Encouraging our IT talents to be entrepreneurs

Borrowing the numbers from the Cebu Chamber of Commerce and Industry (CCCI), the Philippines is said to have cornered about 10 percent of the global outsourcing business or around $10 billion. CCCI also said that the Philippines has already overtaken India and is now the number one destination in the world in terms of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO). What is unclear about the numbers is the distribution. But I would like to guess that more than half of the outsourced business that go to the Philippines may have been captured by vendors in and providers of voice services like call centers. The rest may be in a form of back office services – data entry, accounting and legal research, publishing, animated graphics, software engineering, web design and etc.

Undoubtedly, the BPO industry has created and provided thousands of jobs to the Filipinos. However, the fact remains that practically almost all BPOs that’s operating in the country are foreign-owned. Which means, what’s being outsourced is only the labor component and that’s probably the reason why they are called “locators.” If I had it my way, “relocators” would have been more apt to describe the business because these BPO companies are just relocating here in the Philippines to take advantage of our talent and cost-efficient labor pool.     

While we should be thankful to these locators for providing us jobs, it would have been more ideal if Filipinos should also be doing or exploring these types of services owing to our talent and experience to offer the service. I can only count with my fingers the BPOs that’s wholly-owned by Filipinos. The most popular I know is Exist Global owned and operated by Winston Damarillo and Jerry Rapes. Exist provides software solutions for overseas clients. The country would have been prouder to see Filipino enterprises like Exist exploring the opportunities in voice services and other IT services that’s been dominated by foreign providers.          

I have also asked this question to CCCI if they have a program that encourages our Filipino talents to get into business than to be employed. You see, we have great skills in programming, graphic design and 3D modeling and even operating a call center. Unfortunately, our talents choose to be employed than to capitalize their world-class skills.

There is also another area in the IT field called “search engine optimization (SEO)” and search engine marketing (SEM) in which we have the capacity to provide. I have seen a lot of talents in this field but most of them are content with just getting employed with SEO companies. The opportunities in SEO are so great that businesses right now are in the lookout for talents to make their websites more visible in search engines and social networks. A single contract for SEO alone ranges from a low of $1,000 to a high of 2,500 per wesbite per month for a six-month campaign. Some offer additional bonuses for a very successful campaign.

We need to transition our campaign from inviting investments to encouraging the creation of investments. Our talents are our goldmine. We need to motivate them that they can do more with what they have. Remember, we only have captured ten percent of the total global BPO and only a handful of Filipinos are getting the pie of that ten percent. 

I think a good start would be to tweak our IT syllabus to include entrepreneurship to change the mindset of every IT student to be more innovative and solutions-oriented. To tell them the bright prospects in selling their solutions than selling their skills.

CCCI may organize a seminar for IT graduates on entrepreneurship organize them to form their own businesses and give them IT projects. CCCI’s members alone can have their IT requirements outsourced to this newly-formed group. Marketing their skills is also something that CCCI can also help to enable them find projects as a start or they may provide marketing seminars for them so they can on their own find these markets themselves. Providing seminars on business and financial management will certainly be useful to run the different areas of their business.  

There are more ways that CCCI can help. Their strong ties with the government will also be very important to make this happen. The help in the government may be in a form of seed money for start ups or to support highly creative and innovative projects.

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