Recorded on 02/2020 in Amsterdam, Netherlands at Tribes Coworking. Joseph Vito DeLuca is the Marketing Executive at Kambr and the founder of Yellow Cat Five, Kambr’s upcoming in-house branding agency. Kambr is focused on lifting the airline model and creating harmony between traveling and the traveler. He welcomed Remoter into their coworking space and spoke to us one rainy February morning. Being a team lead in a remote company has taught Joe the importance of questioning the status quo and implementing changes in his workforce that he wants to see being normalized by the masses down the road, and the first step is by sharing his and Kambr’s story, mission and values.
Recorded on 02/2020 in Amsterdam, Netherlands at Tribes Coworking. Joseph Vito DeLuca is the Marketing Executive at Kambr and the founder of Yellow Cat Five, Kambr’s upcoming in-house branding agency. Kambr is focused on lifting the airline model and creating harmony between traveling and the traveler. He welcomed Remoter into their coworking space and spoke to us one rainy February morning. Being a team lead in a remote company has taught Joe the importance of questioning the status quo and implementing changes in his workforce that he wants to see being normalized by the masses down the road, and the first step is by sharing his and Kambr’s story, mission and values.
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Josephine Tse 0:00
It's time for season two of the Remoter Podcast. I'm your host Josephine.
Josephine Tse 0:05
As a continuation from season one with Alex and Andres, I had the opportunity to interview some remote work leaders, ranging from companies, consultants, advocates and more to add to Remoter's stash of free resources and human-centred stories, enriching our educational platform about remote work. This podcast is sponsored by Torre, a new kind of professional network that automatically connects talent with opportunity. Founded by Alexafnder Torrenegra, our goal is to make work fulfilling for everyone find the job of your dreams by visiting torre.co. That's T O R R E dot C O.
Josephine Tse 0:49
So if there's one thing about me, it's that I have a terrible sense of direction, which is pretty ironic given how much I enjoyed travelling. But when I left the Amsterdam Arena train station, I managed to take the longest route to get to Tribes co-working. It literally could have been a straight shot from another exit. But anyways, there I met Joe from Kambr. Joe's story is ambitious, and Kambr forward thinking business strategies, and our discussion about the future of work and in house agencies will shine in this episode. Speaking of forward thinking, there was a little bit of a space mishap so we actually recorded this on top of the box. Enjoy.
Josephine Tse 1:30
Welcome listeners to another episode of the Remoter Podcast. Today I am in Amsterdam, south of Amsterdam, in the Tribe's Amsterdam Area co-working space, and my guest today is Joseph Vito DeLuca, marketing executive at Kambr and founder of Yellow Cat Five. How's it going?
Joseph Vito DeLuca 1:52
It's going great. I'm happy to be here and discuss remote work and what we're doing it Kambr.
Josephine Tse 1:57
We're 11 floors up of this tall building and also nice view. So Joe, could you please introduce yourself? Tell us, who are you?
Joseph Vito DeLuca 2:04
Wow, we're starting right off with the existential questions. But yes,
Josephine Tse 2:09
Existential question at 9:41am. Yes.
Joseph Vito DeLuca 2:12
So I'll try to do my best with that loaded question. I'm Joe. I've been working in the startup and tech space for about a decade now. I've always been involved in marketing working in a startup sector. Previously, I worked for more standard companies in the sense of, there were one or two offices and everyone would go to those offices and work something along the lines of a nine to five, although when you're at a start up, you're not really working nine to five.
Josephine Tse 2:38
Exactly.
Joseph Vito DeLuca 2:40
But you get the idea. Yeah. And then I came on at Kambr last May so and yeah, one of the things that attracted me to to Kambr was its its remote structure. It's our aspiration to lift the airline industry. We have Kambr Solutions, which is building a software for revenue management and commercial operations of airlines. We have Kambr Advisory consulting airlines. We have Kambr Media, which is our publication and then the fourth piece of that is Yellow Cat Five, which is our marketing agency, which also sources external clients, in addition to just doing the marketing work for Kambr itself.
