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Home » Podcast » Jethro Marks – Outsourcing: access to cheaper resources

Jethro Marks – Outsourcing: access to cheaper resources

Ep 251 Jethro Marks
Ep 251 Jethro Marks

Jethro Marks

We are joined by Jethro Marks of thenile.com.au, which is an online retailer based in Australia and New Zealand. Jethro has a wealth of experience both in business and outsourcing. He’s been outsourcing to the Philippines for nearly six years, I believe.

There’s a lot of knowledge, a lot of learnings, a lot of experience that he’s had with outsourcing. and in the evolution of finding an outsourcing partner and building his team here. You can also check out our article on why outsourcing is great for your business for more information.

The Nile

The Nile is a family-and-friends-led enterprise that started in a living room with two guys and a computer. It has now grown to become an employer of over 80 people in the fields of customer service, logistics, marketing, and creative design. The Nile has a successful outsourced operations center in the Philippines.

Founders Jethro Marks and Mark Taylor witnessed the dawn of online retail and withstood its tests of time. They are now beyond 15 years of online retail experience and that is not their collective experience. 15 years is how long together Jethro and Mark have been contending with the challenges of the online marketplace, while flourishing, to guide The Nile to the place it is today.

References

The Nile

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Ep 251 Jethro Marks
Jethro Marks – The Nile

 

Things to consider when outsourcing

Derek Gallimore: Hi, and welcome back everybody. Today, we are joined by Jethro Marks the founder and CEO of nile.com.au, which is, in some ways very similar to amazon.com. I’m not sure if you appreciate necessarily that comparison all the time, Jethro. But it’s great to have you on board. The reason why I’ve got you on this podcast is to discuss, you’ve got vast experience in business, I think you literally almost started this business while you are still a child, and you’ve been running it many decades now.

You’ve also incorporated outsourcing into that business model relatively early on. It’s an absolute pleasure to have you on this podcast. And thanks for your time. So first of all, Jethro, I suppose you can introduce yourself far better than I can you just give us a summary of The Nile and how it came to be.

Jethro Marks: Sure. Well, thank you very much for having me on today. This is great fun. Yeah, so we started the business in 2003. In New Zealand and Oakland. And the background on it is that I come back from a backpacking trip, been traveling around South America for about eight months and arrived back with the needs to either get a job or to start a business.

I thought I will just start a business and see what happens. And if it doesn’t work out, then I can always still go get a job. And so I got together with a couple of guys I’ve worked with a couple of years before that. And we started up a business with a very sophisticated business model and business plan, which was to find anything that we could fit that we would fit into a box that someone would buy on the internet that we could ship to them. And have you make a bit of money doing that.

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Derek Gallimore: But having said that, that was pretty sophisticated back in 2003. The internet was in super early days back there.

Jethro Marks: Yes, 2003 was a couple of years after the collapse of all the dot coms. Ecommerce has gone from becoming sort of something that in the late 90s was going to take over the world, to something that nobody talks about. It was pre-SaaS, pre-cloud, it was there really just wasn’t much going on. And so we got into it. And at the time, there weren’t any of the tools that are available today.

There was no Shopify and there was no almost all the things that today, as an e-commerce entrepreneur, if you were going to set up and use all the various things because none of that existed. So we had to build our technology from scratch, and build the business off, with without any kind of infrastructure around us. When I look back on the way we had done, and the way we did it, versus the way I would do it today, is just totally different. Because today, there’s so much available, that would make our lives so much easier. And to be able to scale a lot faster.

Derek Gallimore: It is hard, isn’t it when I was setting up, one of my previous businesses in about 2010, I needed online payments. And it was just a minefield, trying to find providers trying to find payment gateways that would, enable you to to use cards and trying to negotiate not paying a quarter of a million-dollar deposit bond. It’s just a minefield. And that’s just for online payments. I mean, everything now is just plugged and play, isn’t it?

