13 Months in the Philippines – Lesson 13 – May 2013 – Exit Plans

Lipa City, Batangas, Philippines

At the end of April, I set a line in the sand. If we couldn’t line up enough co-marketed trainings and consulting gigs by the middle of the month, I would pull up stakes and head back to the US for a while. As the days went on we had several set backs as a key marketing partner decided to cancel the four training dates we had set up in May and a couple of potential consulting clients decided to wait on our training. In looking at expenses as well as several pressing personal issues it became pretty clear by the middle of the month that it was time for another change.

In looking at the amount of money we would need to keep things going versus the short-term revenue options the analytics suggested taking a pause and trying again once we have more capital. A lot of companies use data and analysis to look at where they’ve been, but not as many use analytics to help predict behavior. I think any solid predictive analytics exercise would suggest that there is a lot of money to still be made doing what we started. The market is there. The need is there. The raw talent is there. It’s just a matter of a better plan with more dedicated partners.

At about the same time, my partners also decided to officially disband BPO Elite. It has kind of just hung our there as an empty shell since October. I occasionally used the name and identity for people who new me as the man behind BPO Elite before I launched DMAI. It was a pretty sobering day to say the least when two years of work came to an end. However, it severed its purpose. It opened up doors, it allowed me to have the time of my life and it helped a lot of trainees achieve their dreams of finding jobs.

So after 13 months, I got on a plane and headed back to the United States a man who will never have to say he didn’t go all in for the sake of chasing his dream.

Little did I know, the labor and hard work of these past 13 months laid a foundation that would soon led to some amazing opportunities to come back and try it all again.

Analytics Tool > Business Intelligence Applications > http://www.gatner.com

Analytics Concept > Predictive Analytics > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_analytics

YouTube Resource > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjznLJcgSFI&feature=share&list=PL8D46F50D27222FD4

My Analytics Story – My passion is solving problems by bringing together the best talent, cutting edge technology and tried and true methodologies. DMAIPH is all about empowering people towards better Decision-Making through the use Analytics and business Intelligence. This is what I do best. Contact DMAIPH now at analytics@dmaiph.com or connect with me directly for a free consultation about getting more analytics into your career and your business.

13 Months in the Philippines – Lesson 12 – April 2013 – The Wheels Come Off

Quezon City, Metro Manila, Philippines

April 2012, was a tough month. The challenge with filling training classes continued. We had three staff members depart for other opportunities. I ended a six-month engagement with my top client. It was time to switch gears again. We needed to pivot towards doing more outsourcing and consulting and less training.

One good things to come out of April, was the Social Media Analytics Workshop we held for a group of trainees for one of our clients. We discovered some pretty good talent and were able to put together a good team of analysts with a large range of analytics skills and social media savvy. There are a plethora of social media analytics tools built-in to just about every significant social media site. We also learned that the Philippines is the most social media driven country in the world. There is a higher percentage of Filipinos are online and actively using social media that with any other country.

I also continued to blog almost daily as I had learned from a good friend, is the key to monetizing your online business. You need fresh content that is relevant and engaging. You have that and you feed it to your audience on a regular basis, you can then start making a profit off it. Blogging about analytics is a key tool for analysts that’s often overlooked. Most analysts stay embedded in their silo. They focus on the data at hand and they master how to identify, inventory and integrate it. They accumulate a wealth of experience and knowledge and many are blogging about it.

However, in this case it was too little too late. Due to a series of personal and professional challenges it was time to think about what to do if revenue didn’t pick up quickly.

Analytics Tool > Analytics Blog > http://www.wordpress.com

Analytics Concept > Social Media Analytics > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_analytics

YouTube Video > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQYOmQRhzhM&feature=share&list=PL8D46F50D27222FD4

13 Months in the Philippines – Lesson 11 – March 2013 – Missed Opportunities

Pasig City, Metro Manila, Philippines

March was lined up to be a very big month. We had 4 different training on the calendar as we continued to diversify our offering to get access to different types of clients and trainees. I continued to do media events and speaking engagements to push the brand. On paper the month should have led us to a very prosperous outcome and we would be well on our way to a healthy business model.

