Jo Palmer is a former school teacher turned business owner, founder and MD of Pointer Remote, who lives half an hour south of Walker in southern NSW on a small farm with her husband and two daughters.
“I always sort of thought when you do a teaching degree, you think that that's all you can ever do – you underestimate how transferable those skills are. Realistically, dealing with a class full of 15 year old boys is quite similar to dealing with a boardroom full of 55- to 60-year-old men. The other good skills are planning, programing, forecasting and being organised and managing time. I did not realise how they would be really useful for going into business.”
TS: Tell us about your call to adventure to launching Pointer Remote
JP: I taught for nine or 10 years in Australia, generally in small rural schools which quite often had only two or three teachers. I started a business in one of the small towns that I used to teach in Holbrook, in southern New South Wales, and I started The Learning Tree which was a comprehensive learning centre where we did tutoring and school holiday programs and exam prep. Within the first year, we had opened up in two other towns and I had 30 staff working for me.
Almost 18 months later, a friend I'd gone to boarding school with who worked in the live-export industry needed a sponsorship manager to manage the sponsorship for their annual event. So I took that job two days a week for four to five years, which spurred the founding of the next business, a sponsorship and event-management business in the agriculture industry I started with a friend.
The company I'd started with became our first client and Sally and I ran the business from our farms. We had clients all over Australia and ran events all over the place. I realised that unless someone plopped the job in your lap – like my first remote job – or you started your own business, it wasn't that easy to access remote work. This was back in 2016-17, so obviously pre-Covid. I realised that for people living in rural areas – and particularly women – being able to access work that they were trained or experienced in was quite tricky. So I started Pointer Remote. We connect businesses that are looking to fill positions with professionals that live all over rural Australia.
TS: Something that you are super passionate about is creating more opportunities for remote work through training and recruitment. Why is that so important to you?
JP: It ties back to my teaching career. Two of the schools I taught in have closed down due to population decline – we didn't have the number of kids to keep the schools open. If there's not enough work or opportunities in a rural community to keep families and people there, you start to lose the services like your school, your footy club, or your netball club, all of those social things, and also your health services. If you don’t have the population, it's harder to hold on to GP or other allied health and things.
TS: What are some of the key steps that really enable businesses to create a successful remote workforce?
JP: Culture, culture, culture. I know that should be the thing for all businesses. For example, the best way to hold on to staff or to attract staff is to be able to demonstrate you have a strong community and culture within the business. That is how you get the best out of your employees. If they love the purpose of your business, they love the culture and love going to work – whether that's in an office, or if it's working remotely – having a big focus on what it looks like to actually work in your organisation is really important. In a remote sense,
it's really important to understand that it takes work and you need to take a different strategy – but also just to remember that those incidental things that can happen when you've got an office, that culture and the camaraderie that happens around the water cooler, actually needs to be recreated in an online way.
I'm the biggest advocate for catching up with your team in the flesh at least a few times a year. That is still so important. I think human connection and those things that happen outside of formal meetings are really important to building a really successful remote culture in a company that has people working from anywhere.
TS: What's the key message that you are really passionate about that you've been advocating and championing through the work at Pointer Remote?
JP: The fact that talent doesn't only reside in the city. That's still a mindset that even country people are faced with. I quite often hear small businesses based in rural areas who might think, Oh, could they possibly be as good as someone that lives in the city? It is such a funny thing to get your head around, but it's this sort of unconscious bias that we've had drilled into us as country people, this idea that you have to leave your small town and go to the big city to achieve life-changing things that can't possibly happen in a rural area.
We are really passionate about trying to aid the mindset change around that and to say. During the last 12 months, people are starting to realise that you can run a really amazing, viable business from a rural area and you can also access really incredible talent that lives in those places as well.
TS: Can you share some positive and negatives to that decentralisation, and the national shift around regionalisation?
JP: On the positive side of things more people means more services. So you've got enough kids to keep schools open, you've got enough people to field footy and netball teams, you get to keep that GP that lives in town because there's enough people to warrant keeping those services funded. The positives for the people going there is that a lot of people have felt over the years, a lack of connection to the community in the cities, and with the people around them. We have sort of romanticised that slower-paced rural life, but I think a lot of people find that genuinely is what life is like in a smaller place.
The two major negatives are connectivity – which is still a big challenge for a lot of communities, but definitely improving every day – and access to housing. That is a really big challenge for people looking to relocate. Housing is a really big issue across rural Australia.
Interested in learning more? Listen to our entire conversation with Jo Palmer at the TradeSquare podcast, TSQ here.
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