If you take a stopwatch and record the time you spend on web sites, you might notice that Facebook takes an unprecedented amount of time you spend on the Internet over the rest of the other web sites combined. Indeed, Facebook has now topped the charts in terms of daily usage (see Chart of the Day: Facebook’s Unbelievable Effect On The Rest Of The Web). Of course, there are contraries to the rule where a rare few of our friends even bother to browse their Facebook account on a regular basis, much less join the social media behemoth. Still, it is very certain we will soon be communicating and collaborating altogether through Facebook.

So, in the spirit of old “Hacker Ethic” of sharing information to everyone else, here are a few things you may want to consider using to fully utilize it as your means to creating conversations with your network of peers and acquaintances without having to use other applications, cloud or otherwise.

Your Facebook E-mail Account is Now Available

One of the last vestiges of online tools outside the purview of Facebook is everyone’s ability to send and receive messages by e-mail to each other. Now, Facebook has opened that gateway, giving all its users an @facebook.com account, and completing the list of online messaging tools for networking, communicating and collaborating with family, friends and acquaintances.

This means you do not need to get out of Facebook to conduct your e-mail activities. You can send messages with file attachments (though I have not tested the maximum file size that you can send). It’s funny that Facebook has decided not to allow you to encode the “subject title” and just uniformly entitles every message that you send to an e-mail address as “Conversation with <Your-Facebook-Profile-Name>”.

For now, I suggest that you keep your business and professional life outside this e-mail tool. As Facebook has been since time a memorial, you can use your @facebook.com account within the bounds of your social life.

Please go to the Facebook Help Center to learn how to set up your @facebook.com e-mail account.

Groups and Pages – Which One Is Better?

The answer is “both.” After going through so many changes and iterations over the years, today’s Facebook Group and Facebook Page work so differently from its inception. Let me explain the differences and how you should and can use these for your marketing intentions.

First, memorize this:

Facebook Group is to a “Country Club” as Facebook Page is to a “Celebrity.”

This is my personal description because this is exactly how you are going to use either community tool as a means of networking to the entire Facebook world without having to be their “friend” in Facebook.

When you are trying to market yourself or your entity, it is better to create a Page so people can “Like” your page and follow every post you make, akin to a celebrity status. You give the freedom of choice to all Facebook users to “Like” your page, and promoting it is your followers’ decision to do so or not. A virtual “Word of Mouth” marketing transpires within your page as you bellow out announcements and campaigns that drive enthusiasm and excitement about you or your entity. Whether you’re a real celebrity or not, your every move in your Facebook Page should be to act like you are a real celebrity. Not doing so defeats the benefits of maintaining a Facebook Page.

Now, the Facebook Group is a different animal altogether. That’s why the analogy I’m asking you to use is that of a “Country Club.” This is a members-only community inside Facebook where people who form part of the group share a common interest. But instead of the freedom of join the group, members can add their friends without their permission. It’s like pulling your friends into the registration desk through a proxy signup. Once a member, the vertical menu items to the left of their Facebook home page lists the groups they belong to and a highlighted number displaying the total new posts posted in the group.

Where in the past you can message-blast using Groups, that function has now been transferred to the Facebook Page. Rather, Facebook Group members are notified of posts in the left-hand vertical list, including on-page and e-mail notifications, while both Facebook Group and Page posts will appear on your wall.

A word on the power of “The Internet is All About Conversations”: the moment you remove your followers or members’ ability to post messages, links and photos on the wall, you may lose their following or membership, not unless you already think of yourself as too famous a celebrity or a powerhouse business behemoth it doesn’t matter if they follow you or not.

Marketing and Selling in Facebook

If you are using both Facebook and LinkedIn, you should have come to the conclusion that Facebook is social and LinkedIn is business. But why is it that businesses still create Groups and Pages inside Facebook knowing it’s nothing more than a very huge cocktail party? Precisely because it is a very big cocktail party that many individuals of those business groups and pages want to get into the social networking and begin cold-calling, marketing and selling their products and services. Do you think LinkedIn is also a gigantic cocktail party?

Here’s the clincher: it is the individual, who works for the business that owns the Facebook Group or Facebook Page, that markets the products and services of the organization (non-profit institutions also need to market themselves). If it is the individual, then why bother create business-like Facebook Groups and Pages? The answer lies in community-building.

Communities are groups or clans of people with similar likes. Through human history, clans have developed organizational hierarchy to administer how the community should operate and collaborate. So, the more freedom you provide, the bigger your Facebook Group or Facebook Page grows. In contrast, the more policies you institute – barriers to open collaboration – the smaller your clan will be. Free will, freedom of choice, democratic values and all that jazz have been the founding pillars of the Internet and the World Wide Web; no one person or entity owns either. It is a collaborative effort to make the web work as it is today. So, why institute restrictions and barriers in your Facebook Group and Facebook Page, like not allowing members and followers to post messages on the wall or administering who should join (for Pages)?

Regardless of the Facebook Groups and Facebook Pages you created and manage, the idea behind using social networking to market is the sincerity of the individual to represent yourself or your entity so that members and followers develop “trust” to continue being part of your community. You have to be “real” when it comes to social media. You cannot be yourself in the real world but then become someone else in Facebook; that lie and deception will catch up with you and may spring the end of your long-term relationship with everyone – a list of members or followers which took you months, if not years, to build.

Facebook is Now Called Middle Earth

A huge caboodle of today’s online marketing happens in Facebook. From Groups and Pages to Apps and Links, most successful individuals and entities have realized the beckoning of this social media behemoth as the center of the online world. Fine if you have a web site that links each other, but run your web statistics over and over again and you may come to realize a lot of the successful campaigns have started to emanate from Facebook. Once in a while people use Digg or StumbleUpon to, well, stumble upon your web site. But the lure of clicking that square-shaped, blue-colored capital letter “F” on a web site is more enticing than today’s RSS Feed or LinkedIn link. People have begun relying on Facebook as the single source of information that is relevant, useful and trusting. It is trusting because friends recommended it. Even the rare spam and virus-laden links from friends come up to be trusting, though wise friends immediately post a disclaimer, writing, “That wasn’t me!”

But be careful not to hard-sell or short-change people. Again, much as traditional advertising built brands out of trust so, too, shall your Facebook profile, Groups and Pages be built out of trust and sincerity. Market yourself as an expert on real estate, not repeated posts on the thing or item you are trying to sell. Market yourself into one specific business category. For example, many people who know me associate the phrase “call center” to my name. Most don’t know what it is about call centers I do – they just know this simple equation: Raffy Pekson = Call Centers. If you keep marketing yourself, your Facebook Group or your Facebook Page upon endless streams of many categories, people will get confused. Once confused, there goes your market. So, be extra careful.

As more people make Facebook their breakfast cereal and midnight snack, the entire world is now revolving around it. It is not an addiction – it is the new world order to which information is now being passed around. People of the older generation will disagree; however, statistics is already proving how Facebook is fast becoming the real portal to culture, ethnicity, habit and lifestyle. Though Google is trying to pounce on Facebook with its recent introduction of Google-Plus, I still believe the Facebook habit is one that’s as human as ice cream – habits die hard!

