The document discusses the benefits of having a distributed company where employees work remotely from multiple locations rather than a centralized office. It outlines 6 main advantages including being able to hire great talent regardless of location, employees having a better work-life balance and quality of life, more effective communication and collaboration tools, less office politics and conflicts, and an ability to attract and retain top talent. The company discussed, SJN Sales, has over 50 employees spread across 11 states and 2 countries who love the distributed work model.

1. and your company should
probably be distributed too!
www.SJNsales.com

2.  More and more start ups are distributed companies,
from the beginning, and customers, employees, and
investors are accepting this trend as normal in high-
tech and other trending industries.
 Our company SJN Sales, based in Albuquerque New
Mexico, is fully distributed, and I’m always happy to
sing the praises of working for and managing a
business in this way.

3.  An aside, I think the more commonly used virtual
company (“nearly real or simulated to be real”) is a
lousy way to describe a business, with all of the
transience it implies,
 while distributed (“spread throughout an area or
territory”) is a better description for a company that
has dedicated employees working from multiple
locations, rather than from a centralized
headquarters office.

4.  At SJN Sales, we currently have just over 50
employees spread across 11 states and 2 foreign
countries.
 Here are my top 6 reasons why we love our
distributed model and think you might want to
consider joining the parade and making your
company fully, or at least partially, distributed:

5. 1. You’ll be able to hire great people and save money:
The world is full of great candidates for your
company’s jobs. Albuquerque, or even New York is
not necessarily where your next great hire lives.
 SJN Mobile or SJN Sales healthcare or any of our
other teams can hire the best salespeople and
project managers for the company, and our clients,
regardless of where they live.

6.  You’ll also most likely cover more time zones and
reduce airfare and other travel costs by having
employees distributed.
 The original SJN Sales employees started in one
location but spread out as one after the other
followed spouses to jobs or grad school. Now we’re
fully distributed and while we still have an
Albuquerque home-base, our teams are dispersed
across all of North America.

7.  You may get lucky, as we did and get to hire top-tier
employees who have already worked together at a
previous employer.
 We hired one top salesperson from a huge software
firm and it was natural for them to recruit other
members of their old sales team with the option of
working on remote, a very compelling perk of
joining our small firm. We add people this way
whenever possible.

8.  Working with old colleagues in a distributed
company really seems to ease the transition of
people who have been working in a cubicle farm.
 It helps logistically to use an outsourced company to
deal with the payroll and tax needs of people
working in various states, and even countries.

9. 2. Staff will love it: SJN Sales employees tell me, and
generally anyone else who asks, that they can’t
fathom going back to a cubicle that they reach
after a commute.
 Quality of life is not just a cliché for our people.
Working for a distributed company they get
increased time with family and friends, flexible
hours, a reduced or eliminated commute, and
flexible hours and they get to live where they
want.

10.  Several people have joined the SJN Sales group
because they have always wanted to live
somewhere with a rough local job market
(Wyoming ranch anyone?).
 Several others travel as a hobby in between
traveling heavily for the company.

11.  A solid core of our highest performing salespeople
work here because their spouse gets transferred
regularly and they love not having to worry about
starting a new job or a new empty territory with
each relocation.

12. 3. Employees who want social lives with co-workers
will thrive: Some companies see a huge
disadvantage in the perceived lack of social
interaction at a distributed company.
 Most people enjoy socializing with like-minded
coworkers, and very few employees want to work
in total isolation.

13.  SJN Sales people are assigned in small teams and
use all sorts of online and offline methods for
communicating.
 And yes, cat pictures and a meet-up at the bar near
Moscone Center are part of the team
communication and social life. Our teams also see
each other at client meetings and at the large
number of trade shows, industry meetings, and
forums we attend in-person each year.

14.  We also have company-wide meetings at least every
3-6 months. Generally these all-call meetings take
place at our Albuquerque headquarters but we have
also met in Hawaii, Akumal in Mexico, Scottsdale,
and Washington DC.
 As we grow into more widely divergent specialty
teams, we continue to find new ways of gathering
all SJN Sales people together in ways that make the
meetings a treat rather than a time wasting chore.

15. 4. Your work groups and offices will experience less
conflict and have more fun:
 As a distributed company, SJN Sales doesn’t have
mandatory reporting at a centralized office but we
utilize all sorts of other office options that are
available where our employees live and travel.

16.  Team members often work in co-working space
when several team members live near one another,
even when the individuals are not assigned to the
same accounts or projects.
 Other employees work from home, rented office
space, and in one case the guest house of the
employee’s hobby farm.

17.  The key is that no one has going to a particular desk
every day as part of their required job description.
SJN employees don’t clock in or out.
 They come and go when they want and typically do
a fairly small percentage of their total work at their
official office address.

18.  We offer suggestions on how to avoid being at work
at every moment that staff spends at their laptop
because freeing work from location can often mean
too many hours on the job.

19.  Social & business interaction (both within SJN Sales
and with the other businesses that share our space,
whether office or airport lounge) doesn’t generally
lead to conflict or interruptions for others.
 One key is that SJN Sales team and management
decision-making and communication is channeled
online and is set up to be accessible to everyone.

20.  SJN has always had an office. When the company
started it seemed essential to avoid client concerns
about our “virtual” workforce and because we
needed a centralized space for support staff to
work.
 Now, virtually all support functions are outsourced
or distributed, and our suite of offices in
Albuquerque serves most often as the site for all-call
meetings and for some local staff to use as a work
or meeting space.

21.  We also make our Albuquerque conference room
available to community groups and non-profit
boards for events and meetings.

22. 5. You will have better employee and client
communications: Every company has to manage
communications challenges.
 Distributed companies are no exception but we
start with a great advantage: structural excuses to
abolish inefficient, time-wasting meetings, in the
hallway one-on-ones that aren’t documented for
anyone else’s use, agenda free conference calls,
and email and voicemail silos.

23.  We have complete freedom to set up team and
company wide collaboration tools and systems that
make work days more pleasant, more efficient, and
more flexible.
 We’ve found that in nearly every case the work is
better documented which leads to additional
efficiencies as problems once discussed and solved
can be handled again by looking at previous team
efforts and results.

24.  Individual staff members and work groups, and
client teams, can establish working hierarchies of
preferred communications methods and tools
based on travel schedules, client preferences, etc.
 We did learn, in a brutal but brief experiment, that
we can’t actually automate our way out of having a
receptionist.

25.  Yes, you can leave a voicemail, but one of our hard-
working and generally chipper receptionists or
assistants will be happy to talk with you when you
call, and then handle forwarding a message in the
manner that will get you a response, without
needing to know our systems or travel schedules.

26. 6. You will attract and retain better employees than
your firm could otherwise recruit, retain, or
probably afford.
 This is, admittedly related to the first benefit of
being a distributed company. One of the most
frequent questions SJN Sales receives about our
staff is, “how did you get so and so, from GianTech
to work for your little company?”

27.  We do gain tremendous recruiting advantages when
old-guard traditional model companies tell
employees where to be, when to be, and how long
to be, in their cubes or on the road.
 Most of our employees like the distributed model
we offer because it allows them to prioritize work
along with some other passion or responsibility in
their life.

28.  Nearly all of us have a “refugee story” about how
our old traditional work life ended, when a manager
told us that we couldn’t have some accommodation
because, “then everyone would want it.”
 If you’re great at your job and this model sounds
attractive to you, check out our career page.

29.  We are growing and we’re hiring. The dental plan is
only ok and salaries are competitive, but you’ll want
to earn your bonus too.
www.sjnsales.com/careers.html