This week we talked with the founder of PowerHouse Consulting Group, Vasilis Stergiou. He told us about remote work nuances and how Standuply helps them to regulate the workflow and communication.

PowerHouse Consulting Group is an all-in-one business development and digital marketing consulting agency based in Bangkok reaching all Southeast Asian countries.

They operate as a spherical holistic approach to clients. Besides, PowerHouse Consulting is listed as a mentor in a new platform, Standuply.Mentors, where you can get any management and development advice you are interested in. Feel free to shoot them a question.

Powerhouse Consulting Group offers a range of services from business plans and roadmaps to sales training and tools like CRM implementations to digital marketing like search engine optimization, social media marketing, advanced email marketing campaigns, and lead generation funnels.

They also engage in dynamic website development with lead generation CTA’s, content creation, and copywriting as well as everything connected with it. 

Powerhouse Consulting Group prides itself on its versatility being a remote company. By offering such a wide range of services that support one’s business to improve, one tends to build successful long-term business relationships.

They help customers save time and money by searching for services outside and seeking different people to build relationships that cost a lot.

Vasilis explains, “We consider ourselves to be a unique service. Because usually, clients need to refer to a lot of different people or different services, different agencies when they want to acquire these types of services. Nevertheless, we offer them all under the same roof.”

He says, “Instead of going outside meeting different people only to establish relationships with them, our clients prefer to work with a small number of people that can offer them all these services.”

At the moment, Powerhouse Consulting Group has 10 people in their distributed team: six people full-time working and usually around four people part-time.

“It depends on the number of work hours and work projects that we have to deliver. Hence, only the two founders are based in Bangkok. The rest of our staff is based in the Philippines in different areas and operates remotely with no office,” Vasilis says.

Like all Standuply users, the Powerhouse Consulting Group team usually communicates in Slack. Also, they use Trello for task management and some other tools.

Vasilis realized that the team needed a new tool when they encountered the challenge on how to automate daily and weekly reports on different time zones.

Vasilis explains, “All of our staff are working remotely and at different times during the day. Founders are mostly operating on normal business hours because our clients are operating on that time. But our staff can work and do their given tasks any time they want as long as they are providing the results. So someone might start working at 10 p.m., and the other person might start working at 6 a.m.”

Nevertheless, the main issue that they were trying to solve was the lack of transparency. Vasilis says, “We needed to clearly understand what the team does every day, identifying team pain points and any challenges that we can solve. It was also difficult to understand if they need any extra training and do they have any ideas that we can implement. We do not know how to optimize all of this exactly and had to do it manually day by day.”

He also adds, “Furthermore, we often lose a lot of information. So we decided to implement daily asynchronous reporting, and it changed our work enthusiasm.”

“We built our business model based on a remote structure to travel and meet our clients in different cities while managing the business from the phone and keep delivering high-quality results.”

Vasilis Stergiou
Founder of Powerhouse Consulting Group

Vasilis started reading a lot about daily reporting systems, researching Slack App Store for the right app, and finally found Standuply.

He says, “We started using Standuply with basic reports and we understood quite early that we needed a little bit more advanced functionality on the reporting. So we developed all our reports to more advanced reporting that we use today.”

Finally, the basic challenge was not having enough ways to communicate more privately.

Vasilis explains, “We needed our staff to have advanced reporting, to write what they are thinking about: what they have on their mind, their ideas, and any challenges that they are facing.”

Moreover, privacy is really important in teamwork, especially if the team has novice employees who are just beginning their career path.

Vasilis confirms, “It is important for them to feel that they are writing this in private as no one else is reading/listening. Nobody else can criticize or judge them. Only the founders can see their answers because it’s more intimate the conversation through their reporting system.”

So the point that PowerHouse Consulting team needed to upgrade the plan to Standup Bot and become a paid Standuply client was: access to more functions, advanced reporting systems, and Trello integrations.

“Now we are always aware of what our staff is doing today and what is done. We promptly find out about any issues that we need to focus on and try to fix any problem or recommendation to improve,” Vasilis says.

“Standuply is an intelligent bot system fully integrated with Slack which is convenient and easy to use, and it has a minimal time learning curve.”

Vasilis Stergiou
Founder of Powerhouse Consulting Group

Vasilis says, “Our staff learned just from the first day! It has very little time to set it up and configure it because of the perfect templates, which are great, to begin with.”

Vasilis shares what their dashboard looks like in Standuply account. He also told in more detail about specific Standuply tools that they use for project management. 

Website Statistic Report

“A weekly report with our website stats synchronized with Google Analytics and taking like four or five different statistics that we wanted,” he says.

Classic report

“After stats tracking we have a daily standup report with these three questions to our staff. Usually, we run it daily when everyone has something to tell us about,” Vasilis explains.

The questions for the classic report:

• What did you do yesterday? 
• What you planned to do today? 
• Is there any issue quickly?

One-on-One Meeting

“One-on-one report which is deeper, private and has more critical and personal questions to our staff. It is a biweekly that runs typically in the middle of the month.”

Monthly Evaluation Report

“Besides, we have a full month review at the end of each month with more precise and logical questions,” Vasilis says.

These are four primary but different campaigns and reports that Powerhouse Consulting runs, but actually, Standuply has much wider scopes.

Vasilis adds, “We also plan to develop a Kanban report and task management. We plan to see how we are going to develop it. Because now we are using Trello a lot more and because Standuply has this integration, which is very useful to follow up with different tasks through for clients.”

“When the team members see the daily report, they have to write what they have to do, and they know that someone will check them about this.”

Vasilis Stergiou
Founder of Powerhouse Consulting Group

Standuply perfectly fits with the Powerhouse Consulting Group team.

Vasilis clarifies, “Standuply is always there, and I know it is working and will not let me miss a detail. It is easy to use and quick for people to start. I do not need to go through many configurations.”

He also notes, “There are no bugs. I do not need to fix it all the time, and I get my reports pretty easily that I need to see every day delivered in my private messages. So that is perfect for us, and our team gained an advantage because it keeps them up to date.”

When working remotely, requires self-discipline to prioritize specific schedules. Standuply allows you to set a visible self-monitoring framework for employees so that they can complete the necessary tasks within a specific time frame.

Vasilis confirms, “When you work remotely, it is easy to get lost, forget something, or become a little bit lazy. Standuply always pings our remote workers about some things that they have to do.”

He says, “When you see the daily report, you have to write what you have to do. Furthermore, you know that someone will check them about this. That is very important because that gives much time to focus on more important tasks.”

Each Standuply user has its own tips on how to use it most conveniently and enjoy it. Vasilis shared with us his point of view:

“No need to sweat the small stuff,” he says, “90% of the templates that Standuply offers are pretty great, to begin with, unless you manage a corporation with 500 employees. If you’re just a startup or you want to operate a small remote team, then start using the simplest templates.”

Vasilis assures, “Use them six months one year and then see what do you want to tweak out of that list of questions, what do you want to change or which questions you want out.

“It is just like a one-click system! You will click it, then you start to work in, and track the results. In my opinion, it could not be easier than that.”

Vasilis Stergiou
Founder of Powerhouse Consulting Group

“To sum it up, I want to say that Standuply is the tool that you need if your team is remote,” Vasilis concludes.

The top improvement of using Standuply is time-saving using concise messages in reports. Now Powerhouse Consulting Group has a fully updated picture every day about what is going on with no need to ask – the bot will do that.