I recently attended the whole-day seminar on personal finance, “Steps to Financial Peace,” by none other than Randell Tiongson, a Registered Financial Planner (RFP) in the Philippines and a strong advocate of personal finance management, with guest speakers Francis Kong, Paulo Tibig, Jayson Lo and Ador Abrogena.

Francis Kong

I always remember listening to Francis Kong on the radio when I was stuck in the car with my late dad and he would love to listen to DZFE-FM where Francis had his daily inspirational talk on business and faith. Today, he is a sought-out motivational speaker to far-flung regions of the migrant and overseas Filipino community, giving 360 talks in 365 days of each year, as he says.

I personally met Paulo Tibig at the “Wealth Summit” and saw him again during the launch party of a company I used to work for in a short amount of time. Paulo has built his logistics company from ground-up and has also gone through the trials of being an entrepreneur. Today, he is an active officer with the Philippine Franchising Association, enthusiastically advocating franchising and entrepreneurship in the country.

Jayson Lo is a new guy to me, with a brief introduction by Randell before he went up on stage to give his talk on his successes, failures and trials in business, losing millions and gaining it back all over again. His story breathes optimism and faith, that despite being down in the rut there should be no direction but up.

Paulo Tibig

Ador Abrogena heads the Trust and Investment Group of Banco De Oro (BDO). They were the major sponsor of the event and this allowed them to present their product as a means to invest money into different financial instruments, i.e. equities, that yields far more returns than nominal savings accounts or worse the piggy bank.

But this was Randell’s show, with each speaker helping hone the messages that Randell spoke of. Like I mentioned, he started off his whole-day talk with education, and the lack of it, in a subject of personal finance that strikes hard into each one of us, from the time we start earning an income to the time most of the video displays of our entire life pass us by in a short span of time. Why is that? Why is our academic institutions not teaching us the rudiments of personal finance? Why didn’t they tell us what a life insurance is for, accident protection, educational and pension plans, stocks, futures, bonds and so many other ways we can make our money earn more rather than the piggy bank mentality of savings?

Jayson Lo

Randell showed his attendees a video on economic freedom, commenting that the more open and free the economy of a nation is, the more the residents benefit from it financially. The Philippines has a pseudo way of doing it, like opening corporate ownership to foreign entities at 100% for a selected list of industries; I observe that until the industry proves itself first, the Philippine government will not budge at lowering the barriers. Is money remittance the only means to sustaining the wealth of a country? In fact, will it sustain itself or falter once a new nation becomes the new source of skilled, quality workers? Do you think we need more foreign direct investments (FDI)?

I wish I was in high school again, and I was given the chance to attend a public seminar akin to Randell’s where I am awakened by the reality – at an early age – that I need to start planning my life; because today I realize that in order to bring up the stakes of succeeding regardless if an event creates it or not, “life events planning” is the keystone to securing financial success. From school to graduation, from my first job to my second and third one, my first entrepreneurial endeavor and the failures that befall each of them, to my marriage, kids, house, car, tuition fees, health care for everyone, insuring my family’s financial continuity should I die, retirement and the longevity of our lives while we cannot work anymore, and everything that affects my loved ones during and after my death. You think a high school kid will get encouraged to respond positively should he or she attend courses like this? You’ll never know until it happens.

As Randell mentions, there are three ways a person can acquired wealth:

• Inherit it
• Marry it
• Spend less and invest

Of course, the chances of waiting for the first two events to happen is like playing the Lotto – one in a gazillion chance. The best, most rational path to financial peace is the third means; and the age to which you start doing so is so often directly proportional to the odds of succeeding. It’s not just investing cash in financial instruments – the word also describes doing so for yourself. Acquiring new skills, experience, tools to assist you – there are a host of other means to which investing is also related to.

During the break, I was talking to Jenny Magalong, head honcho of Whiteboard, the company responsible for arranging Randell’s seminar, and was telling her how my dad never really prepared for his life events that affected our small-unit family. He only bought one life insurance, and that was out of respect to his brother-in-law, worth a whooping $680 in today’s measurement. He bought no education fund nor anything that prepared him for his retirement. At 54 years of age, he had a stroke which incapacitated him and abruptly ended his professional career and a continued income. By the time he died, all he had left my mom and I was the house. It was good enough I was the only child and supporting such as small family unit wasn’t a huge burden for my dad. I love my dad and my mom, and for everything good that I saw them do during my life; but preparing for the inevitable possibilities of life wasn’t a priority. Typical of the culture to which the average Filipino was brought up, everyone just kept spending but not investing.