Are you taking part in the biggest cocktail party in the world? Have you established your real estate space in social media? Heck! Are you still relying, hoping and praying that people will visit your web site “FIRST” before Facebook?

I kid you not. Facebook is now the central habit of so many people today. Facebook is their early morning news show, daily newspaper, gossip columns, corner coffee shop, community center and park. It’s the early-morning tête-à-tête with BFFs and a lot of LOLs, and the noisiest after-office cocktail party with the who’s who and who’s not. To be seen and heard is now more important than to see, read and listen. Social and professional opportunities will not anymore happen out of hope or coincidence in the social media world – you have to take part, be seen and be heard.

It’s not too late to start. But start correctly. Ask advise from people who you perceive are doing it properly. Investigate profiles, groups and page, and see who does things better than others. Experiment as I did since 2008, creating so many groups and pages, buying too many domain names, blogging left and right, and so on. You will find for yourself and from others what will click for you or your entity, and what won’t. Learn, adjust and continue.

And good luck, too!

Besides all the books, e-books and whitepapers on how to make gazillions of cash through the internet, first understand what it is and why it works for others. And to understand why, you have go back to the basic nature of what the internet is.

Over and over, I kept reading the book “The Cluetrain Manifesto” as if it were my bible to understanding why the internet works and how it could work for me and others. Simply saying, I mimicked this blog unto a mirror of the most obvious message of this book: The internet is all about conversations.

And so, after seeing more organizations and businesses falter into their self-interest and idealism that the web belongs to them, I’ve decided to write by paraphrasing the book that is the only bible-construct to understanding how to make the internet work.

“A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter — and getting smarter faster than most companies.”

I will keep paraphrasing the book of which I have repeatedly read because it still intrigues and puzzles me why many businesses still consider the internet, the web sites and pages, as mere catalogs. Where the telephone broke geographical barriers as a medium to communicate to anyone in the world, the internet, then and now, provides the visual means to communicate it even more. The only difference is the telephone is owned and controlled by corporations whereas the internet isn’t. The World Wide Web is a public forum of visual means open to all who would like to access it.

“It’s got to be free, fast and forever.” I’m not too sure of the last word but the World Wide Web was born out of the intention that it should be given away for free to the world. DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) created the internet and Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, both of which never looked at making a single cent to their inventions though DARPA may have sought the benefits of technology for war. Marc Andreessen gave away the most popular web browser (not necessarily the first) called Netscape, precursor to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox, while Jerry Yang allowed free access to his lists of websites that spawned the ever-popular Yahoo!

“Most corporations, on the other hand, only know how to talk in the soothing, humorless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure, and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal. Same old tone, same old lies. No wonder networked markets have no respect for companies unable or unwilling to speak as they do.”

“But learning to speak in a human voice is not some trick, nor will corporations convince us they are human with lip service about “listening to customers.” They will only sound human when they empower real human beings to speak on their behalf.”

Have businesses understood what the internet and the World Wide Web is all about? Surf around many corporate sites and you will encounter endless headaches looking for that small, iconic link to allow you to respond back to them. Sometimes, it doesn’t even exist. “How the heck can I communicate with this company?” If businesses empower people to speak on their behalf, having the freedom to do so and make choices free of constraints, then that website will become more powerful and enticing to create networks upon networks of members, customers and the like.

“These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can’t be faked.”

What the internet today has done is unify many mediums of communication, most popular of it all is voice through VoIP – Voice Over the Internet Protocol. I believe this iteration is a coming-of-age requirement for something born a few decades ago and it’s time it grew up to acquire more knowledge and skills. Without your knowledge, telecommunications companies have already been using VOIP to bridge your overseas calls and the days of subterranean copper wires have long been replaced by faster yet cheaper fiber optics. And so, the written conversations have now transcended into voice capabilities using the internet.

Wikipedia describes a conversation as “…interactive, more-or-less spontaneous, communication between two or more conversants. Interactivity occurs because contributions to a conversation are response reactions to what has previously been said. Spontaneity occurs because a conversation must proceed, to some extent, and in some way, unpredictably.”

“Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice. Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived. People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.”

Is it enough that we get information through web portals, social media sites or plain-vanilla websites? Is instant messaging enough to satisfy our need for information? Though still popular, does e-mail seal the deal on buying or trading? Even if “markets are getting smarter, more informed, more organized, participation in a networked market changes people fundamentally.” And participation through conversations conducted in a human voice harnesses engagement, trust and consequential trade. History proves that sustaining information and trade to oneself or one tribe minimizes innovation and decreases trade and wealth. The freedom and abundance, however, reverses that threat.

UNDERSTAND, THEN DO

In blinding speeds, the Internet and the World Wide Web has knocked down heirarchy, created new languages within networked communities of ordinary people, and that these networked markets can change and reverse loyalty to a brand or company overnight. “Respect for hands-on knowledge wins over respect for abstract authority” and “paranoia kills conversation.”

Businesses must understand to untangle themselves out of the old-world, traditional rut they’ve dug themselves into and quickly join “human communities (that) are based on discourse — on human speech about human concerns.”

“The community of discourse is the market. Companies that do not belong to a community of discourse will die.”

Don’t build intranets – benefit from the freedom of social discourse inside and outside your organization, lest you are hiding something so secretive from your market.

Don’t create hindrances and challenges for the market to communicate with you inside those firewalls.

Don’t be too busy to answer each of the 10,000 e-mails a day that you will receive, or the 20,000 Facebook wall posts pondering on what you’re going to do with their problem. If you are, you’ll lose the market.

People are already so immune to advertising. The Internet and the World Wide Web has been creating communities through the years and most of what’s successful have little or no advertising at all.

If your market is busy being your “target market,” always think they are still people; and people would rather be talking to other people online like friends and relatives than watching the day go by, remembering to mention your name (brand or company) which makes better advertising money than a very expensive web site.

And lastly, please use the phone; use VOIP. Human contact is still the precursor to long-term loyalty and satisfaction than automated e-mail responses. Other than the hinderlands where cellular sites have not yet been introduced, people have mobile phones – call them!

Photo of WorldLink88 call center I managed

Many people have asked me for advise on setting up and operating a small business call center. That’s been my niche – always the small business advocate even with call centers. The industry has many descriptions of how many seats a small call center has to have. In my personal opinion based on experience, small means no greater than 100 seats. It’s a number that’s easy to manage even by yourself. Beyond that, I call it mid-sized all the way up to 999 seats where you now start setting up a more formal management team.

From the various informal Q&A sessions I’ve conducted over the past years, I decided to write down some of them in short snippets as my young and agile mind could recall.

Q: How much does it take to set up a call center?

This is always the first question asked when I’m with a group of entrepreneurs interested in operating a call center. There are two ways of setting up a small business call center: (1) buy, build and operate, and (2) lease everything and operate. The major difference is the amount of money you need to shell out. It’s like buying a house to live in and furnishing it with the fixtures you like; or renting one fully-furnished and making-do with what you have. So, if you have the cash to stay in business for more than year despite the usual income cycles of a startup business, then go for the “build and operate” model; this way, you spread your ROI which doesn’t force you to generate a high revenue. However, if you are not 100 percent sure of being in business for more than year, lease as much as everything you can. You can plan to move out in a year’s time to your newly built call center after accumulating enough cash from your income.

