A team in an office, working your hours, reporting to you.

What we do

Five kinds of role, recruited to your brief. If the work can be done in front of a computer and it is repeatable enough to hand over, it is probably one of these or close to one.

What this is not

It is not a virtual assistant sourced from a marketplace and working from home. Our staff work in an office, on managed equipment, on a connection we are responsible for, with a supervisor on site.

It is not a managed service where somebody else decides what your team does. You brief them, you set their priorities, you review their work. We handle employment, payroll, the office and the equipment.

And it is not free of management effort. The journal on this site is largely about that, and the first entry in it says so plainly: what separates a team that works from one that does not is almost never the people.

Seat leasing

If you already have staff in the Philippines, or intend to recruit them yourself, we lease equipped workstations in the same offices: desk, chair, machine, connection, power backup and building access.

Requirements and what is included →

From the journal

Thirty entries on making an offshore team work, written to be useful whether or not you engage us. Where the honest answer is that outsourcing is the wrong move for a particular job, the entry says so.

The first conversation

Half an hour, no obligation, and the agenda is the same every time: what the role is, how many hours of describable work it contains, whether it divides cleanly, and what would have to be written down before anybody started.

The useful outcome is sometimes that the answer is no. A role that does not divide, a volume that does not justify a full-time person, or a business with nobody free to brief and review, are all better established in that half hour than in month three.

If it does suit, the next step is the written role, and we help with the format. Nothing is recruited against a conversation.

Why the journal is on a sales site

Because the questions that decide whether this works are answered before anybody signs anything, and a prospective client who has thought about them is a better client than one who has not. Several entries argue against outsourcing a particular kind of work, and those are the ones we most want read.

Everything in it is written for the business engaging a team rather than for a provider. Where a claim rests on something we cannot show you, the entry says so instead of asserting it. Where a rule of Philippine or Australian employment law is described, the entry names the jurisdiction and states that it is not legal advice, because it is not.

And no figure about this company appears anywhere on this site unless it has been confirmed. Where one has not, the page shows the gap rather than an estimate. That is a deliberate choice and it is visible on this page, in the strip near the top.

Who this suits

A business with at least one role's worth of work that can be written down and checked. That is a lower bar than it sounds and a higher one than most first conversations assume: forty hours a week of describable work, not forty hours of things you would like off your plate.

Most businesses reaching for this for the first time have between ten and twenty. Where that is the case the honest answers are to combine roles, to wait, or to do something other than hire a full-time person, and we will say so.

It suits steady work rather than work that arrives in bursts. It suits businesses where somebody has time to brief and review, heavily for a month and permanently thereafter. And it suits roles you would fill locally if the cost were the same, which is the question that separates a real role from a cost exercise.

Where the work happens

Two cities, and the difference between them is practical rather than promotional. Cebu is the larger market with the deeper pool of experienced staff and the higher salary expectations. Dumaguete is smaller, quieter, with lower turnover and a narrower pool for specialised roles.

Which suits a given role depends on how specialised it is and on how much a stable team matters against a fast start. The journal entry comparing the two says which we would suggest for which kind of work, including the cases where the answer is neither.

Both offices are staffed on site, on managed equipment, with business connections and power backup. The last is not a formality in this country and the entry on infrastructure explains what actually happens during a typhoon.

What the arrangement is

We employ the staff on Philippine contracts, run the payroll and the statutory contributions, provide the office and the equipment, and handle review, progression and pastoral support.

You describe the role, interview the shortlist, decline anybody you want to decline, and direct the work from the first day. Nobody is allocated to you.

That division is the whole of it, and where it becomes unclear it causes trouble for everybody, most of all for the person in the middle. The journal entry on whether an offshore team belongs to you or to us is about the cases where it does become unclear.

Talk to us

The first conversation is about whether this suits your business at all. If the roles you have in mind do not divide cleanly, or the volume does not justify a full-time person, that is worth establishing in half an hour rather than after a contract.

How to reach us →