Jethro Marks: Absolutely. And I feel your pain entirely on the payments. I think when we first set out all the domestic banks wouldn’t touch us with a bargepole. And it really required to go and deal with a third Singapore based UK entity that agreed to take us on and they process payments, and paid us out six weeks later we have to wait six weeks to get payments.

I remember going to then renegotiate with them after several months. And we were an established company. Now we’ve shown that we can do that all our metrics are good, can we get an improvement on we’ve decided that you guys, but done very well and we’d like to reward you, we’re going to make it a five-week turnaround time now instead of six.

Derek Gallimore: Crazy. Huge and you haven’t paid for your stock in advance, or you could manage the cash flows.

Jethro Marks: No, we were quite lucky in that regard, I think we managed to buy some of the stock or like some of the stock on credit at the time with some of the companies that were a little bit more nimble. It was just it was tough. I mean, it’s tough in the beginning, there’s never enough cash around when you’re starting up.

It was just one of those things, eventually, I think we’ve only managed to find a bank that would after several years, a couple of years later, that was prepared to deal with us once we’ve still got a bit more traction. And then we’re amazed that they could turn it around and get it down to one week. And then eventually the next day. And that was just, it was quite eye-opening that such a thing was possible at the time.

Derek Gallimore: It’s hard when you’re too early into a market and you’re a market leader because everything just has so much friction associated with it, doesn’t it? I suppose the alternative to that is when you’re no longer a market leader and there are no barriers to entry, then you’ve got a lot of competition. So maybe there isn’t, maybe there’s a sweet spot there somewhere.

Jethro Marks: Yeah, it’s a really good point. And today, we were just discussing this about how, today, it would be easier, and we’ve had to iterate and change the model to stay ahead of the curve, because we developed some technology, in one area, and we’d all of a sudden have a real lead on our competitors, you fast forward 12 months, and everyone’s got the same product, and they’ve all developed it or they’ve managed to get a SaaS product who does the same thing.

There’s that constant need to kind of stay ahead. I think in the beginning, certainly the problem is that the perception of risk on the part of every supplier is high. So they look at you and go, ‘you’re an unstable entity, and therefore we can’t give you whatever credit or whatever it is that you need at the time.’ And the irony is that that’s probably when you needed the most because you were in the formative stage of your journey and you haven’t yet built momentum. But it’s just a constant state of perseverance and just kind of knuckling down and making sure that you keep focused on those things that are important, like cash flow, for example. And then it all kind of stuff to work itself out.

Exploring outsourcing

Derek Gallimore: And it’s this constant need to stay ahead of the curve, which is really why I want to get you on this podcast and discuss because, I think the what do we call the internet sector, they’re renowned for being a little bit cutting edge in terms of everything, the sort of older industries, all the businesses generally they’re not so agile as the younger, newer industries and players such as yourselves.

One of those ways that you certainly stayed ahead of the curve was to outsource some of your staffing. Do you just want to I suppose before we get into the hardcore outsourcing, what was your journey like in terms of your staffing journey? And the decisions that led you to explore outsourcing?

Jethro Marks: Sure, we’ve had offices both in New Zealand and Australia since day one, or shortly afterward. And for those of your listeners who aren’t familiar with these markets, I mean, we’ve got relatively small populations of 20-24 million across the region, and relatively high labor costs. And what we found during the startup phases, we had difficulty being able to hire people because the economies were quite vibrant.

We weren’t ready at that point. Because to do anything, because we just hadn’t formed enough of our business processes. Then we had the start of the GFC or the financial crisis. And I think that kind of changed the calculus a little bit because there weren’t, there was all of a sudden some high unemployment, we were able to hire people more easily. And then as the economies kind of recovered it throughout 2011-2012, what we found was that we were back into the same state of not being able to hire people they just weren’t, was real heavy competition to try and recruit staff.

