Challenge

Outlandish was trying to find the most effective way to connect their global, remote team. With employees based in China, US, UK, and the Phillipines, they struggled with streamlining all operations and updates from different geographical locations into one platform. They used over 10 different collaboration platform tools, such as Google Workspace, Microsoft Office, Zoom, Monday.com, Whatsapp, Calendly, and more.

When working with employees around the world, some collaboration apps are not available for use in certain regions, which also led to communication challenges across separate platforms and time zones. Outlandish found it specifically challenging when collaboration on documents and processes alongside global teamwork.

Solution

Now, with Lark, Outlandish manages their employees and works all under one app. "We found out quickly that we preferred it over mixing different software. All in one is much better. It is also very fairly priced and has a very good freemium version," says William August, CEO of Outlandish. The team now saves up to an hour a day on manual work, thanks to Lark's centralized platform, automated workflows, and team-focused features.

Bringing the team together has never been easier.

Since the entire team is dispersed, Lark brings everyone together through chat, video conferencing, and email. All of their employees conduct all communication via Lark, which is friendly for use in all geographical regions, so that they no longer need to juggle across various apps to communicate with each other. "Lark brings my team together through group meetings, cameras on and chats. It's a really great tool for building a community as well," says William.

Moreover, each region focuses on different initiatives—such as UK on Ad Management, US on Livestream Operations, and more. With these different regional focuses, they also have chat groups per regional department to help streamline communications and make their discussions more focused.

When collaborating with teammates in different regions, Lark makes it easy for them to see their coworker's time zones, so they can take into account different schedules when creating meetings. As a result, it helped their team quickly adjust and improve their efficiency by 30%.

Customized workflows and databases that work just right for their business.

With Lark, Outlandish manages all operations, from client management, video creation, and finances in one place. Their favorite app to do all of this? Lark Base—a robust, no-code dashboard and database that allows you to build custom workflows. "Everything changed when we found Base. It is so much better than an excel sheet, easily scalable, you can set custom permissions and automations. It's so customizable, saves a ton of time for us, and is great for managing projects," says William.

Outlandish uses Base as a CRM, Project Management, and Creator Management tool. They have a Lark Base that they use to track creators internally, one main sheet, and sheets for each client. To manage these various sheets, they have advanced permissions for each client where they can see their creators but no-one else can. "It's just an extremely efficient way to communicate. Without this advanced permission and Lark Base, I can't imagine how this would have been possible without building a whole custom system internally. Lark is great for building systems fast," says William.

Lark Base also has an in-built business intelligence system, which helps them track work, easily search for information, and quickly build out dashboards. Now, they save hours a day on manual work.