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.

The CEO and COO of KUNNECT recently visited the Philippines to launch its call center technology solutions to the Philippine BPO market. Fred Cote, co-founder and CEO, spoke at the October 12 meeting of the members of the Call Center Association of the Philippines (CCAP) in Shangri-La Hotel Makati. Mr. Cote presented KUNNECT as a viable, inexpensive call center solution for immediate operations without the need for costly and time-consuming setup, calling it the “best in its class” of a full suite of call center features and functionality. Together with Mr. Cote were Chris Persaud, COO of KUNNECT, and Raffy Pekson II, the Country Representative of KUNNECT in the Philippines.

In Mr. Cote’s talk, he presented two new subscription plans, specially created for the Philippines, at half-the-price rates: Plan 100 for $100 per month, per seat, with unlimited calls within North America at a 1-year commitment contract, and Plan 125 for $125 per month, per seat, unlimited calls and a 6-month commitment contract. KUNNECT has two regular monthly plans with no commitment contract (start and stop anytime): the Basic Plan of $50 per month, per seat, plus toll charges, and the Unlimited Plan of $199 per month, per seat, with unlimited calls within North America. “Someone has yet to beat our $100 plan.  We are setting a new standard.” adds Mr. Cote of KUNNECT’S web-based SAAS call center offering.

During their two-week stay in the Philippines, Messieurs Cote and Persaud personally presented KUNNECT and met with the management teams of several call centers, and also non-call center companies that want to set up small, internally-controlled call centers for their sales, marketing, service and support business requirements. Mr. Pekson said that some prospective clients remarked that the main enticing feature of KUNNECT’S offer, besides the price, is one’s ability to start immediately without the high setup and maintenance costs.

KUNNECT is a global Tier-2 class telecommunications carrier with offices in the U.S., Canada, France and Germany, and does about 6 billion calls a year through its network, according to Mr. Cote.  “The amazing thing about the Philippine’s business and commercial broadband internet service is that all the telecommunications companies in the country first land their internet pop in One Wilshire, Los Angeles, which is where KUNNECT is co-located.   This helps eliminate any downtime due to latency problems, as well as ensure the shortest possible route to a business.” (Latency is defined as the round-trip time it takes to access an IP address or a website, measured in milliseconds).

Aside from its popular hosted call center solution, KUNNECT also sells a premise-based, enterprise version for call centers that want to host their own solution. For details about KUNNECT’S solutions, get in touch with Raffy Pekson, KUNNECT’S Country Representative in Manila, at 501-3025 and 0927-726-9949, or e-mail him at raffy@kunnect.com. You can also visit their website at www.kunnect.ph for more information.

A long time ago not too far away, everything had a price tag because there were not much options available. If something was given away for free, it was more of a privilege than the norm. “Buy One Get One Free” and other big sales promotions were never much of a big deal as life was good, simple and easy.

Today, when something free is offered, everyone goes out of their way to get into the action. A “Big Sale” event is enough reason to change one’s daily routine or make a snap decision to drop everything and tell your spouse, “let’s go – now!” That’s exactly what happened when I spent the day at the Bonifacio High Street commercial area inside The Fort after attending a BCBP fellowship breakfast. My good friend and I hopped from one retail outlet to another window shopping and ended up at Starbucks for more banter before calling it a night. When we left the café at around 7:30 PM, we were surprised to see hundreds of people loitering around the two-block area. I realized they were all waiting for a free view of the scheduled Pyro Olympics. Unfortunately, many of them didn’t know that that Saturday’s show has already been rescheduled and moved to January 2010 because of the previous Saturday’s fireworks competition between China and Germany turning out to be a rainy night and thus spoiled the show.

Starbucks inside Fully Booked at the Bonifacio High Street, The Fort

I’m an ardent fan of anything free. In fact, my moniker for this is “free, fast and forever” – the three F’s of things that are must haves for anything that being offered for free. When “free” fails the two remaining F’s, it’s not enticing to continue the service.

However, some things will never come for free. There was a long go internet site that offered free phone calls to any US number (I couldn’t put my finger in it but it started with the letter “S”) but eventually stopped giving its service for free because (probably) of the cost of providing it for free was just too much. So, in the spirit of “free,” I’ve compiled a short list of things I use for my business matters that’s “free, fast and (hopefully) forever.”

