Michael Melen: Talent Pool, Growth Opportunity | Work 20XX Ep54

Michael Melen: Talent Pool, Growth Opportunity | Work 20XX podcast with Jeff Frick Ep54 from Running Remote 2025 Austin
English Transcript
© Copyright 2025 Menlo Creek Media, LLC, All Rights Reserved

Cold Open:
You guys good? 
Okay, cool. 
All right so then I’ll 
I'll count us down 
and then we will just go. 
In three, two, one. 

Jeff Frick:
Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here coming to you not from the home studio. Looks a little bit different. I'm actually in Austin at Running Remote. So Work 20XX on the road with my good friends at Running Remote. So we're here talking to the experts. And what's interesting about remote work is was said once, long, long ago by a guy much smarter than me, Darren Murph. Remote forces companies to be good at things that all companies are [should be] good at. So whether you're fully remote, whether you're distributed, hybrid or everybody in the office, these are all lessons in terms of knowledge management and communication and engagement that we can all benefit from. So we're excited to have our next guest. He is Mike Melen and he is a co-founder with his brother of SmartSites. Mike, great to see you. 

Mike Melen:
Great to be here. Thank you so much. 

Jeff Frick:
Absolutely. So for people not familiar give them quick 101 on SmartSites. 

Mike Melen:
So we're a digital marketing agency. We do SEO, Pay per Click, email marketing, social media and websites. I started myself just in the SEO piece and then while we really branched out from there seeing that a company, small business that we serve, they don't need just SEO. They need the full service. And we really became the, you know, it's a, as long as small businesses need digital marketing, you know, we'll be able to provide it for them. 

Jeff Frick:
Okay, so you're giving a session in a little bit here at the show called How I Scaled My Business 400x using Remote. 400x. First off, congrats on the great growth. You know you've talked about getting ready for this. You're a New Jersey based company and you used to hire all locally and that was your thing. What happened that made you suddenly decide you need to go outside of New Jersey? 

Mike Melen:
Well, first off, I'll say that the credit of that title is not to me, that, I don't know who made that title, but it's a really good title. But I was looking at it also and I’m like 400x to me, like a dollar to $400, so. But in this case it was one employee to 400 employees. And that’s where they got the 400x. I don't take credit but it is a good title and that is the title of the session. 

Jeff Frick:
You know, there's a whole other group of people that write the headlines, then write the stories at newspapers.

Mike Melen:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s good. To me that's pretty good. And it was actually introduced to me. They said, hey, do you have the presentation ready? I'm like, well, what's the title? I'm like, that's a really good title. I'll work on it. And actually the way it started, I actually started remote and I started what eventually became SmartSites. I actually started in college and first I did things myself. And I started this like in the summer. So, it was almost like for, like, some side money, you know, to be able to go back to college and actually have some, you know, money to pay for things.

Jeff Frick:
You can say beer money. We know it was beer money. 

Mike Melen:
Yeah, exactly. It was beer money. But I was not 21. But still it was beer money. And eventually when I went back to university, I had to have a team to be able to still run it. Right, so I went overseas. Not to say that like it was intentional overseas but I went online and there were message boards back then and forums and I found people to do what I did in the summer. So to be able to run it right. And then when it came time to graduate, I kept those same people. But then I opened up an office and I, kind of the way I saw it is, you know, I was a project manager, you know so I was the one managing clients, managing relationships, sales. And then the writers would write and the link builders would build links. And I was the person to like, you know, manage it all. And my idea was hey, I'll just replicate myself. And those are the people who are going to be in the office. And that was the model until Covid came along. And then we closed it. So I started off remote, you know, and then I, it was a piece in the office, the US-based team. And now again, we're fully remote, so. Okay. That was my journey. 

Jeff Frick:
So what does remote do in terms of opening up the talent pool for you? That's got to be a completely different thing than just recruiting in your local Geo. 

Mike Melen:
Yeah, well, I speak two things on that. First off, I start off managing remote. So when we had the office, it was just a whole new set of challenges for me, things I would never think of. All of a sudden there's like office drama. There's debates on like the temperature of the office, you know, someone goes takes lunch five minutes later than someone else and they go, and they go, well, are we allowed to take lunch for an hour and five minutes now? Like, where does it end, Mike? And I was just like, oh my God, like, it was so hard for me to manage that because I came from just like managing on KPIs, like here’s what you have to do. [Jeff] Right. [Mike] And, you know, you just get it done. I don't care when you do it, you know, you just do it. And then when I opened up an office it was just like so many distractions, right. So, you know, that was one challenge with the office which again I'm happy to go fully remote now be able to more focus on the KPIs. Secondly, I headquartered it, quite selfishly, you know, next to my hometown, right. So I didn't look at a map and say, hey, what's good for this business? I looked at a map — a small map, and I said, what's close to home? Which was Bergen County, New Jersey. And it's not the cheapest place to live. And it's, well it’s next to city. No one from New York City would commute to Bergen County to work. It works the other way. So, you know, when I would look for something like a Google ad specialist, you know, or even more niche, Meta ads, Pinterest ads  you know, in Bergen County, New Jersey, very small talent pool. All of a sudden, again, Covid hit and we look for the same job now all through the United States. There's a lot more qualified people. 