The frugal set up cost is about $1,500 per seat (or workstation), inclusive of every machine, furniture, fixture, painting, construction, etc. It costs more if you decide to use expensive but aesthetically good-looking materials. For leasing, expect to spend about $200 per seat, per month, but this not only includes everything you need to set up a seat but also operating expenses like rent and all utilities.

Q: How many seats should I set up or begin with?

Many people think that starting small and building or getting more seats later on is the ideal way to operate a call center. In fact, the magic number I’ve heard is five seats. This is actually unproductive and may pin down your hopes of growing in the long run. Many foreign clients want to outsource part of their business operations with no less than 10 seats. If you only had 5 or 10 seats, how would you determine if a new, prospective client’s program or campaign is better than the one you’re currently running? However, if you had 20 seats and was looking into a new campaign that required an initial requirement of 10 seats, you could test the new campaign with, say, 3 or 5 seats for a few days or a week to see if it fits the skill-set of your workforce and your revenue projections; and you can do this without any major effect on your existing client’s campaign. After a week, if the new campaign proves to be a whole lot better than the existing one, you’ve got a great problem: which do you choose? That scenario differs a lot if you only had 5 seats. With that little, it won’t make you grow – you might just get stuck where you are because you have no room to test and in effect grow your income stream to build or lease more seats.

The other opportunity when having the capacity to add more seats that in about 2 or 3 years time you’ve accumulated hundreds of seats performing beautifully, there’s a bigger chance for a foreign player to buy you out at a substantial amount. Many mid-sized call centers have been bought out in the past not only because of the operating size but the skill-set of the workforce and the types of campaigns and clients you maintain fit well into the foreign buyer’s business model.

Q: What kind of program or campaign should I get?

Most small business call centers run performance-based telemarketing campaigns. Though people always think that fixed-income, inbound-oriented campaigns like customer service and technical support are better, the reality is you have a better chance of making more money in performance-based campaigns. What people don’t realize is that inbound-oriented campaigns have more metrics that the call center must achieve; if you don’t hit your client’s metrics, you actually don’t get paid for those failures. Therefore, inbound-oriented campaigns are also performance-based. The major difference with inbound-orietned campaigns is you don’t get more money if you do better than the metrics. For telemarketing-oriented campaigns, the more you perform (i.e. selling a product), the more you earn. Whether the campaigns are easy lead generation or a full cycle, cold-calling up to closing the sale type, managing a call center that’s running sales-oriented campaigns is akin to operating a direct selling agency or group – it’s fun, involves lots of cheerleading and sales activities, employee tenure is based on pure numbers (no subjective evaluations required), and so on. And ordinary business-people and entrepreneurs understand selling a whole lot better than the intracies of inbound campaigns (what the heck is an AHT?)

Q: Where do I get campaigns?

One of your roles as a small business call center owner, delegated or done by yourself, is to keep looking for campaigns even if you’re happy running the current one – on a daily basis. Call center clients and campaigns come and go, much like any kind of business client who will favor you today but not for eternity. You have to be ready for that inevitable time when your client suddenly bolts out for varying good or bad reasons. So, business development is an ongoing, 54-week job for you; and the internet is aswarm with brokers and direct clients always looking for the right call centers to run their campaigns. A huge number of them cater to the outbound-base, sales-oriented campaigns.

When you find a prospect in the internet, establish the initial e-mail correspondence but find a way to talk to each other. Don’t e-mail each other to death. Verbal communication is always a great way of getting your gut to tell you “This is great!” or “Something’s wrong here.” You can find prospective clients and brokers in social networks like LinkedIn and its many industry-related groups, Yahoo! Groups, Google-ing specific clients and making the pitch, and so on. Like a good salesperson, ask your happy clients if they can refer you to their peers without sounding like it’s going to affect your current business relationship with them. Also market the past campaign experiences of your workforce even if they’re newly hired – these kinds of information give you tremendous weight in the type of campaigns you can get your hands on. For past and current clients, ask their permission to post their company names, logos and short testimonials on your website (yes, you definitely need one.) Alliances such as technology providers are also a good public relations items to post in your website, i.e. Dell for your computers, Cisco for your network, Microsoft for your O/S, etc. Whatever it takes to build credibility as immediate as possible for your startup call center.

Q: How do I recruit good people for my startup call center?

The fastest way to recruit is by advertising in the dailies but that’s way too expensive to do for a small business call center. Online job boards like Jobstreet.com and JobsDB.com provide less expensive ways (the last I paid for Jobstreet.com’s service was 5,000 Pesos per position). However, one online place I go to to recruit experienced agents, team leaders and supervisors is Friendster.com, not Facebook.com. Friendster.com allows me to search specific call center companies written in user profiles and message each of these people invidivually using Friendster.com’s messaging system. However, before you attempt to do this, make sure you complete your Friendster.com profile as expansive and detailed as possible because your recruits will first look at your Friendster.com profile before they answer you back. Don’t recruit blindly – place your full name, company name, full addrress, landline and mobile phone numbers, and e-mail address (for the latter, get a company domain name – only costs $11/year at GoDaddy.com and getting GMail to host your @domain.com e-mail account is free). There are hardly any agent in LinkedIn.com and way too many managers and expats who you don’t need for a small business call center. Facebook.com isn’t recruitment-friendly. Some Yahoo! Groups where call center agents congregate can also help you recruit good people.

Q: How much should I pay my new recruits?

I’ve managed telemarketing-oriented call centers and here’s my commonsense answer to this question. For me, the reason I pay someone a basic salary is for that person to hit his or her quota or functional objectives. Anything beyond that is commissionable, so to say. Now, remember that the Filipino culture has always been employee-oriented and fixed-income salary-based. So, the higher the basic pay, the more enticing you are to them. Match your breakeven levels and margins to the basic pay of your workforce. For example, if a basic pay of 13,000 Pesos equates to $30 per day, per seat, a breakeven level that includes everything from leases and amortization, up to the salaries of your supervisors and manager, add no less than 50% margin or $45 per day, per seat, that’s not bad considering that many telemarketing campaigns pay a lot more commissions than $45 on a per sale basis of their products and services. Your agents might think P 13,000 is low but the amount of sales they need to generate is also pretty low. Then, incentivize their pay with commissions beyond their quota. I usually reserve no less than 25% of margins above my $45 mark for workforce commissions; giving more becomes enticing for them. If you can show them exactly what you’re talking about on paper during the final interview of your selected few, I’m pretty sure you’ll be a great call center to work with. The bottom-line is not to be greedy and your workforce will reward you for doing so.

Now, if your call center is in the boondocks far away from the nearest 711 convenience store and accessible public transportation, you have to increase your basic pay to entice experienced people to come join you despite the location. To arrive at how much should higher pay be, go back to the equation above and determine your breakeven level, margins and the rest of the projections.

Q: Should I set up beside existing call centers or somewhere where I am the only call center in that area?

