Zach Boyette: Remote, Design, Freedom, Games | Work 20XX Ep46

Zach Boyette: Remote, Design, Freedom, Games | Work 20XX podcast with Jeff Frick Ep46 from Running Remote
English Transcript
© Copyright 2025 Menlo Creek Media, LLC, All Rights Reserved

Cold Open:
All right.
So we'll go in
three, two, one.

Jeff Frick:
Hey welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here from Work 20XX on the road. We're in Austin, Texas for the Running Remote event that probably I don't know, a thousand of the smartest people in the world of remote work all in one place at the same time, who would imagine. So we had to come down here and really what's important is a lot of these lessons are applicable whether you're fully remote, hybrid, distributed all back in the office, it doesn't really matter. It's really about managing people better. And we're excited to have our next guest. He’s Zach Boyette the CEO of Galactic Fed. Zach, Great to see you.

Zach Boyette:
Good to see you too, Jeff. Thanks for having me on. Happy to be here.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah. So, what do you think? What do you think of this scene? Have you ever been to one of these before?

Zach Boyette:
I have not. I was invited to speak in 2020. April 2020. And I don't know if you were alive then but if you were anywhere in the world you would know that April 2020 was not the time to do a remote work conference in real life. in real life. So that one was canceled. I maybe went to speak, was invited to speak last year. I maybe went to speak, was invited to speak last year. I can't quite remember, but I'm happy to make it here for the first time.

Jeff Frick:
Excellent. Yeah. So tell people what is Galactic Fed for people that aren't familiar with the company.

Zach Boyette:
Yeah, we are a digital marketing agency. So we help companies run Google ads, Facebook ads, build great ad campaigns, SEO, email marketing, build sites, that sort of stuff. I started this company in 2018. I've grown it to 150 employees now and we're in 31 countries around the world. Originally, it was a big emphasis on startups like early stage, seed, pre-seed, series A start ups. But now we've scaled and we help a lot bigger startups and companies all the way up to the Fortune 20 try to grow faster with marketing.

Jeff Frick:
Okay And are you fully remote? I think you’re fully remote

Zach Boyette:
We're fully remote and about 50% asynchronous as well. So a lot of our people are doing stuff without other people doing stuff at the same time, doing it on their own time.

Jeff Frick:
And you said 31 countries?

Zach Boyette:
31 countries. Yeah.

Jeff Frick:
Wow, what's the most of in any one country? What's the most people?

Zach Boyette:
We're pretty spread out. So I think maybe, maybe either the Philippines or South Africa. So I think maybe, maybe either the Philippines or South Africa. We have maybe 15 people in those countries maybe a bit more in them but that's the most it's pretty distributed I'd say, between countries. There's not a big spike in one place. And I think that's good because like culturally and stuff it's not like a big swing towards I don't know, Thanksgiving and Christmas in the States because everyone's based here.

Jeff Frick:
Right, right no anchor. So you were a Digital Nomad I saw part of your TED talk. You lived out of a suitcase for a number of years. So clearly it was a priority for you to get around the world. And be, you know, kind of a global citizen. Did you have that as an objective when you started the company at the beginning? Was that a priority for you?

Zach Boyette:
Yeah, so I became a digital nomad in 2016 and I was like, oh my gosh, this is the coolest thing ever. I’d never flown on a plane till I was 19. I grew up on a small mountain in Tennessee, so I really wanted to structure my life in a way where I could see the world. Where I could travel, I could go to new places.

Jeff Frick:
What activated that bug? You hadn’t been on a plane and you’re 19 and suddenly you want to see the world?

