPT, you know, Claude, whatever it may be
that companies are now looking to rank in. Right?
And so rather than this sort of
promise of the internetthat Larry Page invented
(11:56):
20 whatever years agowhen he made Google
which is basically that
the world will be divided by backlinks
you know the more authoritative backlinks
your company haspointing at it
the higher you'll rank on Google
the more organictraffic you'll get.
There's different signals now.
Now you know your companygetting mentioned in videos,
in podcasts, in real life, in the news.
(12:17):
These things all contribute to a company showing up well in SEO
and on the LLM results
not justbacklinks.
So there's a lot of stuffchanging here
and companies really need helpfiguring out how to adapt to that.
Otherwise they're liketop performing Google results
that got them a lot of money for years
are going to be at the bottom of the page
and they're going to makeno more money.
So it's almost like
(12:37):
like treat all theGen AI platforms
almost as like another Google cause you’re hoping
to show up in those things.
Absolutely.
How do you get into them?
How do you startto populate that data?
So for now, it's the same stuffthat you do for Google
since they're crawling theweb traffic in similar ways, so
Get good backlinks,get people mentioning you,
(12:59):
the types of things that aretypically good for Google SEO.
But that said, the LLMs do look more for
what they call ‘entity based’ results, which is just
any time your company's nameshows up anywhere.
So againas I mentioned
podcasts, videoson the news in real life, press
even if your company's not linked there
(13:20):
the LLMs look just as closely
at these entities
of people mentioning theentity of say Galactic Fed
than justthe backlink
Right.
And you see in the not sodistant future that those will
usurp Google in terms of prioritizationwithin your go to market.
I don'tthink usurp
I think it’s just something differentthat we can do.
Just something different, okay
I think Google
(13:40):
Google is a very smart company.
It's one of the most valuablecompanies in the world.
90 something percent of theirrevenue is from ad clicks.
And those ad clicksare only valuable if
people are searchingon their platforms.
There's a lot of smart people there.
I'm quite confident they'll finda way to keep that traffic flowing.
It's just figuring outhow to change with the times.
I think that
you know, there will always be need for people
(14:01):
to get help from external marketingpartners, such as Galactic Fed.
But what companiesneed to be able to count on is that
we're not going to be selling them the same like tired crap
from ten years ago.
That just doesn't makesense anymore.
Right
We need to be doing the homeworkand going to the conferences
and reading the research papersso they don't have to.
Right
Well you know
Clayton Christensen, before hepassed away spoke at Google.
(14:23):
One of the Google Talks.
And he actually told him,I really worried about you guys
cause you’re doing so so well.
I'm really worried.
I’m really worried you're going to missthe next big thing that comes along, so
Innovator's Dilemmapay attention, you know
[Zach] Innovator's Dilemma indeed[Jeff] It’s not easy
yes it’s
Google is now realizingthey need to actually care
about this AI stuff that they shelved.
[Jeff] Forever ago, alright[Zach] Yeah, exactly
(14:43):
Well, Zach, thanks for spendinga few minutes with me and,
31 countriesthat's amazing.
You got it Jeff. Thanks for having me.
Thanks everybody for listening to.
Hope this has been helpful.
Absolutely.
All right.Thanks again.
He's Zach,I'm Jeff
You're watching Work 20XX.
Coming to you from Running Remote in Austin
And yes, it's hot here.
We’ll see you next time.
Thanks for watching
Thanks for listening on the podcast.
Take care. Bye bye.
(15:05):
Give it a clap
Cool.
Golly
That was good
Sweating like a pig
Yeah. Me too, man
Hey, Jeff Frick Here
big shout out to the podcast audience.
Thanks for listening in.
You can get show notes and transcripts at Work20XX.com
And that also has links to the videos as well.
Appreciate you listeningin on the podcast
(15:25):
Do reach out
say hello, like subscribeand smash that notification bell.
Thanks for listening.Take care. Bye bye.
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
Ridiculous History
History is beautiful, brutal and, often, ridiculous. Join Ben Bowlin and Noel Brown as they dive into some of the weirdest stories from across the span of human civilization in Ridiculous History, a podcast by iHeartRadio.