There are two things you need to consider when choosing your location: (1) available internet bandwidth, and (2) access to experienced people. For the second part, I think I’ve answered the solution to that if you are locating yourself away from major thoroughfares of public transportation (see “How much should I pay my new recruits?”) In addition, I made sure to write “experienced” because you will not have the time, money and patience to teach newbies how to sell. For the first consideration, you need to make sure that your internet service provider (ISP) in that area can bring you to the internet cloud in the smallest amount of hops as possible and in the most stable way it can. Try testing your ISP’s connectivity by using SpeedTest.net and connecting to a server in Los Angeles. If you have access to a VisualRoute software or a similar solution, the better for you to determine everything you need for your voice-oriented internet connectivity. Lastly, it’s inevitable that you provide the expected basic amenities of a call center office: unlimited hot and cold drinking water, microwave oven, a place to wash and store their eating utensils, clean restrooms, bright lighting, comfortable workstations, and a host of many minor things that make a difference.

So, location is dependent on internet access and access to experienced employees. Everything else is replaceable with something similar.

Q: What kind of technology should I get?

Technology here means the kind of tools your workforce will be using when calling or receiving calls. It is what makes your entire call center productive or otherwise. It only means that besides the skills of your workforce and the nice campaigns you’re able to get, technology is the third important piece of the trilogy of major factors that will make or break your small business call center.

Here’s where I become biased. I’ve experienced hands-on installation, implementation and operation of enterprise call center solutions, those that physically resides inside your call center network (also called “premise-based),” and I’ve used hosted call center solutions or technologies that are not residing inside your network but are accessible through the web. For a startup small business call center, I recommend going for the hosted solution because it is subscription-based – you lease the service rather than having to buy the software (which is usually expensive) and the required server-hardware (also expensive) plus the telecommunications costs of calling landline and mobile phones in the country to which you are subcontracted to call. As you work your way up to the comfort level of the day-to-day grind of call center operations, you begin to realize what it takes to make it successful and falling in love with what you do – or not. Leasing is an easy get-away solution just in case your call center operations withers away due to many reasons. Buying software and hardware is like buying a car – only after a few months, the purchase price depreciates plus the next buyer has to acquire the same maintenance agreement with the software and hardware providers you bought them from without any discounts.

Between the few players I’ve encountered in the market like Five-9, Drishti, Touchstar and many others, I’ve found Kunnect to be the most cost-effective solution that gives me about 80% to 90% of what I want (and need). Kunnect is also very user-friendly, meaning I didn’t have to hire expensive IT experts or engineers to manage it (like VicciDial and other Linux-based systems which are usually free but takes several IT people to manage it; and you can’t afford these people to be late or absent – so, you hire more as idle backup). It takes a 3-hour remote training session to learn administration and 5-minutes for the agents to understand it. With Kunnect, I was able to hire home-based Quality Assurance (QA) analysts; that’s less seats to pay for. I didn’t need a report analyst to generate half-day, end-of-day, end-of-week (and so on) reports I’m required to submit to my clients. Because Kunnect was simple to use, I sat down with my team leaders and supervisors for an hour and taught them how to manage the dialer and create the Excel-based client reports on a daily basis. If I was sick at home or vacationing in Boracay, all I need is internet access to monitor the call center, because it’s web-based. I can go on and on – the point is, it fit my bill. After 3 years of using it, Kunnect offered me to represent them in the Philippines and Asia. I accepted only because I knew how effective it was for a small business call center, I knew how to use it (even knew the shortcuts on an operational standpoint) and I just loved their solution. So, there – that’s why I wrote “Here’s where I become biased.”

If you have any further questions related to this post, please go to my Contact Page to write down your thoughts and I will try to answer it as soon as I can.

How can the small business owner compete with large, multinational enterprises in the same market without having to spend so much money in setting up and maintaining a “customer conversation” infrastructure? People say “Talk is Cheap!” but simply said, it’s either complex, expensive or both. Beyond social media activities, the small business has to talk more to its customers in the most direct manner possible – verbally. The cost-effective way for the small business owner is to look for web-based solutions and rent it cheap. This article attempts to explain that “way” in simple, non-technical terms the small business owner himself (or herself) can plan, implement and succeed.

In today’s wired world, the dreams of online marketing, social media networking and social media marketing don’t necessarily amount to high revenues and low expenses, which ideally equals to great profits. Many large companies spend thousands, if not millions, trying to use the World Wide Web in the most imaginative ways; and in some of those ways, their web activities become controversial or, worse, provocative. But even if they result in negative publicity or results, these corporate giants still have enormous cash to dispense – all they need to do is juggle money between departmental budgets. This is not the case for the small business owner.

Online, Offline or Both?

Here are some questions to ask the small-office, home-office (SOHO) businessperson or small business owner with little cash to spend:

• Is the effort to market your products or services on the web way too much?
• Are you getting just a trickle of interested customers rather than higher as you projected?
• Is your market not responding to your message blasts – e-mail, text, content, articles, blogs, tweets and the like?
• Heck! Does online marketing and social media activities even work? (See also “Bridging the Social Media Generation Gap in the Workplace”).

Here’s another question I always ask small business owners when they start talking about imaginative or über-ly creative online campaigns:

“Don’t you think the simplest customer campaign is to just talk to your customers?”

When I wrote the word “talk” above, I meant a verbal exchange of words, not message-blasting your customers to nirvana. Don’t messaging them and expect so many enthusiastic replies back. It’s not about great copywriting or blogging and assuming everyone will click “Contact Us” right away. The world as history writes about it depends on conversations, “the oral exchange of sentiments, observations, opinions, or ideas” (as defined by Merriam-Webster), to improve or enrich society.

A Customer List is a Goldmine

Your online world is already ripe with many telephone numbers you can use to establish a one-on-one relationship with existing and prospective customers. The telephone directory has hundreds of thousands of contact information you can import based on area codes, zip or postal codes, cities and so on. You can also buy customer lists in a variety of digital formats from many providers like directory companies and list providers. Getting a customer list of your market today is so much easier than the heydays of rotary-dial telephone systems. The web is already a golden place to search for list providers.

Implement Bite-sized, Chewable Customer Conversation Campaigns

Your sales, marketing, service and support campaigns do not have to be so complicated only experienced employees knowledgeable in telemarketing, service and support, and sophisticated technologies are able to provide the right result. Chopping a large, maybe complex customer program into bite-sized pieces is the best and fastest way to implement it because even the inexperienced employee can perform wonderfully if given the chance. This is something many corporate entities have been doing, like creating levels of sales pitches between the frontline people and the sales closers, or escalating service and support from simple Q&A short sessions to expert-based long discussions. What you need to do is establish the groundwork for multiple yet simple tasks according to the level of expertise of each of your existing employees – or yourself. Going beyond the present capabilities of your workforce only means hiring very experienced and expensive professionals to do it for you. For starters, that’s not prudent. You and your team will eventually develop the skills to be able to drive more complicated customer conversation campaigns over a given duration. For now, keep it simple and develop from experience.