However, I underestimated a couple of things and overestimated our capabilities. This is exactly where so many small business efforts fail. Trying to do too much to soon. We did four different types of training; recruitment analytics, English for call center jobs, sales and marketing analytics and analytics for business leaders. If everything would have filled up I would have made over 100,000 PHP. But in the end I lost money on all four after costs of staff and venue were factored in. It’s the last time I did trainings without the help of a dedicated marketing partner.

I also overestimated my staff. One of my biggest weaknesses as a leader is that I tend to over trust and over challenge. I tend to treat employees as I wanted to be treated myself, but I forget they do not have the same level of experience and depth of passion I have. It sets them up for failure. And we failed miserably in our marketing, our recruiting, the quality of our product and our execution of strategy. I just got too excited and lost my discipline.

I also continued to do media events, but wasn’t capitalizing on them. Promoting myself is not easy. I can talk all day, but I forget the little things. Trinkets for the host, Shout outs to key business partners, mixing in a little Tagalog, staying on script. All valuable things that I can see now in hindsight I should have done better.

I really had uncovered a niche for training that I want to focus more on in the future. Recruitment Analytics training is something I am good at and something there is a dire need for in the Philippines.

Analytics Tool > Bullhorn > http://www.bullhorn.com

Analytics Concept > Recruitment Analytics > http://www.recruiter.com/recruitment-metrics.html

YouTube Resource > http://youtu.be/blx8IuHsmCA

Analytics in the Philippines – The Philippines is at the center of the action when it comes to solutions to the global need for analytics. Blessed with a solid foundation of young, educated and English speaking workforce, companies around the world are look for Filipino analytics talent to fill analytics positions. DMAIPH was set up to facilitate these solutions and bring the talent and the business together. Contact DMAIPH now at analytics@dmaiph.com or connect with me directly so we can help you take advantage of this unique global opportunity.

Lesson 10 – February 2013 – The Future is Bright

Mandaluyong City, Metro Manila, Philippines
In February, for the first time in ten months I made a profit. You hear that the typical new business takes a year or more to make a profit. I had been a very flexible and nimble business leader and let my business evolve as opportunities came up. It seemed like all the hard work, sacrifice and money spent has been worth it. To take a quote from my all time favorite book, The Tale of Two Cities, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of time.” It was all a matter of perspective.

I was encouraged by several things. We had our most successful training event in February making a nice profit on my first public training geared towards young professionals and entrepreneurs. We also turned a profit with my first training focused on recruitment analytics, which was my first attempt to do something besides the basic analytics intro class. We had a couple of lucrative consulting gigs in the works. I was set for several media appearances and there was a lot of buzz building on our social media sites. I had a couple of speaking engagements lined up as schools to help set up more trainings down the road. The people I had hired earlier started to get into the swing of things and for the first time I thought we had enough people to fine tune our story and tell it to the world. Basically I was executing every aspect of the business plan I had set forth back in November.

As an analyst I felt pretty good about the ROI on our trainings, we had young and hungry staff willing to work for cheap to get the experience, my revenue was diversified and we were meeting our training head count expectations. I took on another trainee to work with a client’s marketing efforts and I was doing all this without the overhead of an office. We started getting into infographics. A fairly new trend in analytics and data visualization. I found a free info graphics tool and went crazy! A picture is worth a thousand words and a good infogrpahic is worth a thousand rows of data! Hehe!

Analytics Tool > Info Graphics > http://www.infographicsarchive.com/create-infographics-and-data-visualization/

Analytics Concept > Data Visualization > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_visualization

YouTube Resource > http://www.youtube.com/user/Piktochart

Lesson 9 – January 2013 – New Beginnings

Ortigas, Metro Manila, Philippines

January 2013 got off to a great start. I set up a training, had a partnership with an events management company set up one in February, I filmed my first promotional video, and we had an official kick off party launch. I looked back at all the lessons I had learned in 2012 and focused in on two key ones; better marketing partnerships and charging more for the trainings.