Skype – still the best free PC-to-PC voice service

Skype is still the best-in-quality, VOIP-based, chat-and-talk, web-based solution

Skype is the best peer-to-peer voice platform using the internet that’s been around for free and has maintained the quality of service I expect a voice provider to do. Yahoo Messenger et al also provides the same service but their voice quality isn’t as good as Skype. Though I chat with friends, I try not to do this with my North American clients. In fact, many of the latter don’t even maintain a chat account because they’d rather speak than type. I would e-mail clients asking for a good date and time to speak to each other using Skype because in my experience, business transactions are done better by talking to each other. Through the e-mail message, I ask my prospective client if he has a Skype account and schedule a date and time to discuss doing business with each other. One thing I will never do is discusss a business opportunity using e-mail, which many Asians like Filipinos try to do. North Americans and Europeans actually prefer talking than writing. Filipinos love doing the reverse; why do you think text messaging is a huge success in the country?

The Inexpensive Philippine Long Distance Telephone Solutions

Globe TipIDD prepaid card allows you to call North America for 2.50 Pesos per minute

If your client does not have a Skype account, immediately offer to call him instead – don’t even think about asking him to create a Skype account. Please. Also, this is a business opportunity for you so don’t make the mistake of assuming he will call you in the Philippines. In today’s telecommunications world, it’s actually cheaper to call North America from the Philippines than the reverse. There are inexpensive ways I call my North American clients. I can buy a Globe TipIDD card for my Globe landline which gives me 40 minutes of talk time to the US or Canada for 100 Pesos, or the PLDT Budget Card that gives me 30 minutes for 100 Pesos or 60 minutes for 200 Pesos. If I’m not around a landline, I can use my Globe mobile phone and dial 12800, the country code, area code and telephone number, and get charged about 7 to 10 Pesos per minute, half of the regular 20 Pesos per minute cost. You can also buy the popular Magic Jack product that allows you unlimited calls in the US which retails for about 4,000 Pesos. However, before you complain how lousy the service is, remember that the weakest link to an internet-based telephone system is your internet bandwidth. Using a poor DSL connection will definitely make the quality of service bad. In technical terms, traditional VOIP-based services require 64 kbps of simultaneous upload and download speed. DSL connections don’t have any bandwidth commitment so even if you have a 2 Mbps DSL connection, it can drop to zero in a second or two, then climb up back to its subscribed speed, drop down and up again. That’s why call centers in the Philippines pay thousands of Dollars to subscribe to internet lines that maintain the required simultaneous upload-download speeds.

You can buy prepaid minutes from Global Access anytime.

You can also buy prepaid minutes from a service provider they call a “termination service provider,” one who sets up VOIP lines and terminates your VOIP call to a North American telephone number. If you prepay and buy around 2,000 minutes at a high price of $0.03 per minute, that’s about 2,760 Pesos worth but valued only at about 1.38 Pesos per minute, still lower than the prepaid card landline providers Globe and PLDT. All you need is to download a freeware called “X-Lite”, configure the user ID, password and domain IP address and you’re set to call North America at cheap rates. I’ve used www.globalaccesscomm.com before for this kind of service. I bought 20,000 minutes worth at $0.015 per minute rate. They are located at the 21st floor of Prestige Building along F.Ortigas Jr. Ave. (formerly Emerald Ave.) where you can pay by check or Peso or Dollar cash in person.

Get a Corporate E-mail Address for $10 a year

In today’s wired world, many in business continue to use free e-mail services like Yahoo, G-Mail, Hotmail and the like. That’s great for personal e-mails and the like. However, you must professionalize your corporate image by using an e-mail address that depicts your business, e.g. myname@company.com You normally have to buy an e-mail hosting solution that will cost about $50 to $100 a year. I did it the cheaper way but let me explain below.

GoDaddy.com is a popular domain and hosting provider with good phone support, even from the Philippines

First, I bought a domain name from GoDaddy.com for about $10 a year – it’s cheaper if you purchase the two or three year subscription. I know of only two very popular free e-mail hosting sites that offer hosting your organization’s domain for free – that’s Hotmail/Live.com and Gmail.com. I’m sure there are hundreds of others out there but I stuck it out with an e-mail hosting site that I’m already used to the graphical user interface (“GUI”). You can use Google Apps Standard Edition (go to http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html) to set up your corporate e-mail account for free, including Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Site. I can’t find the link to Live.com’s version but I’m sure the free e-mail hosting feature is still there. If you’d like to use other free e-mail hosting service, that’s okay, too. Whichever you use, your e-mail hosting provider should give you easy-to-understand instructions to point your domain’s e-mail IP address to the new email hosting platform you’re going to use. If what you’re reading still sounds too Greek, copy or print all the instructions of your free e-mail hosting provider and call GoDaddy.com. in about 10 minutes, they’ll have your domain settings changed and pointed to your free e-mail hosting provider for you. C’mon! 10 minutes of a long-distance telephone call to a US number is peanuts compared to the anxiety of having a domain name you can’t even use. Trust me when I say e-mail will not work right away – the tendency is to keep bouncing e-mails between your domain provider and yourself until the former clearly understands what it is you’re in need of help for.

