What This CEO Says About Leading a Company That's Worked Remotely for 15 Years

“Scrappy” is how Ann Schlemmer, CEO of Percona, describes her company’s approach to booking team travel and retreats.

If you work in the travel industry, that word translates as “unmanaged” and companies like Percona are currently of huge interest to agencies and other new platforms being built to help manage the complexities of travel in an increasingly remote world.

Percona, a database software company, has 350 employees and has been a remote organization for more than 15 years, well before it was a thing. Yet for almost all that time it’s made do without a travel agency.

From Airbnbs on the beach in Brazil to an all-inclusive resort in the Dominican Republic, Schlemmer notes that Percona has always a had decentralized approach to managing travel. There’s not even a real expense policy — she advocates for her teams to be “frugal smart.”

You could call the technology company “mature” in terms of its remote working culture, but it has always supplemented the Zooming with in-person meetings.

There’s a lot of trust in staff to get things done, and Schlemmer said she leaves the budgeting to individual departments.

“We tend to be a little scrappy even though we’ve been around for 16 yea