In a lot of the roles that we needed to fill, for example, like customer care or some of the back office roles, there wasn’t there weren’t perceived to be career type moves, we’ve just picked up people who are picking up transportry work. And so you had this kind of situation where we weren’t able to get the people that we wanted. The people that we were able to get didn’t stay with us very long as just was it there was a lot of factors that said we potentially weren’t playing the game correctly.

I think at that point, we started to seriously look at what other markets could we potentially go to start hiring a highly qualified group of very well-motivated people, and potentially would allow us to save on the cost of that hiring. And I think you were actually very instrumental at the time I think at the time you were running a business and you were very instrumental in giving me some insights into how you would structure yourself and as a consequence, we took a journey to go and look abroad and see where we could look at and we looked at a few markets.

Initially, we looked at India, we looked at the Philippines, we looked at some other Asian markets, and we eventually just discounted all of them except for the Philippines, either by proximity or lack of proximity or timezone or whatever. It’s just, it worked out well for us because it was a market which timezone wise was on the same as Perth was only about two to three hours out of Sydney. Very large English speaking population, we had several contacts and friends who had both decent operations up there.

We just felt that there was a strong push try and assist with that market would work for us. And I think it was in about 2011-2012 around then that we first went up and started to do our research and understand what the Philippine recruiting market was like and what hiring staff was there and what the entire experience of outsourcing would have been like. I think it took us about six months to kind of get comfortable both with the providers and understanding how to pull the trigger. Between early 2013. We pushed enough to put a few people on the ground there to just see what it would be like

Derek Gallimore: Yeah, go on. I mean, it’s amazing. And you were before you pulled the trigger, what were your major fears, what held you back?

Jethro Marks: I think the constraint, the biggest constraint I was worried about was operating. We’d operated remotely with multiple offices up until that point, but I hadn’t done it out of our comfort zone. And so I wasn’t sure with even though it’s a relatively short distance to the Philippines, like nine hours from Sydney or eighth from Sydney, it just felt like it was quite far away. We hadn’t had enough experience or comfort factor with being able to do and so we weren’t sure we were gonna have management issues, where we’re going to have, we’re going to be able to hire the right people.

We just weren’t sure how the structures work, it was just a lack of understanding on our part. And I think what we, the best thing I did, beyond talking to some other people who had operations there, really was to get on a plane and just go and meet with all the different providers that were shortlisted by that point and just get a really solid understanding of how their businesses worked, who they were as people, what their journeys been, why they’ve done what they’ve done, and look at the kind of operations that they were running, meet firsthand some of the people who would later become our employees. And I think once we’ve done that, we got a much better comfort factor around what it would be like to go ahead and do this.

Derek Gallimore: And again, it’s only years ago, things have come so far in that time, haven’t they? I mean, you just need to look at like kind of Facebook only just really started about eight, nine years ago. And similarly, outsourcing has been around for 25 years, but eight, nine years ago, it wasn’t quite so accessible. It wasn’t as easy to navigate. And there was nothing like Outsource Accelerator, of course, but it was relatively early stage when you compare the market now, in terms of how you explored and how you did DD on this process?

Jethro Marks: It’s just the amount of adoption from a lot of new people into using services up here. I think that we got in five, six years ago and started building our teams. And I think there should the sorry, to segue slightly. But to answer the question that I think the one thing that really blew me away, when I first went off and started looking at options, were the sheer scale of opportunities that people that other people had exploited how that what other people had done, in terms of what roles that outsourced where the growth was coming from, I got a sense when I first went up, I thought, oh, that’ll just be offices after offices just have call centers and just people answering phones from customer.

I didn’t realize the sheer volume of different roles that have actually been outsourced into places like the Philippines. And with that came this kind of sense of, well, actually, we came here to do one thing, but there’s a whole bunch of opportunity that we could do within our business and roles that we could create that don’t exist anymore. And skills that we could bring in that we had never thought to do so before. Just because we hadn’t, I hadn’t got my head around the fact that that exists in other parts of the world. And there was quite exciting.