Blogging as a Corporate Website

Wordpress offers everything FREE - free blog hosting or download their entire blogging program for free

Today’s corporate websites now copy the format or actually use free blog sites like Blogger/Blogspot and WordPress. I’m a WordPress user but other blogging sites are just as easy to use. However, WordPress.com also offers their entire blogging software free to download at WordPress.org. This entire software is something you can use and alter when you have your own web hosting space. But start with the free blog hosting site like WordPress.com before attempting to buy a hosting package and use the WordPress.org program. I bought a personal domain name in April and pointed it to my WordPress.com site, i.e. www.company.com points to company.wordpress.com. After six months of using the free WordPress.com blog space and getting a good feel about WordPress and the activity of blogging, it was time for me to buy a hosting package. Before I did, I looked for a free but better looking WordPress theme (like the themes of your mobile phone) that would now professionalize (or personalize) the look and feel of my original blog. I bought a $50 per year hosting package from GoDaddy.com that’s WordPress-ready. When I found the free WordPress theme that I liked, I downloaded it into my new WordPress hosting package.

Blogging is now the new method of providing content to web visitors besides media publication or communications companies. Even CNN uses the free WordPress.org program in their website. Now that people are so used to reading blogs, the old-world way of creating a catalog-looking website is passé. Your corporate site now needs to be updated, at least, on a weekly basis; otherwise, people will visit you twice and never return because nothing changed in your site or nothing interesting exists. Content is now king – either you develop your own content or hire the services of other people to develop content for you. You can become an employer at oDesk.com to have freelance content writers bid for your project or get your relative, friend or acquaintance to help – besides hiring someone the traditional way.

Conference Calling the United States for Free

Freeconference.com is by far an established multi-party telephone conference solution that FREE to use.

When I need a three-party conference call that involves a North American entity, I always use www.freeconference.com to set up the bridge conference telephone number. This simply means everyone must call a US telephone number, enter the PIN code and start talking to each other. If it involves a Philippine company calling the US number, I always give my two-cents of suggestions on the inexpensive ways to call the US as I described above. Freeconference.com allows you to set up as many participants as you want and up to four hours of talk time without paying a single cent. It also allows you to auto-email all the participants with an attached Outlook-formatted calendar file. Recording the conference used to be free but is now a paid service. However, I don’t usually need to record conference calls as all of my telephone meetings are exploratory and discussion-based – writing out my notes using pen and paper has always been easier than being lazy and just recording the conversation. After the telephone meeting, I always create and e-mail everyone an after-conference report to document everything and allow the other participants to review and even add their comments or things that I missed jotting down. I’ve been using Freeconference.com since 2005.

Here’s a realization: most countries’ long-distance calling rates to the United States is cheaper than two Third World countries calling each other. So, if I have that situation, it actually becomes more cost-effective to call a U.S. bridge conferencing telephone number, like Freeconference.com, than calling each other long distance. For example, I’m currently dealing with a call center in Guyana. Initially, I started a Freeconference.com US-based telephone number until we became more familiar with each other and relied on Skype in our following conversations.

Online Address Books with Birthday Reminders

Plaxo.com has been around for a long time. I use it for being reminded of birthdays and sending Plaxo e-Cards to e-mail addresses.

For address books, I used to use Plaxo.com because it provided free use of its “export to file” feature; today, you have to pay for that. However, I still rely on it to remind me of birthdays and so I continue to update it every time I receive a new business card. It automatically invites my new contact to check and revise my entries even without forcing my new contact to join Plaxo. This is good because some systems force you to join their online service before allowing you to update or change detailed information. One field that’s always there is the birthday field. Birthdays are important for me in business because it is the most important event for a person without having to know his nationality or religion. Remembering someone’s birthday is a great relationship-building activity you can do to someone who many not give you business today but may do so in an unforeseen future. A great example is an e-mail acquaintance of mine from Toronto (I’ll call him Martin). We met in a Yahoo Group because we both worked for the call center industry in 2002. I kept tabs with him every year when I greeted him on his birthday and we’d continue to exchange a few more e-mails right after greeting him until the conversation dies down and I greet him the following year. Four years later, when I greeted him on his birthday, I also told him I was setting up a call center and wondered if he could help point me to a good campaign. Lo and behold he pointed me to his good friend (who I’ll call Cathy) who worked for the largest trade publication company in the world. Because Martin was a good friend of Cathy, she obliged to conference call with me. In the end, I won the hearts of Cathy and her team to be one of the outsourced call centers for their business.

