Company Interview with Brad, co-founder and CEO of WebDevStudios

I co-founded WebDevStudios back in 2008. We were a typical “coffee table” startup with no office, funding, or clients. Our location, which was near the Jersey Shore, actually made it difficult to find good talent to join our team.

Our first few hires were local, but as we began to grow, it became harder and harder to find good developers and designers. Because of this, we quickly learned that hiring the right person, regardless of their location, was going to be the key to our business growing and being successful.

We’ve been a 100% remote company for over a decade now!

Wearing PJs to work? Ha-ha! The single biggest benefit when working from home, in my opinion, is all of the extra time you get back to spend with your friends and family.

This is the time you would normally spend commuting to and from your job. That commute time, which is spent full of frustration and stress, is just wasted time in your life. Getting that time back for things that are actually important in your life is a huge benefit!

It’s hard to replicate a group working session with a whiteboard.

Sometimes, when hashing through something challenging on a project, or working to come up with creative solutions, it would be nice to be huddled around a whiteboard with the project team.

We’ve found video calls with Zoom, and screen sharing, is a great way to work through those challenges when working remotely.

Our team is 100% remote, so we have no office. All of our employees work remotely out of their homes, coffee shops, co-working spaces, or anywhere!

Remote tools have evolved so much in the past decade. Slack is our primary day-to-day communication tool. We also use Zoom for all of our meetings and prefer to have video so we can see the team.

For project management, we primarily use Jira and Confluence for all major projects.

Our typical day isn’t much different from a traditional agency office setup—our team logs into Slack when they start their day. The project managers outline tasks and goals for their project teams.

We also utilize Slack bots for daily standups to find out what our team is focused on and if any challenges are in their way.

All new hires go through a standard onboarding process. This includes learning and working with the various tools and services we use on a daily basis.

Our engineers will actually build out a small feature set and interact with their training lead as if they were a client.

We also utilize online training through LinkedIn Learning. They have a massive library of online courses you can take in a variety of topics, including management.

Since our company is fully remote, we have our standard company policies, which include expectations for all employees and working remotely. We also have a readily available online employee handbook that answers all employee questions and helps set clear expectations for our team.

The obvious difference is that even our HR team is remote. They conduct their one-on-ones, employee reviews, new hire interviews, disciplinary calls, etc., using Zoom video meetings.

Building close connections with your co-workers while working remotely can be a challenge. Our engineering team has a recurring all-hands call where they share interesting features they are building, new technologies they are experimenting with, and just generally get to know each other better.

We also have an end-of-week, all-hands video call, so everyone has the opportunity to see each other at least weekly.

It’s a fun time to wrap up the week, highlight our accomplishments and successes, give props to team members that stood out that week, share important company news, and wrap up the week on a fun, positive note.

Once a year, we host WDS Camp. This is an all-hands in-person company retreat. We fly out the entire team to a set location for the week. This is a great opportunity to form and strengthen relationships between employees and really get to know your co-workers on a more personal level.

We spend time reviewing and revamping our internal processes, test out and demo new tools, and share knowledge.

There’s also plenty of time for fun activities like our annual WDS Olympics, Survivor team challenge, and, of course, the Web Devie awards, which are the most exclusive awards given out to team members who go above and beyond each year!

Remote work is the primary reason for our company's success.

We have built an amazing company that specializes in WordPress design and development, which means we can hire the absolute best talent, regardless of their physical location.