Zach Boyette:
I got my first job I worked at Procter and Gamble out of college and they had me, I don't know why they had me when I was 22 fly all around the world, just kind of sitting in meetings. fly all around the world, just kind of sitting in meetings. It was a great gig, wonderful people, very smart. I have no idea why they brought me there. I was in the south of France in a lavender field meeting with the heads up some perfume plants. I was in China meeting with people who make the make the taste for toothpaste. And I was like, wow, I really like traveling it turns out. It was also easier that I was doing business class travel with work things I, I didn’t realize it's a bit harder when you're in coach. Got out of that and I don’t know I just realized I really love traveling. I really love meeting people from different cultures. And I wanted to structure my life in a way that lets me do that. And also, I wanted to give other people the opportunity to do that. So I thought I could build a great company remotely. I could give people the opportunity to travel if they wanted or just to have the flexibility back with their lives.

Jeff Frick:
Right So how do you manage culture? How do you manage engagement with so many people distributed in so many places, so many cultures, languages, time zones, etc., How do you focus to keep everybody on the same page?

Zach Boyette:
So for us, from a cultural perspective like an actual country culture I'll talk about that real quick. Then I'll talk about the company culture. Country culture we try to like really get into the different countries like what would they do? Like our HR team is constantly celebrating this and that regional, national holiday and, like really making people feel involved and making people feel like we care about them and their background. But as far as how we keep people engaged at my company since we're all spread out and all over the place we have a lot of like really great systems asynchronously to help people, get their work done even when they're not together. For example we have we really care about time tracking like time tracking software is really big for us. Because if you're giving people this freedom to spend their time how they want it and to rarely have phone calls you need them to give you back the responsibility and accountability of checking in with their time giving you every 5 or 15 minutes worth of time and reviewing that and that allows us to check you know, not only are people doing what we hired them to do, are they trying to pad their hours? Or are they actually committed? Which is this thing, you know, you hear about these companies that have forgotten employees. They wake up a year later and they're like, wow, this guy, what does he do? He's been collecting a paycheck

Jeff Frick:
Did anybody seen him?

Zach Boyette:
Four jobs. But what we find, you know, in a less, really bad way than that is let's say on average, it takes us five hours to build a new Google Ads account for a client. And, Mary, it takes her two hours to build one. And, Jeff, he takes not you, we’ll use a different name, someone else.

Jeff Frick:

It’s alright, fine. Take me a long time.  Hopefully I was the long guy

Zach Boyette:
Yeah. Jeff takes ten hours. He’s never done this before in his life, so you know, we might conclude that Mary is rushing. She's, you know, not doing it good. Or maybe she has some new novel genius way to do it. And Jeff probably just doesn't really know what he's doing he’s a perfectionist. And we wouldn't be able to test that unless we were tracking their time.

Jeff Frick:
Right, right. One of the things you mentioned I think it might have been in the TED talk is that we're all probably spending too much time in meetings and not enough time writing. And Darren Murph, right who is the godfather of this whole thing actually has a Guinness Book of World Record for writing blog posts, which is pretty amazing. But really, this whole idea of getting information out of your head in a place that it can be more easily shared. I wonder if you can share. How do you execute that day to day within the company?

Zach Boyette:
Yeah, so for us, writing blueprint documents is a really big thing, so I'm big on not having these personality dependent institutional like knowledge holders where if one person just disappeared, you know, rage quits gets hit by a bus, goes on mat or pat leave.

Jeff Frick:
Right, the old bus problem.

Zach Boyette:
then like, you're like, oh my God like we've had a hole blown in the way we do things. Like, anytime we onboard someone, we won't know what to do now. So for us instead, when I first started this company, I spent the first few years I had lots of weird, kooky rules. One of them was everyone had to spend 10% of their time just documenting, so that was usually four hours a week on Fridays people would just be writing down how we do things. So, you know, what's the blueprint for how we kick off a new marketing account? How do we onboard a new team member? How do we let somebody go if they're not doing well? And as a result, we have this great system for how we do things. So that means that as we scaled from, you know 20 to 50 to 100 to 150 employees, it wasn't just like I was hiring good people and throwing them into the meat grinder to do things their own way. I have, you know, 50 new talented employees doing this one function, and they do it my way, the Galactic Fed way, not their own way which has been really useful.