One of the things I’ve liked is that we’ve been able to experiment at a much lower cost than we could in Australia, or even in New Zealand, where we can onboard people put them into roles if it works out great. If it doesn’t, then we can move on to the next thing. And with that has come the creation of a lot of jobs and a lot of group of people within our teams who we’ve never thought about those roles before going to the Philippines and that’s been beneficial to our business. And we’ve brought on some amazing talent to we’re very, we’re very happy with.

Effects of outsourcing

Derek Gallimore: And that’s the real magic of outsourcing isn’t, sure you can get your customer support done. You can save a bit of money, but the real magic is seeing the vast opportunities here because you have cheaper access to abundant resources. And that’s anything from web design, to creative to launching rockets to doing whatever you need. And it’s an incredible competitive advantage when you realize I think that you can almost run the whole structure from the Philippines. And go five steps ahead of your competition. And it takes kind of a couple of years of outsourcing to grasp that or I think you can speed that up. If you just come over here and have a look. Yeah,

Jethro Marks: Absolutely. I think we started with a view that this was going to be an outsourced function, I think very quickly, we changed our entire approach and said, this is no longer an outsourced function. This is simply one of our offices that happens to be in another country. We started with three people. And I think we scaled that to about 25 in under a year, it was just a once we got a sense of comfort. And it came very quickly, I think within about three months, once we got a sense of comfort, and we decided this was going to work, it was just about doubling down and tripling down on their investment and making sure that we got it right.

To that end, making sure that the culture of the operation there was consistent with the culture that we were running in Australia, we’d run a separate office before where we hadn’t done enough work on that regard. And we treated its officers being somewhat separate to us. And this time around, we changed it around. And we said from day one, they will be a part of our company and they will be it will be absolutely first and foremost in their minds that they are employees of ours even if they’re employed by an outsourcer and that was instrumental I think in making this a successful venture because it just means that it even permeates the language of our staff here in Australia, where they don’t think of it as just being some other company who’s doing something for us.

It’s not a service provider, it’s our people who are doing stuff. And if they do things, well, then we will celebrate if it’s not being done well, and we all work to try and to assist and fix whatever the problems are. But it’s not we can talk about the full journey we’ve gone to try and achieve the outcome. But I think there was a design decision on day one, once we made that call to make sure that was the approach that we took, and we never wanted the staff to feel like they were just an outsourced provider. We wanted them from day one to think they’re our company, they just happen to have a different company paying their signing the checks.

Derek Gallimore: Yeah, I think there’s a there’s a high correlation with success. And that mindset shift isn’t there. Because on that if you look at it as a spectrum, the worst end of outsourcing is that the employers just kind of don’t even realize that there’s a person behind the computer screen. And they’re just engaging with the computer screen, setting deliverables and having them delivered and it’s not, it’s the low end of functionality and output in terms of outsourcing, the high end is when you reach this almost altruistic state of really just running an operation as your employees.

It’s so simple to say that they’re just your employees, but sitting in a different destination. And then you see the opportunities open in front of you. But again, I think it’s hard for people that haven’t necessarily done it to grasp that if you’re sitting in your office, if they’re in a different country, they, when they’re home, they speak a different language, how are they part of our team, that’s a sort of them and us thing, isn’t it? But once you work with them, you realize, they’re people, they all have their careers or in career aspirations their families and they want to be a part of a company in culture and enjoy the days of work. And it’s no more complex than that isn’t?

Jethro Marks: Absolutely, I think that when when we look at it, if I believe that our team in the Philippines is a much stronger brand, and champions of our brand, and the culture and the values and they but they’re there, they’re much they’ve embraced it to even to a higher degree than our Australian team have. Not that our Australian team isn’t, it’s just it’s not, it doesn’t form a part of the daily vernacular. And there’s a lot more usage of the brand. And then the logo and the just generally a lot more of the emblems and the symbols within the Philippine office, and they’ve live and breathe. So they’re part of their brand.

