How E-commerce Experience Fueled an Outsourcing Journey – with Warren Walborn of Pentwater Connect

Warren Walborn, President and CEO of Pentwater Connect, brings decades of business and outsourcing experience to the table. In this episode, he talks about his background in e-commerce, industry disruptions, and finding the best talent.

Pentwater Connect

Warren starts by explaining the origins of Pentwater Connect. 

“I started an e-commerce business and needed outsourced services. And so I hired a team from the Philippines and found that it added so much value to my company that we could do the same thing for other companies.”

The name comes from Warren’s childhood village in Michigan, along with its mission of connecting businesses to customers. 

Pentwater Connect today provides a wide range of services. “We helped visionary entrepreneurs grow faster by providing easy, affordable, and high quality outsourcing solutions,” Warren says. “We do things around digital marketing, customer support, accounting. We do a lot of e-commerce growth services and we also have a mortgage services arm.”

Living in the Philippines has allowed Warren to connect directly with the country’s growing talent base. 

“We’re just outside of about an hour north of Davao City, which is the second largest city in the Philippines. But the town that we’re in called Tagum has, oh, 17 or 18 universities and colleges with, you know, a lot of great talent coming out of these schools that we can draw from.”

E-commerce and digital marketing in outsourcing

Warren’s entry into outsourcing came through his own success in e-commerce. 

“Our Shopify store was so successful. We applied these principles… and that company is now ranked in the top 1% of all e-commerce, all Shopify stores. That’s more than 3 million brands worldwide.”

This approach later became the foundation for Pentwater Connect’s offerings. 

“Once we developed all of those tools we’re like, hey, probably not very many people do digital marketing as good as we do. 

So we’re out there marketing our digital marketing, but we’re competing against, you know, everybody in India, everybody on all of the other platforms.” 

However, Warren very quickly found his advantage.” 

That was a pretty competitive market. However, very few of them are married to the Philippines the way I am. We have an army of team members over here.”

Technology and outsourcing adoption

Warren also emphasizes the role of technology in reshaping outsourcing, bringing up how things like SEO have been affected by generative AI.  

“[People] want to type their questions and they want AI to give them the answer. And so we have to be able to provide those answers. And that’s what gives our clients the edge.” 

At the same time, he remains cautious about forecasting, especially with regard to claims that AI will rapidly replace the need for BPO functions. 

“But this much I do know: outsourcing is here to stay. 99% of the Fortune 500 are doing it, and the younger companies are doing it. 

The smaller companies are growing and growing, and with offshoring, people have access [to] billions of potential employees who can do specialized tasks for them.”

Yet he acknowledges SMEs face challenges that enterprises have already overcome, underscoring the need for a professional offshore partner. 

“A big cause of that failure is when companies just wanna hire a remote worker. You get somebody, they sound great at first, but then they go radio silent one night. 

We don’t do that at Pentwater Connect. All of our employees are in our office. It’s a secure, supervised, trained, supported environment.”

Hiring talent and perceptions of offshoring

For Warren, recruitment is a hands-on process. 

“I have to be intimately involved in the hiring decisions. I can’t delegate that… I know what I want, I know what success looks like, and I know what failure looks like.”

To find talent, Pentwater Connect turns to a mix of local strategies. 

“One of the things that we’ve discovered is the merits of job fairs. We went to a job fair last Tuesday. I hired five people on the spot. I was so happy, and they’re all superstars. And tomorrow we’re going to another job fair that’s even bigger.”

He also highlights the importance of fair pay, noting that his company pays twice the going rate, but this results in a stellar reputation and retention. 

From the US side, Warren has seen attitudes toward offshoring evolve dramatically. He tells of how even minor accents used to be an issue, but now are commonplace in the industry.

“[Previously], I had to be very careful about the accent that my team had because people wouldn’t give their credit card number to somebody who had a foreign accent. That’s gone. That’s completely gone.”

He adds that despite political debates, outsourcing has not been a target. “The outsourcing industry? The business as a whole? Offshoring? Nobody’s complaining about that at all… it’s just the future. There’s no stopping it.”

You can learn more at https://pentwaterconnect.com/. 

If you’d like to ask us anything, send an email to [email protected].