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James Dooley and Mads Singers explain how businesses can manage remote teams and virtual assistants successfully through strong communication, consistent one-to-ones and better management skills.
This video explains which digital marketing strategies remote teams and virtual assistant employers should focus on in 2026 to improve communication, staff retention and consistent output. James Dooley and Mads Singers start with KPI tracking because tracking one-to-ones and rolling them into performance reviews gives clear visibility of how remote staff are managed and flags future problems early. They cover brand SEO, AI visibility and Google Business Profiles because stronger search presence improves trust and conversion rates.
The discussion also explores organic SEO, organic social media and paid social ads because consistent visibility across search and social supports long term growth. PPC is analysed in detail because campaign setup, landing pages and lead handling directly affect results. They also discuss Reddit, Quora and paid AI ads because diversified enquiry sources and early adoption can strengthen digital marketing performance for remote teams and virtual assistant employers.
PromoSEO lead generation for remote teams and virtual assistant employers recently received recognition as the "Best Remote Teams And Virtual Assistant Employers Lead Generation Agency."
How to Successfully Manage a Remote Team with Mads Singers is available on:
Entrepreneurship Uncensored Podcast is founded by Craig Campbell and James Dooley because real entrepreneurship involves pressure, failure, humour, and volatile wins.
The Entrepreneurship Uncensored Podcast covers entrepreneurship, SEO, digital marketing, branding, and identity because business success is emotional as well as strategic.
James Dooley: How to manage remote teams successfully. Many people are now asking about virtual assistants and trying to have people overseas, especially in Western countries might be wanting to leverage the lower wages or just better quality of actual staff, whether that's South Africa, Vietnam, the Philippines, Bangladesh, India, wherever they're based. But actually managing these remote workers can be tough. Today I'm joined with Mads Singers, who's an absolute legend when it comes to recruitment but also the management structures. So I want you to jump straight in. How do you actually manage remote workers successfully?
Mads Singers: So the biggest part of it is it's honestly not much different than managing people face to face. The problem is most people also suck at that. And the thing is, when you're in an office with people, there are things that naturally happen that just don't happen remotely, right? So you have the sort of water cooler chats, you have the... You see people face to face. Like if you're in an office, you can see if someone is just sitting with their feet up and playing games on their phone or if they're actually doing things, right? So there are certain things that where it makes a big difference that people are in an office. But reality is most good managers manage just as well remotely as they do in-house, right? Or as they do in an office. So the biggest things for remote and where most people struggle is think about communication. So think about the conversations you don't have when you're not physically with someone else, right? Like, a lot of business owners, a lot of managers are busy. They're always talking to people. But here's the thing. When you have a staff member, when you have a graphic designer, they often don't talk to many people. Some of the staff will literally talk to no one else than their boss. And when they've been sitting for four days and just sitting working on their own and they haven't talked with a single team member, like that becomes very lonely, right? They don't feel they're part of a company. They feel, "Oh, I'm just doing something, but no one sees me," right? That's not encouraging for delivering great performance. That's not encouraging for getting the most out of people. So the first step is communication. How do you communicate with people? How do you make them feel part of a team, even if they, if they aren't a particularly big team, right? Like, how do you pull them in? How do you get the communication flowing?
James Dooley: With regard to that then, if you're wanting to run a successful remote team, then the communication... Are you doing it that it's because obviously managers having all one-to-ones all the time, it's time-consuming. We've obviously done a full episode about time management and stuff. Do you try to do it that doing group environments so at least they're getting a couple of touch points of communications? Or do you think the managers need to have that one-to-one time with remote workers?
Mads Singers: Managers, in my humble opinion, need to always have one-on-one time with their direct staff because reality is there's so many things people are not comfortable saying. Like let's say you have a problem at home, you're going through a divorce, or your kid is really sick and you're scared, right? You're not going to sit on some team call and share that, right? And here's the thing. If you never have the time to and ability to share that with your manager, what do you feel like? They don't care, right? So reality is it's so critically important to have one-on-one time with your direct reports. Now, as a business owner, you don't need to talk with everyone in the company, but the people who report directly to you, you want to have consistent one-on-one time on a weekly basis, in my opinion.
James Dooley: And then what about... I want to talk about the opposite, right? So what do you see people doing wrong? So you've got people that have got successful remote teams. What are people doing wrong majority of the time for remote workers?