Josephine Tse 3:18
Got it. Okay, so the tonne- tonnes of initiatives going on. What else would you like listeners to know about Kambr?
Joseph Vito DeLuca 3:25
We're remote by nature, there was no other way to start this company. Because we have these four unique businesses, we have people scattered all over the world, South America, the United States, all over Europe and you know, soon I'm sure will expand to Asia. So remote working was really the only way to make this work.
Josephine Tse 3:43
Could you explain a little bit more about the I guess the lifting the airline model just for listeners to understand the, I guess the solutions part of Kambr?
Joseph Vito DeLuca 3:53
Yeah, absolutely. So I think you identify with us as well because you're a traveller. So you can probably relate to the fact that when you hop on a plane, and you go from point A to point B, that process is a bit broken right now. You, whether you're, you're groaning in the security line or your planes been delayed or maybe even been bumped to another flight. So, yeah, it's really our mission to to create a harmony between travelling and the traveller.
Josephine Tse 4:22
Context for our listener. So, Kambr actually reached out to a Remoter and seeing that I am currently in the Netherlands and asked to be a participant of the Remotor Project. So we basically whip this up in, in a day or so. And that's how I'm here talking with Joe today. But he wrote an interesting article on Medium about the future of agency partnerships and marketing a couple months ago, I believe now. Yeah, how do you see the future of agency partnerships with marketing?
Joseph Vito DeLuca 4:56
When you start that discussion, you just start at square one, which is just work itself, I think when you look at the foundation of how we work, it's really mind blowing. This standard eight hour a day, 40 hour a week working structure is something that harkens back to the time of the assembly line in the 1920s. People are building the Model T Ford cars. And you know, so much has changed in our lives, a lot due to technology, yet, we're still working in the same old structure. And yeah, that just blows my mind. Obviously, things need to change. And fortunately, they are changing, albeit maybe slowly, depending on how you look at it. So, you know, going back to how agencies and brands and marketing teams can work together, we need to challenge ourselves, how are we working as you know, individuals ourselves, for instance, there's a lot of different studies out there, but people say that, you know, the eight hour work day is so inefficient because on average, the typical employee is only really productive for two hours and 53 minutes out of those eight hours, so...
Josephine Tse 6:01
That was definitely me when I, yeah. To all my old employees ignore that. But I totally I relate to that. In your past positions, did you find, I guess the positions you were in falling within those hours or the those terms and you weren't really productive as well? Because I know we were talking about, we're in startups and startups don't really follow that structure either.
Joseph Vito DeLuca 6:22
Yeah, I think startups are dangerous because they take that structure and they make it even worse. So it's very common depending on your role and where you're at to maybe work like 12, 13, 14 hour days, which is incredibly unproductive, especially when you pull it out and you look at the macro of how your, how it's straining you mentally and even physically. Going back to the eight hour workday thing, it's not just the in office dynamics to create distractions, just like the human psychological element behind that, because part of that study referenced that an employee might spend over an hour just reading articles online. It's part of the eight hour workday. So even when you're remote working by yourself, you need to be conscious of, am I really being productive, because there's all these distractions, especially in today's day and age. I anytime pick up my phone, there's probably 20, 30 new notifications. And yeah, it's just killing our attention spans as human beings, and it's getting harder and harder to focus for longer intervals of time. So these are all the kind of things that, you know, we need to challenge ourselves about, like when it comes to work, like just showing up and being in a place for eight hours. You know, that's, that shouldn't be working, how we look at work.
Josephine Tse 7:31
So how have you found it? So the Kambr has been, is that, is it your first like, remote position? Because the past ones were more traditional?
Joseph Vito DeLuca 7:39
Yeah, typically more more standard, where you go into the office every day, and that was what was expected. Unless you had some kind of other circumstances. You know, there's always been a certain degree of flexibility, but here, it's not at all expected that you need to come to the office. It's about finding your best way to work and finding the right combination. What's nice here for instance, is I live outside the city, so it's over an hour to commute each way. So I can pick and choose days when I want to come to our co working space and be surrounded by more of a team dynamic. And when I can just work from home, I have my own office space in my house. So that's something on the flexibility side. That's a huge benefit, I think.