I think that’s amazing because this is a team that doesn’t even though it’s an Australian company, that services, and Australian audience, and here’s a group of people far away who are, who are living and breathing that from morning to night. And it’s, it’s quite awesome to see and to feel because they’ve, they’ve embraced it. And to your point, they’re all well-motivated individuals, they’re all educated. They see this is a conscious decision for them to come and work with us. And some of the tenures of those staff we’ve had with some of the staff have been with us since day one. And we do think there’s something quite special and quite important about them. And it’s part of the competitive edge that we hope to get them to keep is to maintain the culture and be able to do it internationally.

Derek Gallimore: You’ve been outsourcing now for five, six years. And I preach to people that it really can be an absolute game-changer, it can transform your business. And it’s not as hard as you think, the only real obstacle is just getting started and iterating from there. But  I’m sure you can attest that it’s not all a holiday, it’s not all easy sailing, and it’s not plain sailing. There’s a lot of hurdles between starting and finishing. If you ever do finish, can you give us some insight into your journey over the last five or six years what you’ve changed, what you’ve learned, what you’ve iterated?

Jethro Marks: Yeah, so the most, I think the biggest challenge that we faced on day one was that at the time that we moved up to the Philippines, there was very little documented process within our business, we had processes, but for the most part, employees were taught largely to through socialization, and through our law by being around other members of the team, as to how things got done, which, which in itself was not a good outcome. We didn’t, I don’t think we put enough thought into it at the time.

What we discovered by transplanting into the Philippines was that we couldn’t do that at all, even though we put staff from New Zealand into the Philippines, it just wasn’t enough to have individuals trying to teach new team members regularly. And one of the biggest benefits that we got even though it created the most amount of work for us was the requirement to then document all of our processes from start to finish. And at that point, we were probably 10 years into the business. So there was a lot of specific ways of doing things that we just had never sat down documented sufficiently and kept a, a proper log-off. So it required us to do a full audit of all those processes and then to document them.

Interestingly, I think we came out a much better company as a consequence of that, just because we were required to document what we were doing. With that, once we had that in place, we were in a much better position to set expectations and operate, the teams that we had set up the one thing that the Philippines does slightly differently to the way things would be done here is that there is just a much more, much more stringent approach to process. Everything needs to be documented and run according to the process.

Importance of business process mapping

Derek Gallimore: If you go an extension to process mapping, then how does that extend into the organization and the kind of mapping of people’s roles and the general maturation of the company?

Jethro Marks: Yeah, so I guess once we completed the process mapping within the business, the next step was to try and get much stronger job definitions and KPIs around individuals, individuals roles, we had a very loose structure before going into the Philippines and once we went in, we were able to over the period of time period is develop a much more stringent structure that was a long lines, what what would be called lines of business or departments will just areas, actual functional outcomes.

It was what we have found as and this has been an ongoing discovery will it certainly wasn’t on day one is that as we have become much more defined in the outcomes of a particular task, or a particular role. The outcomes have always been substantially better. One of the things that we were notoriously bad at and until very recently is about giving people too many different tasks and too many different jobs. And the upshot, the upshot of this ongoing process of creating much more delineated roles has been that we were able to strip back a lot of those superfluous parts of people’s jobs and just get them to focus in on whatever it is that we want them to focus in on.

I think, again, by being in the Philippines, this is been an absolute requirement because this is how the industry is structured, how the organizations are structured and how people expect to work. And so it’s made us a much better company, I think, as we’ve been able to kind of focus in on specific outcomes that we’re looking for task people accordingly, and then both monitor and reward accordingly to that as well.

Derek Gallimore: And where’s the balance there with a very fast-changing, let’s say high growth business within a fast-changing sector, where’s the balance there, and the sort of the risk of investing a lot into building processes that then have to be scrapped or rebuilt in three to 12 months.