Find a Workforce You can Afford Or Use Your Existing Ones

Manpower is not as difficult as it seems to get – just make sure you’re not looking for someone who’s got a decade of sales or engineering experience and paying them minimum wage. Even if you “up” the ante on sales or performance commissions, employment-driven people still make it a point to get the best fixed monthly income. There are a lot of people out there without a job who can deliver customer service, telemarketing and up-selling with good, not mediocre results. Chances are, some of them may develop the knack for it over time and can become your best asset in the long term. Given the right tools, direction and support, you’ll be surprised how much value they will bring given that one-time chance.

Don’t even dream of creating a home-based group of telemarketing reps because it (still) doesn’t work in the Philippines or many places in Asia. Culturally, the average Filipino in his humble abode is an undisciplined person. He (or she) is way too comfortable in his house that it’s distracting to be doing telecommuting work productively. The efficiency of running a good team is still dependent on the traditional office environment. In fact, many experienced call center agents (you can tap into) welcome going back to daytime work even if it means lower pay. In my 26 years of work experience, I can state for a fact that the overall work environment is (generally) still a better come-on than higher pay.

The Right Office Tool is the Least Expensive One

The right tool for a productive employee conducting your sales, marketing, service and support customer conversation campaign is simply composed of an office table or cubicle, a PC with broadband internet and a USB headset – that’s it! This setup alone already gives so much productive power to your sales and marketing rep. Broadband internet would mean giving each PC at least 100 kbps of uninterrupted internet connection – uninterrupted because the main use of the PC is to call and receive calls (voice), not surf the web (data). If there is an interruption of connectivity in data streams, the web browser program simply retries connecting to the website. In the case of a voice-over-the-internet (VoIP), one second of disconnection means one full second of a blank conversation – there is no retry. With regards to the USB headset, it’s far more superior than buying a headset that connects directly to the PC’S sound card.

Setting up a local area network (LAN) is optional. The easiest thing to do is connect all your computers to the digital subscriber line (DSL) or internet modem provided by your internet service provider (ISP). In a common setup, you need to buy a multiple-port router so that your employees’ computers can directly be connected to the ISP’S modem. How many ports should the machine have is up to you. Now, if you want to set up a LAN, you need to confer with someone who’s adept and experienced in setting up these office networks. Consider maintenance of your LAN especially when things go haywire inside your network.

Wi-fi connectivity is not suitable for uninterrupted VoIP conversations. Wi-fi has a more complex job of connecting your computer to the internet using radio frequency; once there is interference from electronic machines and appliances, you will encounter those one-second gaps in repeated or multiple times. Surfing the web using wi-fi connections is fine, but not for VoIP.

The Power of the Automated Dialing Solution

VoIP, the wonder technology that today allows people to verbally communicate with each other through computers just like a telephone call. There are free and not-free solutions on the web which allows you not only to contact a person between computers but also call them on their fixed line or mobile phones. From the old-world DialPad.com of the late 90′s to today’s Skype, Yahoo Messenger and Google Talk, these free and not-so-free web solutions provide a simple, manual-dialing platform for your small business to start talking to your market. However, if employee productivity and efficiency is a key factor to the success of your sales and marketing customer conversation campaign, sophistication in function and use has to be the norm.

Normally, a small business buys a public broadcast exchange (PBX) machine that’s physically connected to its fixed lines. This allows employees to call and receive calls by way of traditional phone lines. Of course, you can connect multiple telephone units to the PBX machine even if the number of fixed lines (from the telephone company) doesn’t match the number of employees. But PBX machines provide little efficiency that doesn’t allow owners and managers to analyze employee productivity for a given campaign. That’s where the sophistication of an automated dialing solution comes into the picture.

But sophisticated solutions are usually expensive if you buy everything and set it up as if you’re going to use it 24×7 for a decade. For a small business owner, that’s not frugal, not even practical. Many small businesses need to run short-term sales and marketing customer conversation campaigns that provides an interim leeway to compete with large enterprises without incurring excessive expenditure. What the small business owner needs is a “call center solution” that he can rent, not own; a solution he can use but only when he needs it, and not pay for a long-term contract when in some months that solution is vacant or unused; and a solution that’s cheap.

There is an available subset of “call center solutions” that is web-based where the small business can conduct sales, marketing, service and support calls with its customers. Usually called a “hosted” solution, it is also part of those web applications categorized as “cloud computing” and “software-as-a-service or SaaS.” However, many hosted solutions are based in First World and developed countries and access to local, Third World telecommunications infrastructure (local landlines and mobile phones) are expensive.

Enter Kunnect, a hosted call center solution that’s capable of providing small businesses with a web-based solution and access to local incoming and outgoing calls at inexpensive rates. It is able to commit small businesses to conduct automated-dialing telemarketing activities to Philippine-based landline and mobile phones, including calling about any telephone number in the world. It can manage all incoming calls from any country in the world; it can also manage all incoming local calls within the Philippines for free (meaning no per-minute charges) because the small business already leases several landlines it can reuse – it just needs an intermediary machine to route the incoming analog calls to Kunnect’s digitally-oriented VoIP servers. This hosted call center solution now provides the small business owner all the power that large call center (and non-call center) companies use, such as but not limited to automated-dialing (also called predictive dialing), automatic call distribution (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR), 100% recording of all types of calls, live statistics and reports, pop-up scripts per type of campaign, integrated customer relationship management (CRM) modules, and much more. In fact, because it’s web-based, the small business owner can monitor, control and manage all his sales, marketing, service and support customer conversation campaigns from any place in the world that has internet access – at home, in the beach, in a hotel, and so on.

The last piece of benefit in using a hosted solution like Kunnect is the type of contract it provides the small business owner – no long-term contracts. If many technology providers continue to force the small business in a long-term contract with pre-termination penalties, Kunnect eliminates all that because it knows the practicality of the business – customer conversation campaigns are usually short-term. In fact, customer conversation campaigns don’t happen one after the other; there’s usually a gap in between campaigns to allow the small business owner time to respond, analyze, evaluate and tweak his customer conversation campaign for the next type to come. Kunnect provides the small business owner the ability of a “start and stop anytime” because that’s just the practical way for the small business to conduct business – a “win-win” scenario in all fairness of the business world.

In Summary

The small business owner now has power to conduct simultaneous sales, marketing, service and support customer conversation campaigns mimicking the likes of Citibank, huge real estate companies and an arsenal of other industry giants. It does not need to spend so much in setting up a complex infrastructure; it can rely on what computers and internet access it has today with a few minor adjustments. It doesn’t need to spend so much to maintain something it sometimes doesn’t need to use – start and stop anytime is the best service offer for the small business entity. It doesn’t have to hire experienced yet expensive people if it can simplify the operational context of the campaign into chewable bits and pieces together with a web solution that allows one to do so. It doesn’t have to hire a battalion of technical experts to manage and maintain the solution – it’s simple to use, understand and manage.

The world is getting smaller because of the internet and especially due to social media networking and social media marketing websites and tools. But, at the end of it all, any business still needs to verbally talk to its customer before it can deliver its products and services to their doorsteps. Telecommunications rates are not just the only factor to decide what kind of solution to get – the overall efficiency of the entire campaign, including the productivity of the people involved and the tools it uses are what matters most; because without that kind of efficiency, no matter how cheap the rates are, chances are the entire customer conversation campaign will never generate the right results – results being the magic formula of Revenue – Expenses = Profit.