Jeff Frick:
So how many of your remote folks are U.S. based versus international? 

Mike Melen:
So we keep a still a very similar model to what I started with, everyone U.S. based is client-facing. So sales, project managers, and then the writers, the developers, the designers, they're overseas. So we have around 100 people in the U.S. and about 300 overseas. 

Jeff Frick:
So there’s always a tricky question that comes up is pay. Do you pay by geo or do you pay by skill?

Mike Melen:
By skill but that's, it's funny, the way I looked at it, and I'm going to talk about a little bit about it tomorrow. You know, when I first went out to look for, you know, this talent, right. And I would see, like, oh, you know, this person from Australia is wanting the same rate as this person from Indonesia. And I would look at this and go like, okay, maybe I'll take the person from Australia, right. And then I would realize like, yeah, that's not a living wage for the person in Australia. So all of a sudden like, you know, my mindset flipped and said, hey, I want to look at people from really affordable countries because that dollar is going to go a lot farther for them. So we don't do, you know, we don't look at geo to for pay. Yeah, we don't look at geo at all.

Jeff Frick:
Cause it’s wide, right. 

Mike Melen:
I was reading Facebook

Jeff Frick:
Is it a huge range or is it collapsing? What do you see? 

Mike Melen:
Well, I'll say this also. So in Meta, I was reading about what Meta does, which I thought was funny. So Meta pays you, you know, in the U.S. based on where you live. So I have a buddy who works for Meta, works for Facebook and although he moved away from New York City, he still tells Meta he lives in New York City. And he goes, If Meta finds out that I actually moved upstate, all of a sudden they're going to pay me 20% less. Yeah, we don't do that.

Jeff Frick:
That's crazy.  So one of the things you've also talked about a lot is hiring young and giving opportunities to people to grow with the company, and that's really one of the benefits of being in a high growth business. I wonder if you can share a little bit more about that philosophy and how that's worked out for you?

Mike Melen:
Yeah, I mean it's worked for us, right? It's hard for me to say like, hey, it'll work for all cases. But for us it was always like, you know, yeah maybe we'd have like the luxury to like hire, especially when we started, like really experienced people. Right, so like all we could do is hire kind of inexperience and work with that. And it's worked for us. And another thing I'll speak about a little bit tomorrow, too, it's, we set out this goal really early on to grow 30% per year. And I'll say it was almost like accidental. When I envisioned the company, I envisioned like me and my best buds like make a company, right, like something small like, you know, me and my best ten best friends and we're going to do something cool together. And that's what it is. Right. And I was at that point really early on, but then I realized all the best people, they wanted growth. Right, so there's this like, Mike, what's like the growth plan? I'm like, what growth plan? Like, I'm cool with it. Why aren't you? And they're like, no, like Mike, I don't wanna be like your only sales person forever. And I was like, well why the heck not? Like you’re awesome. Like do this forever. They're like no Mike, I actually want to grow a team. And again, the best people, they wanted that. And I was like reluctantly I was like alright, well how about this? Like, nothing too crazy. Every year we're gonna grow 30%, right? And that way the best people, they could all of a sudden look at their organization say, hey, if I kick ass, like, in three years, I could actually be a manager. Yeah, and that was the goal we set up. So, yeah, it wasn't like we went from 100 to 400 overnight. It wasn't even like here’s the six months it happened. It was actually very organically every year, maybe like plus or minus 5%, maybe Covid was a little slower. But, for the most part, each year we grew around 30% and you know you multiply that out for 14 years and we’re at 400 some odd people. 

Jeff Frick:
That's great. Well, Mike, I appreciate the story. Good luck with your panel tomorrow. I'm sure it'll be fun. And thanks for sharing the update.

Mike Melen:
Thank you so much. I appreciate it. 

Jeff Frick:
All right. He's Mike. I'm Jeff. You're watching Work 20XX coming to you from Running Remote in Austin. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening on the podcasts. Catch you next time. Take care.

Cold Close
All Right
We are out
Thank you
Thank you sir

Michael Melen: Talent Pool, Growth Opportunity | Work 20XX podcast with Jeff Frick Ep54 from Running Remote 2025 Austin
English Transcript
© Copyright 2025 Menlo Creek Media, LLC, All Rights Reserved