How Exposure Ninja manages a remote team using Teamwork
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Find out how Exposure Ninja used software from Teamwork to ditch the office and work from anywhere in the world!
Tim Cameron-Kitchen, SEO expert and author, grew a team of freelancers into Exposure Ninja, a digital marketing and SEO services company for small to medium-sized businesses. The company was founded in 2013 and now has a remote workforce of 52 team members based across 10 countries around the globe.
Creating a virtual workplace
" We wanted to be an entirely remote-working company as office work didn’t suit our business. After all, we had a business which could theoretically work with any website in the world and we were stuck in one office in one English city. Shortly after founding Exposure Ninja in 2013, Tim Cameron-Kitchen made the decision to give his team the freedom to work remotely. Tim knew that the success of the transition depended on finding software that would make it possible for him to build a virtual workplace for his team. Up until this time, Exposure Ninja had been using Wrike for their project management needs. However, Tim was uncertain about the software’s ability to foster the level of collaboration necessary to become a fully remote company.
“Our workflow was messy, variable, and lots of things fell through the cracks. In order to become a fully remote company we needed to standardize our processes.”
Tim recognized that Exposure Ninja needed more than just project management software to make a successful transition from co-location to location-independence–and software from Teamwork proved to be exactly what they needed.
The tools to succeed
To manage every aspect of their work as a digital marketing agency, Exposure Ninja now relies on software from Teamwork, which includes Teamwork, Teamwork Desk and Teamwork Chat.
Teamwork
For Exposure Ninja, Teamwork is essentially the team’s virtual workplace, where they collaboratively manage every task involved in taking their clients’ digital marketing projects from inception to completion. " Every single work task at Exposure Ninja has a corresponding Teamwork task, which is vital for us. Everyone, from employees to managers, can keep track of what they’ve done individually and as teams each month. Two features of Teamwork that Tim and his team find particularly valuable are the time-tracking feature and task-list templates. The ability to create task list templates has allowed Exposure Ninja to standardize their workflows and processes as a list of tasks—eliminating guesswork and allowing the team to deliver consistent results for their clients. While the time tracking feature has been an important tool for ensuring transparency and accountability—the key components of every successful remote team.
Teamwork Desk
“Teamwork Desk has completely revolutionized our handling of emails now that we have a support team monitoring and assigning all inbound emails.”
Exposure Ninja’s growing client base has resulted in a designated support team being built to handle queries. No matter where each member of the customer support team is located, Teamwork Desk allows them to deal with customer queries collaboratively.
"We have multiple employees working with a single client, meaning lines of communication can cross, or a client request is sent to the wrong employee. Teamwork Desk allows us to keep track of all communication and quickly forward information onto the clients or team members who need it."
Teamwork Chat
Teamwork Chat is where the Exposure Ninja team go to brainstorm, discuss projects and tasks and crack the occasional joke from time to time. The tool is used for both team and one-on-one conversations and it’s availability across devices ensures everyone can stay in constant contact regardless of their location.
The ability to create tasks directly in Teamwork from Teamwork Chat helps ensure that every decision made in Chat is actioned and tasks are never neglected or forgotten.
"Communication is how stuff gets done, and because we’re not all not located in the same office, we need a tool that helps us to overcome the lack of physical proximity. Teamwork Chat does exactly this!"
Complete Integration
For Exposure Ninja the biggest benefit of choosing software from Teamwork is how seamlessly all three products integrate. According to Tim, the ability to create tasks in Teamwork from both Teamwork Desk and Teamwork Chat saves his team a considerable amount of time switching between apps—leading to more efficient workflows and fewer distractions.
All on the same page
Using Teamwork over the past two years has given Tim the benefit of knowing that regardless of location, his entire team is working from the same playbook toward the same goals and timelines.
“Teamwork helps our team set tasks across departments (and across countries) for all of our staff to see. It’s a simple, effective way of keeping track of what everyone is doing and how long they should take to do it.”
Today, Teamwork’s software allows Exposure Ninja to work from any location–without compromising the quality of their services.
"It would be impossible to run our business without software from Teamwork. It has transformed the way we work and gives us the flexibility to work remotely from anywhere in the world!"
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