“Talk is Cheap!” That has got to be your new mantra today.

There are, of course, those that think otherwise. For some reason, I may have hurt them or became the reason why they failed a business opportunity or the like. If in my good conscience I know I have done nothing wrong but gave everything my honest and sincere best, then I can sleep soundly and now worry about those who may think “otherwise.” Life is too short to keep hurt feelings or, worse, become vengeful with spite. I grew up with parents who were not perfect but were consistently nice and accommodating to everyone. That character rubbed in on me and made me live life according to those ideals. Despite the ordeals and hurtful encounters, never ever change the goodness in you – ever!

I haven’t written at all only because of the rut I went through. But, like any wounded prey, you lick your wounds, heal yourself, get up and start walking back to the path you came from. That path is still my intention of providing for my wife and children and being able to go back and live with them – near them. A short version of a long story is that I live thousands of miles away from my family but I never relinquished the aspiration to be back with them, forever.

My rut was the result of a few failed projects involving call centers, web development, content development and internet marketing. My realization to all these is that at the end of the day you are still who you want to be, and if those failures make you succumb to brooding and procrastination, you will have failed not only yourself but everyone around you. To be able to get back up on your feet and go back to your chosen path in life is difficult but not impossible. God and faith are very important – don’t be part the 5% population in the world that do not believe in God at all. God moves wonders in you to make a dash back to reality and life, and continue conveying compassion, love and understanding to everyone around.

Notice that many of the world’s richest people are, well, to put in direct perspective, “assholes.” Therefore, nice people don’t necessarily beget wealth – not that much, anyway. I don’t mind that at all. I’ve learned that our aspiration in life must not be about money but peace of mind. Regardless of how people think of you, if you think you have done no one wrong, or if you have sincerely apologized for the wrong that you have done, then there’s nothing from stopping you to live life according to your good principles in life.

Be a good person, no matter what the odds are. Money does grow on trees but it blossoms way above an oak tree – yeah, that tall. You need effort, determination, focus and ambition to have your picking. That’s how wealth is achieved. However, there are other people also trying to do just the same as you are, together in the same tree. If you think kicking them out of the tree to fall and hurt themselves, or trampling on them to speed up your ascent, will make it easier and faster for you to get your wealth, well, think a milion times before doing just that. Because, man, I’ll tell you – it isn’t worth it.

Today, two nice persons by the name of Fred C. and Chris P. have given me renewed life to a new business opportunity that I thought was lost. We recently met, rejuvinated the past intention to market and sell their service in the country, rekindled our professional relationship to a new par, and has now inspired me to rise up from the rut and go back to the path I was once at. Yes, you need people like Fred and Chris who are willing to help you, even if it’s just a nudge. You need people who are willing to support you in what you’re trying to do, people like my newfound friend, Gale P. You need to continue doing the “meet and greet” friendly, unobtrusive networking even if the likelihood of a sale isn’t there – there are always indirect means through your new professional acquaintances that isn’t apparent but will eventually result in closing a sale. Don’t do it out of self-interest because that kind of negative vibe will become obvious later on. Do your networking out of sincere interest to meet, greet and get to know the person well, especially friends and acquaintances you haven’t seen for a long time.

One thing you must always do is “be honest.” Never lie, cheat or steal. You don’t have to be great friends or BFFs but honesty is a quality that draws honest people closer to you than, say, your gift of gab. In the 80-20 rule of life, 20 percent of people may just want to use you. Be careful but be honest. If you can’t help the person who’s asking for money or your valuable time, tell them so. I was once in that situation where I asked people for money (I panicked) and half of them responded back. A big portion of that half said they couldn’t help me because of varied reasons. With sincere gratitude, I admonished appreciation for even just responding back to me. Many of them today are closer to me as friends or business acquaintance than before. The other half stayed silent and I’ll never know why; but that’s okay. They have their own reasons why and I for one cannot even think of judging people. My faith has taught me well that only God can judge us.

I have lived alone since, oh, for almost two years. Prior to that, I lived with my in-laws for about a half a year. I am an only child so maybe that’s the reason why I can survive without have anyone in my humble abode when I come home. After separating from my family, I pursued the course of entrepreneurship and have had my share of successes and failure, more of the latter. Good friends who became my business partners are now gone and, like always, I do not force myself to want someone to like me. Again, they have their reasons. Many other people I know, friends and acquaintances, continue to appreciate me as who I am; and I am thankful for them all the time. If I feel the angst to be around people, I just go to a coffee shop with my notebook computer and get into my creative self of looking for solutions to my issues and my problems. My notebook is my best tool of soltitude, tapping away on the keyboard, verbatim to my thoughts and without the need to edit what I first write. Regardless of my situation, I try to visit my in-laws every weekend and mingle with them on everyday banter of family life or things that have happened.

Recently, my father-in-law got sick and had to go through an Angioplasty surgery. I didn’t have to tell anyone that I felt so much compassion for him and what he was going through. I felt his pain. He is growing old yet continue to work for wealth because, somehow, I understand his need to fulfill many of his childhood aspirations. He is a kind and decent man. Just like me, he is an only child, too. I even asked my Facebook friends for their prayers, and many obliged openly or did it in their own non-public ways. My real father, Antonio Lumanlan Pekson, died 16 years ago and even if my father-in-law isn’t my blood relative, he is the only Dad I have today. (My Mom also lives far away from me.) My Catholic and Filipino traits rub on me to respect my parents and elders, be kind and honest to people, and never cheat, lie or steal – and of course, never kill. With that, I will always love my in-laws in my own humble way.

I’m now trying to get back on the road to recovery. I have been very busy tyring to come up with sales and marketing plans for the service I am trying to sell. KUNNECT is a hosted call center solution that allows any business center or call center, small or large, to perform its customer-centric services without the need for large capital investments, no need for a long set up duration and no expensive upfront fees. I love the product and the service, and I love the people behind it – Fred, Chris and everyone in KUNNECT. It has, as I mentioned, given me a renewed inspiration to fulfill my dreams once again but with the honest feeling that I’m doing the business market some good, too, in providing a cheaper but productive way to do business. And I’m doing it “on my own.” No more business partners. No more suckering myself into believing that good friends are the best kinds of business partners. They will always be my friends but I’ve learned late in life that it’s not always the best combination. Give them something to do on their own is better than working together but feeling you can’t argue about his personal self in the workplace. That’s a fine tightrope to walk.

Love God. Love your family. Love everyone around you even if they do the wrong things. Love your work, something which you spend a third of your life doing – sometimes even more. But most importantly, love yourself, too. To love yourself means you profess a positive aura that becomes very transparent to the people around you – and, like a virus, they get hooked on your positiveness and optimism, and project the same sentiments to others. All told, life is short but life is good, no matter what the odds are. Life is God’s gift to you – so, treasure it to its fullest potential.

Happy halloween!

The Most Effective Internet Marketing Formula Ever

by Zeke Camusio

What are your biggest sales turn off? Pushy salespeople in your face begging you to buy, buy, buy! However, they don’t offer anything valuable in return. They want you to buy the latest and greatest product but what’s the motivating factor? They don’t have one! As a result, people pass them over and won’t buy their products.