The biggest topic which Randell and his guest speakers kept reiterating was all about debt. One story was about a 15,000 Peso per month employee amassing a staggering 1 million Peso debt, done in the course of a few years through friends, relatives and cash advances. It was like a pyramid scheme, loans made to pay off other loans, until the principal and interest payments ballooned to more than 6,000 percent. Another dealt with one who amassed a little less than 10 credit cards and just kept buying beyond her ability to pay until everything exploded in her face and she had maxed-out all her cards.

Obvious to everyone is the simple mathematical equation to financial peace, to wit:

Income – Expenses = Savings

Obviously, income should always be higher than expenses.
Obviously, if income is disturbed, expenses can be controlled down.
Obviously, you should not deduct savings and add it to expenses.
Obviously, savings means extra money stashed away somewhere.

That’s where the falacy of savings exist in our minds: it equates to a savings account in a bank. What many do not know, or attempt to try to know, is that savings also involves investment. Randell tells us the tried and tested rule of getting 30 percent of your total savings and investing this, or making your money grow more money. You leave the 70 percent intact for emergencies and the additional things you want to buy to motivate you to continue doing a good job. (New shoes, anyone?) But as time goes by, you keep iterating the method of investing 30 percent as your income goes up. I will assume that for everyone, 30 percent isn’t much to ask.

Randell Tiongson and me

Personal finance is as common as common sense tells you – save, invest, lessen cost, find more means to increase income. If you are reading this, it means you have access to the internet. Spend an hour a day sifting through the many ways of saving, of investing, of lessening your cost, of finding additional means to more income. You can also force yourself to start using some tools like a daily expense tally, or go more complex like using QuickBooks and the like. The faster means is hire a retained accountant to do your personal finance books, and a personal finance consultant to help you find the better and comfortable means to managing your finance, no matter how small it is. I remember Randell telling me it only costs about 18,000 Pesos or so to hire a good personal finance consultant which accounts for a series of one-on-one sessions, not just one.

You have to educate yourself to learning more about personal finance management. The likes of Randell’s whole day seminar is a small drop in a bucket of learning how to manage your money and how to plan for your future. Today may be great for you but man’s history is generally sought with many ups and downs. When you are in a period where there is no income coming in, are you prepared? Start today; it’s never too late even if you’re 50 or 60 years old. Better if you are 20 or 30 years of age and you begin planning and managing your present and future finances.

Personal finance – something old but still something new. Sounds like getting married? It is. It’s a lifelong commitment.

Title photo by Ken Teegardin at SeniorLiving.org

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Are call center training schools really producing candidates for the various small or large call center companies around the country with inadequate skills for promotion? Is the Philippines creating a population akin to factory workers of decades ago hype? Is the call center industry in the verge of imploding because of the increasing cost of training only entry level people, driving the cost of outsourcing in the Philippines higher?

My personal answer to all three questions is yes – many call center agents enter the corporate world without the right skills to succumb not only the graveyard shift but to tackle organizational ponderings. These entry-level employees are just like the thousands of factory workers of the past that did robotic tasks day in, day out. Today, the call center agents are like parrots, mimicking scripts rather than understanding their work and their role. In fact, many call center agents do not even finish college because call center companies started accepting undergraduates years back. Teens and the Yuppies would rather get a paycheck than finish their studies. That’s a sad realization today. At least before, factory workers worked without achieving a college degree simply because they couldn’t afford to pay tuition.

But, let me throw a question that may change the entire call center education landscape. What if there is a technology that could allow training schools more courses to teach besides just the usual lessons on becoming a good call center agent? What if this technology can give colleges and universities the chance to create a call center degree, exactly what the computer revolution of the 60’s and 70’s created multitudes of degrees in computer science starting in the 70’s and the 80’s.

Today, there aren’t enough retirees from the call center industry to provide a big pool of professors capable of teaching the entire process cycle of call center operations. A few managers have resigned because of burn out and you don’t want those kinds of people teaching kids a future career with angst and complains. I believe technology may provide a means to create new and better coursewares beyond the norm of just training a Filipino to be a call center agent. If the schools were given access to a good call center technology, then it can creatively position their students to become graduating professionals capable of providing skills and knowhow beyond the existing entry-level training system and allow call center companies to easily integrate these new human resources into their organizations without having to spend too much on organizational development, post-agent skills and a lot of coaching and mentoring –  just to explain what kind of career the agent can have.