There are so many important elements to a good marketing campaign. I learned a lot during my time with Wells, but hadn’t done a great job of them up till now. One thing was we needed a video. Something with me talking about analytics in away that gave people a chance to both better understand the topic and walk way feeling that I’m the best person to teach them about it. After some miscues we finally got it right. Another lesson is to have another voice be the one talking me up. We partnered with an events management company to get me in the media and put some polish on things. I guested on a number of TV and Radio shows and we started to sponsor more high profile events.

The next thing to do was reload the staff. At the end of 2012, I was down to one staff and no trainees. I decided to go all in with hiring more staff to help with the marketing and get our message out much broader then before. And with the media exposure we had content, we just needed to get it in front of as many people as possible. Based on the data available, I knew that our best bet was to train young professionals who could pay 3000 PHP for the training and then refer friends and co-workers. So that was the heart of our plan.

At the end of the month I was exactly where I wanted to be, the business had every sign of taking off and reaching the heights I had in mind.

Analytics Tool > KD Nuggets > http://www.kdnuggets.com/

Analytics Concept > Cost Benefit Analysis > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost%E2%80%93benefit_analysis

YouTube Resource > http://youtu.be/A0rFj0WVqDQ

13 Months in the Philippines – Lesson 8 – December 2012 – Holidays in the Philippines

Kalookan, Metro Manila, Philippines

As 2012 came to a close, things really started to slow down. I took full advantage of this to prepare of a big launch of DMAI in January. We didn’t go home for the holidays, and ended up just staying in Makati to enjoy Christmas and New Years. And boy was it memorable.

The Winter Holidays in the US start with Thanksgiving. That’s when the malls have huge sales and you start seeing Christmas lights and hearing Christmas music in the malls. However in the Philippines that starts in September. So, but December I was pretty fatigued from hearing and seeing the Christmas cheer and looking forward to finally seeing the day come and pass.

There were a couple of additional interesting lessons I learned. From the period between Christmas and just after New Years, all movies show in Manila are Filipino made films. No Hollywood blockbusters or international films. It’s both good and bad, it allows Filipinos to relish in their own productions and guarantees viewing for films that might otherwise be missed. However, they are of course all in Tagalog. I went to one and got some of it, its was a romantic comedy so most of the jokes don’t need translation, but boy wouldn’t it be nice if they had subtitles.

The other one that really stands out is the fireworks. In the US we do fireworks in a big way on July 4th. There are also some on New Years or Veterans Day or Memorial in places, but fireworks really cant be enjoyed when its cold so for the most is just Independence Day. In the Philippines in Christmas Eve, Christmas, New Year’s Eve and New Years Day. Staying on the 10th floor of a corner condo in Makati I could see fireworks all around from Pasay to Manila to Makati. Big and Small. It was amazing. And after the smoke was so thick it was like fog. It was truly amazing.

From an analytics standpoint I took away a couple of things. Know your holidays. For example, if you are an American company doing business in the Philippines know the holidays so you can keep your people happy. The second is that someone needs to do some analysis on the lost revenue of just showing Filipino films. They still make good money, but it has to be tough on the cinemas to sacrifice profit for art over a two-week period where everyone is at the malls.

Analytics Tool > Enchantment > http://www.guykawasaki.com/enchantment/

Analytics Concept > Business Partnership > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_partnership

YouTube Resource > http://youtu.be/f66naHGTsFU

13 Month in the Philippines – Lesson 5 – September 2012 – Cracks in the Pavement

Clark, Pampanga, Philippines

In September we stated working for a client that at first seemed to be a wonderful opportunity. They asked us to help them set up a manpower staffing business in Clark, Pampanga. It was a very interesting proposition. We would go out and sell the business and get a 50% commission on any business we brought in the door. We were given an office space, internet access, business cards, a business proposal and we found a list of potential clients to market too. We started doing a multi channel sales campaign with an e-mail blitz, phone call and in-person meetings. We also did some deep dive competitor research including mystery shopping. And we networked with the government agency in charge of the Clark Freeport Trade Zone. But we made a lot of assumptions and mistakes and after about three weeks of travelling from Makati to Clark (about 2 hours each way), things hadn’t worked out the way we had hoped for. Let’s look at a couple of the issues and analyze them.