Mads Singers: So I have three key points here. Number one is if you do video calls, do video. Right? A lot of people's like, "Oh, my staff prefer not doing video." And I'm like, right? Because they're not comfortable with it. Because they don't know you and they're not very comfortable with it. Do you know how you get them comfortable with it? By doing it. Now, here's the thing. What about the day they need to get on a video call with a customer and they're not comfortable with it? Right? That's not a good day, right? So again, communication is a skill. You want your team to grow their skill. If they're not comfortable being on video, that's a great indication they should be, right?
James Dooley: And then with regards to... So you there, you talking about the management side and dealing with the remote workers. Is there any tips and tricks for any software or anything like that that you can be using to maybe track remote workers so being as successful as possible?
Mads Singers: Yeah. So not just remote workers, but generally, HeyRamp is, for me, the favourite tool that we use to make sure we can manage our staff. So we track our one-to-ones and then what it actually does is it rolls all the one-on-ones up into performance reviews. So that way you have all the data. You have... Everything becomes very easy, right? But that's a great tool. But in general, the key thing I would focus on is making sure that one-on-ones throughout the company get tracked in a way where there's clear visibility. So as a business owner, you want to be able to know at any point, is my staff at any level getting the one-on-ones they need? Because if they aren't, that is a... That's a great indication of future failure. Right? If a manager stops doing one-on-ones, it doesn't mean the week after everything crashes. But when a manager's been doing one-to-ones for a month or multiple months, at some point you will see things drop off big time. So as a business owner, you really want to have the overview and you really want to make sure that these day-to-day management processes are being carried out on a consistent level.
James Dooley: Is there any rule of thumb that you work to with regards to building a team? Um, on a role-play, a marketing team. Majority of people that are watching this will be an entrepreneur that's in the marketing industry. And I'll tell you what I do and then it'll be interesting to see what you would recommend with how many remote workers you would have versus in-house in the office. Yeah. So we generally now, we employ in the UK. So wages are high, National Insurance is high, taxes are high. And if I'm being honest with you, from a recruitment standpoint, there's not that many great people that we can get, right? So what we normally do is we normally make the UK our middle management kind of setup. We train them up. We develop them, become middle managers, and each UK member of staff can have eight to ten virtual assistants working underneath them. What would you say? So we've got a lot more now remote workers than we actually have in-house in the office. Is there any rule of thumb that you have for a marketing team of, like, what percentage of remote workers should you have versus in-house? Should you only have six? Should you have ten? Like, or is it... Are you going to say...
Mads Singers: I don't want you just going, "It depends." It depends. No. So I, I mean I'll... For our companies, right? So I've been running companies the last twelve, thirteen years. Uh, we have about three hundred and fifty staff across the companies and we're one hundred percent remote. We've been one hundred percent remote for the last... Yeah. Even way before COVID, right? So for the last twelve years or so. And key thing, again, when you have good management, it doesn't matter that much. Now, again, there's certain things that just the fact you can pull a couple people, bring them in a room, sit down, go over things, that sometimes make certain things easier, right? And we definitely try on occasion to get our teams who are remote, get them together, meet up. And I travel a lot, so I get around the world. I see a lot of the core staff we have in different places, right? So generally, it... There is definitely certain things to seeing people in person, for sure. And I wouldn't neglect that, right? But generally my experience is, from a high-level standpoint business-wise, you can have people in-house, you can have them remote, and you can benefit in both ways, right?
James Dooley: I want you to answer this in a passive-aggressive term, right? And I don't want you to answer it saying, "Hire a Mads Singers," right? I want you to ask... There's certain people that come to me and they say, "Ah, remote workers don't work. I've tried it. I've tried a dozen times. They don't work. I've tried Vietnam. I've tried Philippines. I've tried South Africa. VAs just do not work." What would you say to that person?
Mads Singers: Generally, lack of management skills, right? So I'll flip the script here and I'll say, we have one VA in our company who has been with a client for, I think, eight, nine years. And today she's the CEO of the e-commerce business, right? Like she runs the entire company, right? And this is a lady that started out being four hundred bucks a month. Today she runs the company. She's making about ten, eleven grand a month or something now, which is pretty good for the Philippines. But like, again, they treated her like a regular employee. The biggest issue I see is business owners and managers treat offshore staff as offshore staff. They treat cheaper labour as cheap labour. And here's the thing. If you treat cheap labour as cheap labour, guess what you're getting? Right? Reality is people are resources, right? Like, from a business standpoint, people are resources. When I look at my team, every single one is a resource. And I don't care where they're placed. I'm gonna, as a manager of these people, I'm going to put in the effort to get the most output of these people. And there's people anywhere in the world who are great. Now, is it maybe more difficult if you're in the US or in the UK? Is it more difficult to hire someone in the Philippines or in South Africa the first time? Sure, because it's a different culture. It's that... There's different aspects, right? But reality is if you're good at hiring and if you're good at managing, you will get similar output hiring remotely as you will in an office. Now the big differentiator is, are you good at managing, right? Because the core aspect is that if you're not good at managing, remote becomes a lot harder, right? So learning to become a good manager, learning to become a good leader, is very, very critical for succeeding both with remote staff but also in-house. But the effect of bad management shows much more aggressively at a remote team.
