- Date published
You can feel energized by the freedom of remote work and still realize its challenges. For CloudPano’s co-founder Clayton Rothschild, this has certainly been the case.
Along with a business partner in Texas, they built a successful SaaS platform and operate with an offshore team across the world. Meanwhile, Rothschild, in Springfield, Missouri, splits his time between a home office and working from efactory’s coworking space.
Recently the Wall Street Journal shared a bit about his journey – but more on that later.
“More than half my team is asleep during my workday,” Rothschild said. “All while we’re trying to do this hard thing of finding success.”
The differing time zones presented many predicaments for Rothschild. If his team needed assistance or approval, the feedback cycles caused projects to grind to a halt.
“By the time I would answer, it’s their nighttime. When they implemented changes, I was out, and so their questions – or my need for sleep – caused a lag,” he said. And for many of the smaller asks, he couldn’t get over the feeling that, “If we were in person, it just wouldn’t be a thing.”
Rothschild balances these shortcomings of remote teams with the benefits: diversity of thought and culture and a lower cost basis for employment. To relieve the pain points, he decided to take a hybrid resourcing approach and establish a local team.
This team could be operating in the same time zone, answering questions in real time, and working in the same space together as the day or task dictated. This gives his new team the ability to have swivel chair conversations to brainstorm – or, as he calls it, jam.
What does it all add up to? Hearing about the small successes in real time energizes Rothschild, and beyond that, it makes business sense to move faster.
“Now I’ve got the best of both worlds where I can turn my chair around and have three people who care very much about the success of what I’m doing and are willing to ideate and build velocity,” he said. “It’s encouraging and the pace is just so much faster.”
Building a team in coworking
Since moving into efactory, most of Rothschild’s workday interactions have come through relationships he cultivated with like-minded founders in coworking.
“Coworking is cool because you get to work around people for a while and see their working styles,” he said.
He says hiring three fellow coworkers has been a smooth transition. One of the team, C.W. Elliott, had worked beside him in coworking since the very beginning.
“He has such a high work ethic. He’s here all the time. He’s like first one in, last out, he’s always focused, and I know he’s got that experience on how to build and execute a strategy,” Rothschild said.
While he hasn’t known his other two recent hires as long, he is proud of this move to a hybrid model that allows all of them freedom and structure to do what he wants for CloudPano – to move faster.
They’re also Innovating and extrapolating new business opportunities. While most of CloudPano’s business has been in the real estate and automotive veins, they’ve recently seen success in offering virtual tours of universities.
“It’s a big market, and our software is the best,” he added. “Our platform gives universities the ability to customize the virtual tour experience, and make changes as buildings get updated.”
CloudPano has enjoyed double digit YoY growth since its founding and is a successful platform with 60,000 users. At the same time, Rothschild has to compete with large tech firms to hire talent. But he’s confident that he has developed the product and now the team to make big moves to compete with those much bigger than them.
A huge congrats to Clayton and his team for this shoutout from the Wall Street Journal! It is a big deal!