Jeff Frick:
So you’ve talked about the power of the thirst to explore. And you've also talked about really the power of human connection. And that's why we want to get together and yet you travel a lot. You were, you know, solo out wandering the world and now you've got these people distributed all over the place. How do you manage the human connection side of this which, as you said is so, so important.

Zach Boyette:
Why I set the company up remotely to start is that we give people the option to build their lives in the ways they want, and rather than forcing them to have the human connection in sort of the, you know 20th century way that we built it which is you commute for an hour and you show up in this place and you sit there next to these people and then you do it that way. We allow people to build their lives how they want. If they want to travel full time like me, and explore the world they can do that. If they want to get deeper with their community they can do that. From a company perspective though how do we make these people who are not talking to each other in real life ever and rarely on the phone with each other? How do we make them not clock in and out and actually make friends and such? We do a couple things for that. One, we really care about doing these async games every month where people might be sharing an example from their life. For example, we did one recently that was like a best workplace rig setup. And, everyone in the Slack channel would upload a picture of their workspace and one guy had this like 12 monitors glowing keyboard psychedelic cat posters on the wall that sort of thing. And he explained like this is how I am. Like, I kind of have a hacker ethos and this is my background. Another person showed the veranda you know her porch side beach side setup where she works every day with the cool breeze. In Croatia. And that's, that's her setup. And then everyone votes with Slack emojis to see who has the coolest one and they get a prize. So we do some fun stuff like that. Another thing we do every quarter instead of the like boring snooze fest every leadership brings slides and like says the numbers from the last quarter kind of call. We don't do any of that. It's all bonding focused. It's a show and tell. So Jeff would show up with one object from his life something, you know it could be spouse, kid, pet, ceremonial sword collection, hot sauce, whatever is important to you. And you say, this is what makes Jeff, Jeff. You know, this is what I care about this quarter and this is what I really love. And that's just a good window into people's soul to see this physical object on the camera. And it's also a good launching off point for these affinity channels we have on Slack, like parenting, photography, travel, where people then hop in and say, okay, I saw that Michelle also lives in Portugal. She also surfs because she brought her surfboard to show and tell. Let's chat in the surfing channel about getting a surfing trip together with different Galactic Fed employees.

Jeff Frick:
So you have active interest areas in Slack dedicated just to this effort.

Zach Boyette:
Yeah, we have about 30 Slack channels for all sorts of niche interests. Cats is a really big one for us. I don't know why. We're a big cat culture at Galactic Fed. I don't have one, but I like them so.

Jeff Frick:
That’s great.

Zach Boyette:
Yeah, all sorts of random niche stuff like that. Think of it, it's probably there.

Jeff Frick:
Right That's super cool. Okay, so I got to ask you How is Gen AI impacting the SEO business, both in terms of the generation of copy as well as, you know, how people approach the whole SEO challenge in trying to bring attention to their stuff?

Zach Boyette:
It's changing everything. And I think it's you know from people who aren't moving fast enough to get on to it. It's like a terminal threat. But for those like us who are you know embracing the future and what things will look like I think it's like 10x opportunity. There's the side of it for my team and the employee side. And there's the side for the you know market potential of what we do. And I can talk about both of those. For us, from a team side of things, it just allows us to move a lot faster. Obviously, if clients are hiring us to write content for them because they want us to do that themselves we take that promise seriously. And we're not going to pump into ChatGPT or Jasper to get some article really fast. You know, we if clients hire us to do a human written handwritten piece of content that still thrives in a world where you want to be 1 in 1,000,000, not one of a million, you know, not having