Hotspots as My Office

Coffee Bean reestablished itself as a telecommuting-friendly cafe with FREE wi-fi. But it still lacks the electrical outlets power-users look for.

For some years, I’ve been a street-side businessman, always out meeting with people, marketing and selling myself and my products or services outside the workplace. Because I’m very much involved in internet-based networking, correspondences and communications, I rely on hotspots to do my business. Though there were enticing options to get a serviced office workstation or e-office, I declined knowing I would probably spend only an hour in the office and get out doing my work in coffee shops that have wi-fi access. Today, Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf offers the best and notebook-friendly free wi-fi hotspot in Manila. I bought a “Swirl Card” that gives me rewards points plus the WEP key or password to access their wi-fi system. A funny story about Coffee Bean’s internet is a recent experience with a prospective client. As a Country Representative of Kunnect.com, I conduct on-the-spot demo of the Software-as-a-Service (“SaaS”) besides my traditional presentation. Once, I did this at New World Renaissance Hotel. It had terrible internet with lots of timeouts. When I told the prospect if he wouldn’t mind walking to the Coffee Bean branch at Greenbelt 3, he was surprised how fast the internet was at the cafe compared with the hotel. The most quiet branch of Coffee Bean I’ve been to is at the ground floor of the Greenbelt Residences condominium, right across Greenbelt 2. It’s a lot smaller than that of Greenbelt 3 or Robinson’s Galleria mall. By the way, all Coffee Bean branches are hotspots.

A quiet, telecommuter-friendly, FREE wi-fi cafe.

Besides Coffee Bean, I also choose Blenz, the Canadian coffee shop that only has two branches: at Solaris One Building along dela Rosa street in Makati City and another one at SM Megamall. It’s got a good ambience, quiet, not much people so it isn’t noisy and lots of electrical outlets in case your laptop runs out of battery power. However, Blenz is not that easy to find as the shop isn’t a street-view cafe and not everyone knows where Solaris One building is. It’s got free wi-fi with any amount of purchase.

Other hotspots I go to conduct meetings are Chili’s in Greenbelt 5, Bubba Gump at Greenbelt 3 (they have an airconditioned smoking area, just like Coffee Bean at the Robinson’s Galleria mall) and TGI Fridays at Glorietta 3. Now, here’s a tip: Globe DSL has been installing their wi-fi routers to new subscribers, including businesses such as restaurants. The funny thing they do is that the default WEP key or password is “aabbccddee” using the SSID “aztech”. So, if you’re in an area where you see the same SSID or even “linksys”, try to see if they have the same password. Chili’s obviously uses Globe because when I asked for the WEP key, the server replied “aabbccddee”.

I use Globe Visibility because I'm usually at an Ayala-owned place.

However, when I’m stuck in a place without free wi-fi, I always have my Globe Visibility USB-based internet dongle (this is the predecessor of the Globe Tattoo). Why did I choose Globe? Well, I usually conduct my meetings in Ayala malls and Globe is an Ayala company; so, naturally, Globe’s signal would be far better in Ayala malls than competing products like SmartBro and Sun cellular. If you’re the type who always goes to the province, I think SmartBro would be better because Smart’s provincial coverage is better than Globe. For someone who’s always in a Robinsons mall, go for the Sun Cellular version. For a prepaid internet dongle, it costs about 20 Pesos per hour for internet access that can ideally reach 3 Mbps but about a maximum of 2 Mbps for HSDPA access in a 3G environment.

In Summary

I’m sure there are many other things that you do that would benefit you if some provider offered it for free or at a very reduced price, like text messaging (I used Globe’s Immortal Text; for 10 Pesos, I get 50 free text messages to other Globe or Touch Mobile subscribers plus 10 free text messages to people using other networks without an expiration date). But for this literary piece, I’ll stick to these basic items I mentioned that continues to be my source of free or inexpensive ways of doing business in our very competitive world. I do hope some of these tips and experiences can help you with your work as it has done with me. If you’re using a whole lot more that can help the readers, please share us your tips on “free, fast and forever.”

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!