1. We decided to set up shop in an area we were not at all familiar with. To mitigate this we hired a local with manpower experience.
2. We had to spend a lot of time travelling, so we had a small window for meetings. So we made sure all appointments where confirmed the day before.
3. We wanted to get to know the way things worked. So I networked with several key people via LinkedIn and in person appointments.
4. We didn’t have any upfront revenue. We got our client to pay most of the upfront costs for marketing and promotions.
5. We need to get our name out there. We sponsored a job fair and I got a speaking engagement at the event.
6. We had to assess the market opportunity. I had a couple of trainees build a prospective client database and map out locations.

So all things looked good. We had a great opportunity, I had applied a lot of analysis and we were ready to go.

But there were crack in the foundation and they had nothing to do with my analysis or our strategy. They had to do with people.

Even the best laid plans don’t work our if you cant count on the people to execute the plans. Partners got distracted, staff had to deal with personal challenges and personal life started to suffer from professional stresses. By the end of September there were more cracks in the pavement then I had cement to fill them with.

But it was still so much fun, so much adventure, so much excitement I just rolled with the blows and kept pushing forward!

Analytics Tool > Tableau Public > http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/

Analytics Concept > Competitor Landscape > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_intelligence

YouTube Resource > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bj1q4zunuN0&feature=share&list=PL8D46F50D27222FD4

13 Months in the Philippines – Lesson 3 – July 2012 – Growing the Business

Taguig City, Metro Manila, Philippines

So after two months of putting the pieces together, it was time to start aggressively growing the business. With an office in Fort Bonafacio, two hard working employees, some amazing trainees and a clear plan of attack we set out to train and place as many analysts as possible. Based on the trainings we had done in May and June, the Intro to Analytics class was rock solid. We were attracting more and more candidates for the class, we had some clients offering us ad-hoc analytics work and we places three analysts with our first key business partner. SO how did we get there?

When I talk to people about business strategy, the first thing I ask is what kind of data are they using? How are the accessing it and how do they refresh and measure it? You need to know the competition, you need to know the demographics of your clients and your market and you have to have customer insight data. Here is who we got it.

Who trains people to be analysts? Not really anyone externally to their own company. To date, I still believe we were the first analytics training program in Manila. So we were competing with other training programs and hiring processes. So we went to job fairs and we published online. We tracked recruiting expenses and determined ROI. A couple of our trainees did some in-depth competitor analysis to know who was hiring analysts, what their duties where and how much they were getting paid.

We also got really good at understanding the best candidates for our program. IT and CompSci grads from the mid-tier college and universities. We started targeting them directly via LinkedIn and at job fairs. We put together a candidate database and started using Bullhorn’s free tool.

And we gather a lot of client satisfaction data. We surveyed our trainees using Survey Monkey, we asked them to write LinkedIn testimonials and we set up a Facebook group to network. We asked our clients for feedback and posted highlights on the web site, the Facebook page and the LinkedIn.

We were rocking and rolling! And than Mother Nature started being a problem.

Analytics Tool > Wikipedia > http://www.wikipedia.org

Analytics Concept > Demographic Profile > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_profile

YouTube Resource > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aHtHl-jcAs&feature=share&list=PL7EC252B253873D5D

13 Months in the Philippines – Lesson 2 – June 2012 – Training is My Passion

Pasay City, Metro Manila, Philippines

I did a trial run of the Introduction to Analytics training back in December 2011 with some interns and business partners, which helped me prepare a two-day training class. I launched the two-day class with the target of fresh grads in late May 2012, and I conducted several of the classes over the course of the next six months. It was in June however that I really figured out that I was an amazing trainer and that I could enchant an audience by talking about analytics.

