But there were many more disasters that came about in the next 10 years. So that’s kind of my first iteration of management. And then my now co founder, Rob Rawson had a really crappy alpha of this tool called Time Doctor that could completely solve that problem, which was time tracking for remote teams, so that you could equate for how long someone worked for someone else when they were working for you remotely. And this was really destroying the business. So it ended up having to refund the student five hours and pay the tutor the full 10 hours, which meant I lost a whole bunch of money on the deal. And then the student would say, I didn’t work with my tutor for 10 hours and work with them for five, go back to the tutor and say, do work for 10 or five and say, I billed you for 10. So a tutor would bill me for 10 hours as an example. And the management issue, actually, that I faced there, let into the next product Time Doctor, because I couldn’t account for the amount of hours that a tutor was working with a student. And I was working through like old school, Skype tutoring students, and I had dozens of tutors throughout North America, and Europe. And that started my very first business, which was an online tutoring company. So six weeks later, I threw a master’s thesis under his door, and I was out into the real world. And then I said, Okay, so what do you think I should do? He said, Well, you gotta get pretty good at this teaching thing for the next 10 to 20 years before you want to do anything fun. And I walked into my supervisors office, and I said, I don’t think I’m very good at this. And did this class started with 300 students ended up with less than 200 got the worst academic reviews in the history of the McGill, sociology department, which have been up and running for about 132 years. And for those of you that don’t know, graduate students usually teach the first and second year classes, so you don’t actually talk to professors yet. So right out of grad school, I ended up teaching a class at McGill University for grad school. But back first days of management, I mean, you know, that goes back to like 2006 2007, which was when I started my first online tutoring company. But inside of that the team members at least know like, I’m not going to tell them to do something that I wouldn’t otherwise have them do. So I think of the same thing with regards to management, I believe that you actually have to do some of the work that you’re delegating in order to actually be respected by your direct reports, which is why for me, I’m not really good at managing large swaths of people, because I feel very self conscious about delegating all these responsibilities and keeping none for myself, which does actually lead into a completely separate set of problems that I have. By I don’t like the term thought leader, because I think instead of thought leader, it’s not someone who actually does things inside of their own businesses and is like an operator. And number one, you’re always so great at pumping up my ego because you always compliment me and do these fantastic things. I would say Max like six people outside of that. Definitely not designed to manage hundreds or 1000s of people I think I’m probably best managing. So do you remember when that was and what were some of the very early mistakes that you made? So I’m But what we wanted to start to talk to you about was this concept of like when you first started managing and leading teams. Obviously Time Doctor is at the top of the list. You’ve been working remote for over 15 years, co founder of Time Doctor, like when I think about companies like really leading the way in the remote space. But you know, just on your background, obviously, you were doing remote before remote was cool. So what you’ll say on this podcast is going to be very well received. I’m not surprised that you’ve done almost 400 podcasts, we’re obviously going to be talking about very unique things that nobody else has ever heard of. You’re kind of the thought leader, in my opinion on remote work. But Liam, you are obviously super popular. And now everybody knows your secrets out. You ruined it, people thought I was so good at coming up with questions on the fly. See, nobody knew that we have prepared notes in advance. So I’m excited to get into the nitty gritty with you. I thought it was so cool that you wrote all these notes. By the way, for people that don’t know, Aydin writes like, Oh, now you’re spoiling it for people who have notes in preparation. Because I’ve been so preparing for this podcast, I read all of your notes. And this is the one that I am most excited about. I gotta tell you, this is my 390/3 podcast that I’ve done on my podcast run. Thanks for having me, Aydin, I am so excited to be here.
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