Josephine Tse 8:17
So how have you been finding your journey, getting used to working remotely and dealing with the distractions that aren't your coworkers tapping you on the back and dealing with you know, like, as you were saying, the phones and are like all the distractions on the internet? Have you been dealing with that?
Joseph Vito DeLuca 8:35
Yeah, I must say that I'm very much an optimizer, maybe trying to optimise to a fault. So sometimes you look at all these self help tips and efficiency guides and how to be more productive. I mean, it's a multi billion dollar industry right now. And even if you go too far down that wormhole can just kill you because then you you focus too much time on, Oh my god, am I being productive? Am I doing this right? Am I being as efficient as I can it you can drive yourself mad at that point, too. Yeah, there's all these great efficiency and productivity hacks. But you know, when things need to get done, I just make sure things get done. Unfortunately, there's no end all be all way to do this. And that very much harkens back to the individual. If I'm working from home and you do have some pockets of sunshine here in the Netherlands, finally, I'll just take a break and go out for a run. And then I come back to work. I'm still challenging myself to think about work differently, because I do like to have this clear divide of where, okay, I'm working, but now it's the evening and I can rest and recharge now. But maybe I want to start challenging myself to start working in pockets. For instance, another study found that the ideal ratio to work to break is you do 52 minutes of work followed by 17 minutes of a break.
Josephine Tse 9:46
Okay.
Joseph Vito DeLuca 9:47
Apparently that's the best way to stay productive and stay focused. So there's so many different things you can try.
Josephine Tse 9:52
Yeah, I've also I mean, the Pomodoro method, the 25/5 or something as well. For me, I've noticed that I can work really early in the morning. And once after lunch rolls around, I'm like, I don't really, it's it's less productive for me. And then I think later in the evening, I get a ramp up. I'm like, like 9 or 10 or so. I was also wondering if you had things that you're trying to improve within yourself as a leader to when managing your distributed team?
Joseph Vito DeLuca 10:24
Yeah, absolutely. On that topic, specifically, something that I find that helps a lot is transparency. Fortunately, we're also in the era of software. For instance, we use Asana to track all our tasks. And then we've integrated an Everhour extension, which then allows you to track your hours. So it's very easy to see what people are working on the status of what they're working on how long they've been working on it, which you know, on the agency side is very important, especially with client work when you're sometimes on hourly contracts with clients. So it also helps with team utilisation. So not just how many hours is the team putting in work but like where are those hours? Is being dedicated to design, web development, PR, content. So those are very important to have those correct tools in place. And yeah, looking at myself as a leader where I tried to improve, I'm very big into self awareness and emotional intelligence. So I spend a lot of time there. And that's something that I'm learning how to get better at doing it from a distributed mindset. It's a completely different dynamic when everyone's in the office. And you can pick up on a lot of nonverbal cues, for instance, but then when you're talking to people, maybe not even just video, but you're just doing a lot of Slack messages. There's something, sometimes it's hard to pick up on the context. So I'm really trying to get better at making sure the context is clear. So sometimes I'll even write like, Hey, I wrote this, but this is the tone I was going for even being that explicit.
Josephine Tse 11:46
Oh, all right. Yeah. Cuz like, that's actually a really good tip. I haven't heard that one before. Just being like, this is the tone that I'm trying to use to explain things. Your position now at Kambr, having almost been there for a year, are there any processes that you've been able to kind of refine and improve upon since starting here to help better manage your distributed team?
Joseph Vito DeLuca 12:11
Yeah, one of the things we're continuing to work towards is working in more of an agile framework. So if you look at how a development team works, a common practice is working in these two week sprints. And you have you start with planning, then you have stand ups daily, then you have a sprint review, or you show what you worked on. And you have a retrospective where you reflect on what went well, what didn't where you can improve. So I'm trying to take that same framework and apply it to my team as well.
Josephine Tse 12:39
So I also want to touch up a little bit about the endeavours with Yellow Cat Five, how has the process been building this agency within this company?