Jeff Frick:
Ahh, I like that line

Zach Boyette:
not like that classic ChatGPT writing with the M dashes and stuff that we can all recognize. You know, having something real and raw can be really valuable especially if, as something we do often is we’ll hire real like deep experts in a certain area that's based on that company. Let's say a mining company wants to hire Galactic Fed for help. We might hire like a mining like a green mining specialist and have them write content for this client. And that's something that ChatGPT or something couldn't get. That said, as well, I think there's a really big opportunity now rather than just figuring out how to rank on Google there's now all these other SEO like platforms. ChatGPT, you know, Claude, whatever it may be that companies are now looking to rank in. And so rather than this sort of promise of the internet that Larry Page invented 20 whatever years ago when he made Google which is basically that the world will be divided by backlinks you know the more authoritative backlinks your company has pointing at it the higher you'll rank on Google the more organic traffic you'll get. There's different signals now. Now you know your company getting mentioned in videos, in podcasts, in real life, in the news. These things all contribute to a company showing up well in SEO and on the LLM results not just backlinks. So there's a lot of stuff changing here and companies really need help figuring out how to adapt to that. Otherwise they're like top performing Google results that got them a lot of money for years are going to be at the bottom of the page and they're going to make no more money.

Jeff Frick:
So it's almost like like treat all the Gen AI platforms almost as like another Google cause you’re hoping to show up in those things.

Zach Boyette:
Absolutely.

Jeff Frick:
How do you get into them? How do you start to populate that data?

Zach Boyette:
So for now, it's the same stuff that you do for Google since they're crawling the web traffic in similar ways, so get good backlinks, get people mentioning you, the types of things that are typically good for Google SEO. But that said, the LLMs do look more for what they call ‘entity based’ results, which is just any time your company's name shows up anywhere. So again as I mentioned podcasts, videos on the news in real life, press even if your company's not linked there the LLMs look just as closely at these entities of people mentioning the entity of say Galactic Fed than just the backlink

Jeff Frick:
And you see in the not so distant future that those will usurp Google in terms of prioritization within your go to market.

Zach Boyette:
I don't think usurp. I think it’s just something different that we can do.

Jeff Frick:
Just something different, okay

Zach Boyette:
I think Google Google is a very smart company. It's one of the most valuable companies in the world. 90 something percent of their revenue is from ad clicks. And those ad clicks are only valuable if people are searching on their platforms. There's a lot of smart people there. I'm quite confident they'll find a way to keep that traffic flowing. It's just figuring out how to change with the times. I think that you know, there will always be need for people to get help from external marketing partners, such as Galactic Fed. But what companies need to be able to count on is that we're not going to be selling them the same like tired crap from ten years ago. That just doesn't make sense anymore. We need to be doing the homework and going to the conferences and reading the research papers so they don't have to.

Jeff Frick:
Right Well you know Clayton Christensen, before he passed away spoke at Google. One of the Google Talks. And he actually told him, I really worried about you guys cause you’re doing so so well. I'm really worried. I’m really worried you're going to miss the next big thing that comes along, so Innovator's Dilemma pay attention, you know, it’s not easy

Zach Boyette:
Innovator's Dilemma indeed. Yes it’s Google is now realizing they need to actually care about this AI stuff that they shelved.

Jeff Frick:
Forever ago, alright

Zach Boyette:
Yeah, exactly

Jeff Frick:
Well, Zach, thanks for spending a few minutes with me and, 31 countries that's amazing.

Zach Boyette:
You got it Jeff. Thanks for having me. Thanks everybody for listening to. Hope this has been helpful.

Jeff Frick:
Absolutely. All right. Thanks again. He's Zach, I'm Jeff You're watching Work 20XX. Coming to you from Running Remote in Austin And yes, it's hot here. We’ll see you next time. Thanks for watching Thanks for listening on the podcast. Take care. Bye bye.

Cold Close:
Give it a clap
Cool.
Golly
That was good
Sweating like a pig
Yeah. Me too, man

Zach Boyette: Remote, Design, Freedom, Games | Work 20XX podcast with Jeff Frick Ep46 from Running Remote
English Transcript
© Copyright 2025 Menlo Creek Media, LLC, All Rights Reserved