The following Internet marketing formula is the most effective six step plan to guaranteed SUCCESS!

Step 1: Distribute Content

Before you even ASK users to spend money on your products and services, you need to offer them something valuable. Would you buy products or services from someone you didn’t know anything about? Probably not!

The first step is to write informative content and distribute it through a variety of FREE marketing avenues including:

• Video Marketing – People respond to “visual” content as opposed to just text – greater impact on audiences and put a face behind the name!
• Article Marketing – By submitting to free article sites, people learn valuable information and want to read MORE information – a great way to brand yourself and put your name out there.
• Social Networking Sites – One of the easiest ways to spread the word about your business to mass people. Sign up for Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc. Create niche groups or create your own networks to really draw in target markets that appeal to your industry.
• Blogs – Stick to one niche/specialty and write interesting, informative posts that really capture subscribers’ attention. Blogs really make an impact by providing VALUABLE information and news. Blogs are another great way to position yourself as an expert in your field.
• Forums – Online communities allow you to interact with other members in a “friendly, informal” way. Generate buzz and interest about your company, products and services by interacting with others in forums. However, don’t just join ANY forum – subscribe to forums that really hit your markets and audiences!

Step 2: Reel Them in with GREAT CONTENT

You caught their interest and you now have a captive audience. What do you do next? Invite them to check out more valuable content on your site. Some examples include:

• Video Tutorials
• How-To Articles

Step 3: Subscribe for MORE GREAT CONTENT

Now you REALLY have their interest! However, don’t go in for the kill and hit them with the “hard sale.” You don’t want to scare them off!

Don’t try to entice with special offers either. Invite them to subscribe for more GREAT content (i.e. weekly newsletters, etc.)

Step 4: Send SUPERIOR CONTENT on a regular basis

Now it’s time to really WOW them with SUPERIOR CONTENT on an ongoing basis. Offer them something your competition doesn’t offer and make it GREAT!

• Send late-breaking special reports filled with the most up-to-date news in your industry – stay one step ahead of your competition! Research your target markets and give them WHAT they want to read.
• Be consistent with weekly newsletters and offer “real world” tips and information. Don’t talk down to your readers and keep the language simple and to the point.

Step 5: BUILD Relationships First THEN Offer Free Trials/Samples

Potential customers love your information you send on a regular basis. You’ve built a great relationship with them. NOW it’s time to offer them a free trial or sample.

Don’t give away too much though. You just want to give them a “teaser” of all the great products and services you offer.

Some examples might include:

• 10 minute phone consultation
• Trial sample of products
• Free half-hour DVD

Step 6: Customers Are Ready to Buy NOW!

At this final stage, your potential customers and clients have been given a “taste” of what you have to offer. They see REAL value in your content, products and services.

Like what the subtitle of Howard Schultz’s book says, “One cup at a time,” I strongly recommend going to Starbucks for the start of something great in your career, business and the things you do great!

Why on earth would I say that Starbucks is a great place to do your work? Let me sum it up in one long and bold sentence:

“It offers one of the best coffee in the world plus I just love the ambiance of the hissing of its large coffee maker, the resonance of its blenders that creates their famous Frappuccino drink, the jingle of the scoops of ice that make their iced lattes and mocha drinks, the holler of its baristas to whose drink is currently being served at the bar, the chatter of banter and sweet conversations, the slight turning of the page by solitary readers of books, magazines and newspapers, and the keyboard clicks of nonchalant writers and workaholics (like myself) at the surrounding tables.”

Obviously, it’s not just the coffee; the sensation of being in its café adds value to working in a Starbucks coffee shop.

Starbucks is probably the best place to set up your first business meeting that will never hurt your cash pockets. I mean, why spend a ridiculously high sum of money over lunch or dinner for a deal that you have no idea where it’s headed? At the end of the day, it’s all about matching what you offer and what your counterpart is looking for. No matter how expensive, extravagant and image-building the meal is, if your business endeavors do not complement each other, it will never work out. “The meal doesn’t make the deal.” So, the best place to cold-call and start the business relationship in an appeasing atmosphere that allows both you and your new acquaintance to relax while shop-talking is still a Starbucks coffee shop.

Recently, I had the chance to call on bloggers to invite them to write for an upcoming travel portal to the Philippines that I’m involved with. Though the site is (frustratingly) not yet online, I’ve managed to get quite a number of good bloggers on the fold while getting introduced to a new, growing segment of the publishing industry that I never cared to bother myself to know more about. I met most of my prospective writers and photo-journalists in a Starbucks coffee shop, a lot of these done at café along Legaspi corner Rufino streets in Legaspi Village, Makati City. My intent for meeting each one of these budding writers and photographers is to describe the travel portal project in detail, something that my literary abilities cannot correctly express. The relaxed aura of meeting at Starbucks proved to be successful, and many signed up to be part of the project.

So, one might ask where this excessive penchant for Starbucks began. As my agile mind can recall, it started in November of 1994 when I had my first taste of a cup of brewed “to go” Starbucks coffee in Sydney, Australia, right before boarding a boat that would take us to the famous Opera House. The trip to Australia was one of my marital travel adventures – my wife, Carina, and I had a penchant for traveling as much as we can before we decided to have kids – six vacation trips in a span of just a year which brought agitated responses from my then Avon boss, Connie Arboleda (who also became my firstborn’s godmother). I heard of Starbucks only from books and magazines. “Hmm. Not bad” was my smiling response. But that was it. It took a year before I had a chance to go to Vancouver, British Columbia in Canada for the first time when my wife gave birth to our first born, Cara Isabelle. In my three weeks there, I probably drank 3 cups per week, usually the brewed kind, and without my wife knowing that I was slipping in and out of her aunt’s house where we lived. The nearest Starbucks café was a five minute walk along Granville Avenue in the Marpole district of Vancouver, BC, which was also right in front of a Safeway store. It was actually the latter which I used as my alibi to buy nonessential things just to skip out of the house and buy my cup of Starbucks coffee.

When I came back to the Philippines, I actually mailed a proposal letter to Starbucks in Seattle, Washington where I offered to get a franchise for a Philippine store. In those days, e-mail was nonexistent and “Voice over IP” was unknown. I never got a response from them.

In 1997, Starbucks opened its first Philippine store at the 6750 Building along Ayala Avenue in Makati City. It was a partnership with Rustan’s Corporation, a well-known family who has been a business mainstay of department stores, supermarkets and restaurants in the country. I thought they got a franchise from Starbucks Coffee Company, something I attempted to do. A few years later, I read the very first published book by CEO Howard Schultz of his wonderful story of Starbucks and learned that the coffee company does not franchise – it partners with experienced restaurant companies on the basis of its standard partnership demand to create hundreds of branches on an annual basis.