Joseph Vito DeLuca 12:49
Oh, yeah, that's an excellent question. In the spirit of bucking tradition and being trailblazers, we also looked at marketing and challenged, how and why we can do this because you know, traditionally, marketing is very much a cost centre and expense for a business such as ours. But we thought, Hey, why don't we flip the script and also generate revenue from our marketing. And that's kind of the idea behind having this internal agency within Kambr that also works with external clients. So instead of marketing just being a huge drain on the bottom line, especially when it comes to the cost of talent, we thought, well, why don't we just build our own internal agency bring in some revenue by working with different clients. It also has strategic significance. Sometimes depending on who the clients are, for instance, we work with one of our investors, so it helps us strengthen that relationship. So no longer is marketing looked at just an expense, but it's actually a profitable unit within the company. And since we can bring in this extra revenue, it also helps us grow the marketing team further and deeper than we would be able to and a more standard approach so we can bring on additional talent that we otherwise wouldn't have if we just we were doing Kambr for marketing,
Josephine Tse 14:01
I had experience working like in an in house as well. And it was like an in house production- post production studio. And we were also able to take on other clients, as well as mainly working with the main client that we were under. So I see the model that you are going for. I guess the one thing that strikes me is that you're doing this with a distributed team. And a lot of I guess, because you're you're focused more on the the marketing and branding with with the agency. What I was working in was more of a like, the post production so everyone had their own stations, everyone had equipment and all that. And what I think about a lot is how would you make that more remote and more distributed? Because it's like they need the equipment and the fast internet and having everything in place and definitely the machines run faster there and all that kind of stuff. So that's always been something on my mind. Like how would I ever do I ever see like post production due to being fully like distributed, but everyone would have to have their own equipment. Everyone would have to have to have their own setup somewhere. What if they can't achieve that? It's just extra things on my mind.
Joseph Vito DeLuca 15:11
I think it's a great question. And I'd answer that by saying, well, how much do you spend on traditional office space? And why don't you redistribute those assets and give people a stipend to build their own workstations?
Josephine Tse 15:22
And that's true, too. That's true, too. How would you, and something else, but like, that I talk about with people is um, remote, is client management. Because we are used to, at least for studios, I think they're used to, or clients are used to coming in and being pampered and treated and it's interesting to see like, how that will go as well, because more companies are going remote and distributed and there's no place for clients to come. Then how's that gonna look like? Have you been in a situation?
Joseph Vito DeLuca 15:53
Yeah, I think it's absolutely a benefit to be distributed rather than a hindrance to that because as we build out those teams, we can have people set up in strategic locations. So we're always local with our clients that that's the aim of what we want to do. Right now we have clients stretched all the way from California and to New Zealand. Right now we're still scaling so that can be met with some challenges. But in the future, I see us being distributed team to be a major benefit, because then we can have people working, not individual people working 24 hours a day, let me stress, but always having some components of the team always working around the clock. And you can't do that unless you have a distributed setting. So then we can always work with local clients in a way that we wouldn't be able to if we just said, oh, we're an Amsterdam based company. And it also opens us up to new business opportunities that we otherwise wouldn't have if we were just focused on one physical location.
Josephine Tse 16:45
That's true. That is very true. I mean, I'm that I'm curious to see how like in the future how people you know, adapt to that as well. And I be like, as you said, like, you can have local spaces for local business is is what I see it us.
Joseph Vito DeLuca 17:02
Yeah, absolutely. And again, going back to infrastructure, you know, high streets are dying. E-commerce is eating up everything. So what is high street going to look like in the future? And I think one of the ways you can fill that is with catering to the future of work and distributed work. Because you can start setting up spaces where there may be used to be retail stores for people to work, and people will come together, maybe it'll be easier to get ad hoc meeting spaces for a couple hours, things like that.
Josephine Tse 17:32
That's true. That's true, too. I mean, it's Oh my God, I was gonna go into like a whole other thing about retail, but, um, I can't it's different topic.