I have always liked being in front of an audience and being empowered to talk about things I am passionate about it. I get a huge rush of adrenaline that can last for several hours. This calling originally led me to traditional classroom teaching but after several misadventures post graduate school, I took the job with Wells Fargo to pay the bills. Fifteen years later I left Wells to do training full time. In the interim I did a lot of ad-hoc and informal training in various way at Wells although I never had trainer in the title.

Per Wikipedia, a Trainer is a person who educates employees of companies on specific topics of workplace importance. While a teacher is simply who provide schooling for pupils and students. I have found that I am exactly in the middle. And there are very, very few people who can train like a teacher. People who can provide hands on, useful content in a short time frame, but deliver it in way that has the empowering effect of taking an actual academic style class are worth their weight in gold. These are the great trainers or favorite instructors who end up becoming speaker and lectures. They have both the ability to train on skill and teach on knowledge. This is what I learned about myself last June.

From an analytics standpoint, I learned a lot about how to construct a training program. Budget, Recruitment, Venue Management, Staffing, Marketing, etc. I learned a lifetime worth of lessons in a few months. I was able to look at each of these topics and find data to compare what I was doing to other benchmarks. Am I efficient, am I cost-effective, am I marketable. Lots and lots of data to bring into my analysis of how to grow my business.

Analytics Tool > Microsoft Excel > http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/

Analytics Concept > Big Data > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_data

YouTube Resource > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhjuyH4RTrM&feature=share&list=PL7EC252B253873D5D

13 Months in the Philippines – Lesson One – Finding the Right People

Lesson 1 – May 2012 – Finding the Right People

Makati, Metro Manila, Philippines

I took a couple of trips to the Philippines in early 2012 to lay the ground work before committing 100% to moving there lock, stock and barrel. When I was there, one of the things I did was set up some interviews for my first BPO Elite employee.

Now don’t get me wrong, I ended up with an amazing employee who would become one of my best friends. But the process itself had some serious flaws. Let me break them down. And even though I have extensive experience in recruitment and hiring, I made many of the same mistakes in the process that most managers make. They put it on themselves to do it all, they are the only ones in on the decision-making, and they don’t really look at the available data to help them.

When recruiting. I found out the true power of LinkedIn. I networked with a couple dozen candidates, and narrowed it down to six to interview based on e-mail conversations before I left the US. When I arrived, I set up phone screenings with the six and ended up then conducting two final interviews. Pretty standard stuff and thanks to LinkedIn, all the candidates where qualified to be my very first employee, a recruitment specialist. However, I did all this myself. And even though I have partners and an assistant back in the US, I took it on myself. That’s lesson #1, you cant always do everything yourself. It takes up a lot of time and it makes others think you don’t need or want your help. Next time I do this, I need to delegate and be more inclusive.

The next thing I did wrong was that I didn’t have one of my partners interview with me. I based my decisions on my gut. Now as an analyst, I am kicking myself about this, but as a first time business owner… its a very common mistake. There is tons of data that shows that candidates hired after interviews with more then one person as much as a 100% chance to stick around longer than those interviewed solely by one person.

The final lesson that comes to mind is that I didn’t do a very good job of understanding the data available when it comes up to the recruitment industry in the Philippines. After being there a while and gathering data and insights, I over paid, I over promised and I over recruited. I hired two, at way more than the market price and I gave them pretty favorable terms. All things that more research would have uncovered.

So In the end it worked out, I got a great candidate who stuck with me thru thick and thin. I just wish I would have hired me the analysts to do the prep work for me the business owner. Hehe!

Analytics Tool > LinkedIn > http://www.linkedin.com

Analytics Concept > Marketing Analytics > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_analytics#Data_and_analytics

YouTube Resource > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jDjeNJrN14&feature=share&list=PL7EC252B253873D5D

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