Call center agents of the past

So, rather than stick with the norm and continue producing factory workers for the call center industry, why not start creating call center professionals who will be prepared for a call center career? Not just a job but a real career in the call center. When these new graduates enter the call center company, they already know how it operates because they were taught several hands-on courses on each of the job position in a typical call center organization. Everyone can teach theory but if there is no practical approach to experience the real world, it may not correctly benefit the students. For someone educated in this new way, they may now know exactly what kind of role they want to pursue after being hired as an agent. A few may have decided that in 5 or 10 years from now, they want to manage a specific kind of department. Isn’t this better than exerting a mountain of effort in developing a neophyte call center employee who’s education had nothing to do with the other aspects of the call center organization? Won’t it benefit the companies to lower their cost of training and organizational development because agents already have a general idea and basic hands-on skill to handle other kinds of work past their entry-level agent job?

If you are managing a training institution or a school department that currently provides short courses on how to be a call center agent, and are interested in this technology that can allow you to produce better graduates, contact me and let’s talk about what this technology can do for you and your school.

If you are managing a college or university that’s thinking of incorporating call center courses but do not know how to start it off or what to offer, contact me and let’s talk about how this technology can create a new kind of educational offering to the public.

If you are an entrepreneur geared towards setting up an academic institution but have no idea what kind of call center courses you’d like to offer or begin with, contact me and let’s talk about this technology that can spur your creativity to begin something others have not yet even thought about.

My foreign principals have agreed to provide the academic establishment of the Philippines “FREE” use of their call center solution. This “Corporate Social Responsibility” is not being offered elsewhere – they have agreed to spin it off “first” in the Philippines. The corporate entity is not a fly-by-night organization but a robust and financially stable North American company whose management team are very familiar with the Philippines. Some of them been in the country several times in the past marketing and supporting other call center solutions. This is not like a Microsoft deal where schools are given huge discounts – it is free without any fine print attached to it. The only thing they ask is that schools will use it for call center training to benefit the academic community and the call center industry in the Philippines.

Please note that I am a “Country Representative” of the North American technology company, which means they have no physical and corporate presence in the Philippines other than myself as their sole representative. So, if you ask for my time to meet with you and present the matter of this free technology, I can do so at my availability and convenient location. Rest assured my intention and that of my principals is to propel the Philippines beyond today’s factory worker training style of call center agents and make the country the best location for call center outsourcing in the region, if not the world. To do this, it has to begin with real education. That’s where you come in. That’s your role. So, let’s help each other.

Maybe, your management team is seriously contemplating setting up a business center – an internal call center – to spearhead a full-blown marketing campaign aimed to destroy competition and capture your market once and for all?

Are you a managing director of a small or mid-sized center looking for a better way of doing things so that the speed of executing a client’s campaign is less than a day and the resulting issues will completely vanish?

Could you be the CFO or the business development head of a “larger than mid-size” call center seeking a solution to accept more campaigns without incurring a large cost of expanding your technology infrastructure?

How about the COO of a large, multinational call center who need a standby call center solution that’s capable of the entire suite of features and functions of your existing system, as part of a “Disaster Recovery” plan?

In any business like the call center business, there are three basic things people like yourself look for:

* Solutions to existing problems or issues;
* Solutions to bring the cost of doing business down some more;
* Solutions to create new businesses.

Here’s my standing offer: just give me thirty minutes of your time to find out if my solution is the solution you’re looking for. I guarantee you that in 5 minutes, you’ll know whether I should continue or not, and just let us enjoy our cups of coffee while it’s still hot. It’s not an inconvenience, not a hassle to accommodate me, not a big preparation like it was a wedding event, not much people needed to harness the message to my story. A small, simple “meet and greet” that can turn out to be a social encounter or the solution you’ve been looking for.

Like many consumer products, there’s always a “look and see” or test phase so that all theoretical analogies aside, will this solution really work on my kind of live operations? I’ll make sure you have that if you need it.

There are only two guarantees I can give you about my solution

1. It’s a robust and redundant full customer contact solution using the best technology available, and

2. It’s back by a global Tier-2 class carrier doing 350 million minutes a month or 6 billion calls a year.

Contact me today and I’ll make the time for you.