Joseph Vito DeLuca 17:40
Okay, last point about retail. It's also you know, brick and mortar retail tell is another example of an industry a space that needs to change. So, if I have, I don't know, maybe a local grocery store or something in my town. Why don't I set up a working space there so people come during the day and can interact? Maybe the local bank can have some kind of facilities for people to have meetings or work. You know, I'm also curious to see how these existing businesses will adapt to the future of work.
Josephine Tse 18:12
I know that Santander banks do work cafes now. So you can just go and use it as like a public working space. That's like that split with their office and their offices are in the back. So that's something I've seen pop up.
Joseph Vito DeLuca 18:26
Yeah, that's a great example. Yeah.
Josephine Tse 18:28
And so I want to also know if working remotely has opened up anything for you outside of work, have you been able to do something that you've wanted to do for a long time but never had the time to do any, anything like that?
Joseph Vito DeLuca 18:45
Yeah, it's funny you mention that because I'm at the point in my life where that's the very thing I'm looking to work on. We just finished this very long process, my wife and I have building our own home here and even during the project, it was so nice to have this flexibility because I had to be on site at certain times and certain meetings, arrange certain things while trying to get this house prepared. So it was nice not having to be stuck in a standard more rigid work setting or also would have probably been nearly impossible.
Josephine Tse 19:14
How long did it take for the construction of a house? Like you literally built it from the ground up kind of thing?
Joseph Vito DeLuca 19:20
Yeah, here in the Netherlands, you'll read that there's a bit of a housing shortage and you know, property prices are through the roof. So there's a lot of these neighbourhood building projects popping up so we jumped on that. So literally, our whole neighbourhood where we live now didn't exist a year ago, which is crazy.
Josephine Tse 19:37
Oh, wow. So does the government help you with that? Is that like, why you guys jumped onto the project?
Joseph Vito DeLuca 19:43
The government does not help you with that, surprisingly.
Josephine Tse 19:46
Oh.
Joseph Vito DeLuca 19:46
It actually cost a certain percentage more to buy a new build home compared to an existing property. I think that that's very strange too, but...
Josephine Tse 19:54
Okay, okay, so you guys were like living elsewhere while supervising this while trying... while going to work? And well?
Joseph Vito DeLuca 20:01
Yeah, exactly. So a lot of moving pieces there. so fortunate to have flexibility with my work to be able to do that.
Josephine Tse 20:07
Yeah. If I were in your position, I'd be really happy with the remote aspect as well. I can see that. Now that we are running into the last part of the podcast. Do you think that Kambr's upcoming initiatives and the entire story that you've told us will help encourage and enable our listeners to explore this future of work?
Joseph Vito DeLuca 20:31
Yeah, we really hope so. We'd love to be the blueprint of you know, beyond just remote work, but just building a company itself doing that with a distributed team. Very much hope to be the trailblazers in the space and show that there's a new way to build a company.
Josephine Tse 20:45
I just want to thank you so much for participating in the Remoter Project and giving us your time and sharing your story. I think that the listeners will be quite inspired by it because yeah, we we haven't had anyone on the show yet. Like a company that's trying to build their business with these units and do it as a distributed team. So thank you very much Joe for your time.
Joseph Vito DeLuca 21:07
Thank you and it's been my pleasure because I think what you guys are doing is great because there also needs to be more education and understanding about remote and distributed work. So you're definitely filling a big niche in the market. So really happy to help you guys and build the future of work.
Josephine Tse 21:28
Remoter Podcast season two is recorded, produced and edited by Josephine Tse. It is mixed and mastered by Stephen Stepanic and Vanesa Monroy. Graphics and visuals by Valentina Castillo. The music track used is Skip by OBOY from SoundStripe. Follow and subscribe to us on Spotify, Apple podcasts wherever you listen to your podcasts. Don't forget, we've recently made our Founding and Growing Remotely online course completely accessible and listed on our site. Visit us at remoter.com, that's R E M O T E R dot com for more relevant content. Follow us on social media @remoterproject to stay up to date with our latest initiatives and collaborations with other remote first companies around the world. We'd also love to hear your thoughts about each episode, so feel free to tag us on socials anytime. And remember, we're here to make work fulfilling, so what part will you play in shaping the future of work?