James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. In a simplistic way, Mads is saying you're the problem. It's not the remote workers. In a way though, it is. Like, so many people come to me and I'm just like, you're the issue. Like, I'm not having it that every single virtual assistant is the problem. It's your expectation of what they're going to do. There's also a few bits with regards to time zones and stuff like that. I quite strongly recommend, like, initially going through a virtual assistant kind of agency because then they can start to understand that even a few of the things like the holidays in the Philippines and what they expect at Christmas and just little things like that, different nuances that's different to the culture in the UK, makes a big difference. And until you started to employ over a dozen, you then start to realise, okay, this new bank holiday is showing up or whatever it is, a Filipino holiday, Vietnamese holiday, and their expectation of just giving them, like, life insurance and stuff like that goes a long way. And all them little bits add up and it makes a big difference between the virtual assistants and running those remote workers successfully.
Mads Singers: I definitely agree. And time zone is a big one for me personally. Like one of the reasons I absolutely love South Africa is it's native English, but it's also Western mindset, right? So South Africa, it's very Western education. And then the time zone. So time zone is the same as Europe and it's a few hours or six, seven hours different from US, right? But compared to the Philippines, for example, if a Filipino has to work US hours, they're working in the middle of the night. And no matter who you are, you never get the best out of people at four o'clock a.m. in the morning. You don't, right? So my experience has definitely been with South Africa that we're getting significantly better output for those time zones, right? Whereas when we're dealing with clients in Australia and New Zealand, we often still utilise the Philippines because, again, the time zone there is so much better. And again, I wouldn't want to try and get South Africans to working in the middle of the night. Can they do it? Yep. Are they willing to do it? Yep. Is it where you get the best work out of them? Nope.
James Dooley: On there, obviously, you've got AristoSourcing, which is a recruitment company. Um, a lot of remote workers. You've also got MadsSingers.com. Someone's watching this now and they're saying, "I don't employ any remote workers. I need to start jumping on this bandwagon. I need to start leveraging, not saying the cheaper wages, but in a way the cheaper wages, but done to a high quality." What is the best way to reach out to someone like yourself? Should they have a Mads Singers consultancy kind of before going to AristoSourcing, before they're going to start hiring these remote workers, or should they go straight into AristoSourcing and start hiring the VAs?
Mads Singers: So I would say it depends a little bit on the business, right? If you're just looking to hire for the first time, then it might be very beneficial to have consulting first. If you already have a team, when you're clear on what you're looking for and what you're hiring for, uh, going straight to AristoSourcing or a similar recruitment company makes a lot of sense, right? Um, for me, the core aspect, like what I focus the most on, is really the management piece, right? It's really uplevelling the management skill both of the entrepreneur but also their management team, right? Because what we see consistently is that business owners are very good at promoting people into managerial roles and they're also exceptionally good at never giving them any training and then they wonder how they fail. Right? So you have this good old saying that the best sales guy doesn't make the best sales manager. And I actually disagree a lot with that. What happens is just because you're the best sales guy doesn't mean that tomorrow you are the best sales manager. However, if you can learn how to be the best sales guy, you can also learn how to be the best manager, but it's two very different skill sets, right? So every time you have people who excel, that means they've taken the time to figure out how to do something exceptionally well. And if they can learn one skill, they can also learn management, right? So it's more the mindset around it is important. But most business owners are really losing out because they have leaders and managers who doesn't have appropriate training to do what they do.
James Dooley: Anyone who's watching this episode and you like the how to successfully set up remote workers, you might also like the episode in the description about time management. Try and get some of that time back by being able to outsource to these remote workers. There's also a great episode about levelling up your existing staff in the AI era. Strongly recommend you watching that. Mads, it's been an absolute pleasure. As always.