The years went on in my corporate life and I sipped the famous coffee mainly for pleasure. Then, it became an evening ritual and for good reason. At the end of a tiring day in the office, my wife and kids would always demand quality time from me until they all zonked out on bed. Having all these corporate issues and debacles in my head while being with my family was a tough thing to handle. Don’t get me wrong. I love my wife and kids very much but the transition wrought my mind with distraught. I started straying to Starbucks for a moment’s time of peace while trying to readjust before driving back home and welcoming my family with high energy and smiles. I would spend half-an-hour or so sipping my hot, grande, non-fat, one equal latte while simmering the humid air outside (I smoked a lot before) and observing the people around me. Sometimes, I would read a magazine or today’s newspaper that was always available inside the café. I realized that the entire routine was the best relaxing way to downplay my corporate role, adjust and move into my fatherly and spouse role. This went on forever.

I would also use Starbucks as my venue to meet friends, acquaintances, old schoolmates and former office colleagues. The ambiance gave a better venue for entertaining ourselves over our hot or cold drinks and the not-too-heavy offering of meals and pastries. My corporate meetings would also be set on its hallowed grounds and I would guess 50% of the time, something successful came out of my many meetings in a Starbucks café.

When I got a chance to work at an American call center in Guyana (South America), my trip would take me from Manila to a two hour stopover at Narita airport in Japan where I would savor a cup before a longer flight. I would arrive at LAX airport in Los Angeles, California, grab another cup of Starbucks coffee before hailing a Supershuttle van for my one hour trip to Fontana, CA, where my Mom lived. I would stay for 2 or 3 nights before going back to LAX to catch an afternoon flight to Guyana. The plane would take us to Northwest Airlines’ Detroit or Minneapolis St. Paul hub, usually for another two hour layover before going en route to Miami, Florida. The latter was the last leg of my domestic U.S. flights. My next ride was a British West Indies Airways plane (they commonly called it “Beewee”) which had a one hour stopover at Barbados before proceeding to Guyana. Okay, let me count the number of times I would buy a Starbucks cup – five cups in a grueling 36-hour flight from Manila to Guyana, not to mention the fact that I always brought at least 5 big bags of ground coffee because three months without Starbucks would be suicide. That’s why I always have my 2 nights in California. The round trip back to Manila would be the same and the number of cups of Starbucks coffee I sipped would still be the same. This went on for two years with a quarterly home leave for 2 weeks.

One Christmas season, I gave away those “Manila” labeled wide-bottom mugs to my CEO and the people who reported directly to me at the Guyana call center. I wondered why Sean Krivatch, my CEO boss, enthusiastically thanked me days later. I later learned that he and his wife loved the mug because it wouldn’t rock unbalanced on the bed mattress, and their “breakfast in bed” routine quickly added my mugs into their customary habit. “I never thought of it that way but, hey! You’re very much welcome for the mugs.”

After two years, I hastily left my work in Guyana to fly back to Manila because of family problems. Being away regardless of my quarterly visits was a strain on my relationship with my family despite the financial gains. I could call them once every other day and would use the online text messaging system chikka.com to send short messages to my wife’s mobile phone. My computer at our condominium unit along Roxas boulevard only used a dial-up internet connection and my wife was never interested in learning anything that had to do with computers. She was a dentist by profession and that was the extent of her technical knowledge in life.

Back in Manila, I roamed the city streets networking with people who would be interested in my North and South American call center connections while my I fixed my issues with my family. Again, the best place to set up a meeting was Starbucks. By this time, there were so many branches between the cities of Pasig, Makati, Manila and Muntinlupa, places where I had easy access to go to. There would be new encounters with entrepreneurs and corporate managers that may be interested in me or what I had to offer. Friends would drop by to offer their help in referrals. It was actually the best place to meet during this time of my life because it was always a “dutch treat” encounter between me and those I was meeting. If I had to pony-up the treat, it was just a cup of hot or cold coffee, not a big strain on my dwindling savings.

There had been many good and bad encounters for me while sipping my coffee in a Starbucks café. It was the place where my wife and I had a big argument (good thing we were outside). I had my only one-on-one talk with father-in-law out at the Alabang branch before my family and I went to Canada. Starbucks Greenbelt 3 was where I got Frank Lai of Montreal-based GoldTech Systems, Inc. to sign a joint venture partnership deal with Hans Dee of Mannasoft Technology Corporation with the intent to set up GoldTech in the Philippines. Though I was a 10% shareholder of the new company in paper, I reassigned my shares to Frank so he and Hans could equally own the company, fifty-fifty. It was also the place where I first met the heads of another Montreal-based company, Fred Cote and Shawn Privatsky. A year later, I got the contract to represent them in the Philippines. Their company is Proximo Systems, Inc. and the hosted call center solution I was to market and sell in the Philippines was called Kunnect. Though I met Kyujin Hwang, then a Vice-President of U.S. based telecommunications company Airnex Communications, Inc., in another place, I had good (business) relationship-building sessions with Kyu in many Starbucks branches. A most recent meeting in Starbucks was with the CEO of The Travel Outlet of Virginia, Inc., Roy Estaris. The Travel Outlet is a twenty-two year old travel agency company in the U.S. and, after I sent my 17-page business plan cum proposal, I got the contract to develop and manage the content of their upcoming travel portal business, Just Go Philippines (or aptly branded as “JustGo Philippines!”). When on his next trip to the Philippines he brought along his COO Naomi Fitzwilliams, whose birthday happened to be on the night they landed in Manila, my business partner Richard Sia and I bought her a Starbucks item as a birthday gift, a set of six espresso-sized cups each labeled with the different city names Starbucks had a branch in the Philippines.

Back while I was in Canada fixing my family problems, my wife and I joined the choir of the Canadian Martyrs Catholic Church. This was where I met Lennie Cristobal, the choir’s musical director and pianist, and we spent many evenings talking about the choir, musical pieces and life in general in a few of the Starbucks branches in Richmond, BC. During one evening coffee session, he got me to agree to start playing bass guitar pieces since two acoustic guitars playing with no consistency in strumming or plucking sounded awful. I could read musical notes so he gave me simple pieces at the start. I eventually translated his pieces into guitar tabs since I could read tabs faster than standard piano pieces.

On an over-the-border trip from Richmond, BC to Seattle, WA, Carina knew that one of my lifelong dreams was to visit the very first Starbucks coffee shop at Pikes Place and we did. When we were there, my kids, Cara and Aaron, looked at me with confused faces why I looked so happy being inside that small place with hardly any chair to sit. I also bought one of their prepaid cash cards that featured the picture of the Pikes Place branch.

Starbucks will always be part of my routine in life – for work and pleasure. I started this literary piece while sipping a grande, one Splenda Americano in Starbucks-Greenbelt One after a nice meal of Hummus and a Gyro (or Shawarma) at The Mediterranean restaurant inside the same mall. Starbucks always has electrical outlets in its store and is friendly to laptop (or notebook) users like myself. It will always be my personal place to think clearly, organize my thoughts, read a good book or magazine and make it the only place to meet people for business or leisure. Even if I had the financial means to set up my own coffee shop, I wouldn’t do it. I’d rather put up something else and continue to savor what every Starbucks café all over the world consistently offers me – a very good cup of coffee and the best ambience for being your self. Like what the subtitle of Howard Schultz’s book says, “One cup at a time,” I strongly recommend Starbucks for the start of something great in your career, business and thing you do great!