Jethro Marks: So I think the, I think, where it makes it easier. I know that sounds a bit counterintuitive, but I’ll explain it a bit further. Because we’ve got more documentation and more structure and more understanding of the consistent outcomes that we’re seeking across the business. And when they were requirement, whenever there’s a requirement to make a change, yet a minor alteration or whether it be a total one 180 on whatever we were doing before, there is a process in place with the infrastructure around it, to be able to take people on the journey of moving from whatever they were doing to wherever we need to take them.

It’s not there’s no real requirement for very stringent change management, we just say, guys, yesterday, we were doing this way, moving forward it will be this, here’s the documentation to support it, we’re going to run some training. And here the people are going to be helping you along the way and then move forward. This is the way we’re going to go forward. Once you’ve kind of got into the mindset, once we’ve gone into the mindset of doing that, and having the right people in place to assist us to make that happen regularly. It gives us a lot more flexibility. Because in a situation where we didn’t have documented processes, and we wanted to make a change, it could be done quickly.

But you wouldn’t necessarily get the consistency that you were looking for. It took a long time to bid in. And people tend to sort of err back to the original process a way of doing things instead of transforming to the new way. Now, there’s a problem, there’s an actual process for changing process. So it’s just it’s it sounds, it sounds like a verbose way of doing things. But I think it’s much easier. And it’s one of these things that if the routines are set correctly, and people can be there’s a way of being able to alter them there. It gives us a lot more flexibility to do things as when required. Rather than being tied in to any one particular way of doing things that is then a huge hassle to change. And people don’t always we don’t always get 100% buy in to make those changes.

Derek Gallimore: Yeah, absolutely. And what are some of the upsides to outsourcing then, we all sort of wax lyrically about the kind of moonshots that we can do when we have access to more abundant resource, what are some of the things if they’re not confidential or secret that you have managed to do within your business that you don’t think would have been achievable back in Australasia?

Jethro Marks: So one of the biggest bottlenecks we have in the businesses, we just never have enough IT resource to be able to do all the things we want to do. And so there is a level of prioritization and we need to put towards projects to be able to get that done. And what we’ve found by having the ability to be able to tap resource as and when required. Certainly with more specialised skills, or just the ability to put on people to do a specific job that would otherwise be financially unfeasible in Australia is we can get people doing a job which ultimately one day will be automated, once our IT team can get around to it or can be moved on to it allows us to be able to build processes or build functions, get them done on a regular basis, assess the viability as to whether we want them done.

Trial test, improve, document and get it to a point where it can officially be handed over to a developer who can then basically take the template that says this is exactly how the process is done, and then code it up. And it’s we’ve done it universally a few times to the point where I almost feel that that is the way forward where instead of devoting IT resource upfront to doing any automation, we would first get people doing it, our teams in Manila, just to be able to prove whether it is actually something we want to be doing ongoing. Because the whole test and learn process is a lot cheaper if we can just be if we can get people doing it. Rather than having to devote the limited amount of IT resources, we’ve got to being able to code and then having to encode and decode and iteration, alternate ways that could be moving on to a bunch of other stuff in that period.

Outsourcing MVP

Derek Gallimore: It’s fascinating isn’t it, it’s that MVP approach isn’t it just kind of testing the pathway before you build it out?

Jethro Marks: Absolutely. And we initially, it was, it wasn’t we didn’t set out to do it this way. But we’ve just found, well hang on a sec, we’ve got this thing, could we give him the right IT resources to do it, let’s just give it to a couple of guys here, let’s pull the process around to build the team around. And then we find in day one, we have to lean in some typical MVP, this is not what you want. It’s just what we put out. And we iterate and iterate until eventually, we get to a point where the function can be handed over.

What is also done is bring down the development costs of our IT team, because, by the time they get given that work to be done, it’s already been well battle-tested and is ready to go. So there’s no there’s not a lot of creative thinking required to try and figure out problems. We assess the problems we’ve dealt with them. We found solutions and now we’re onto implementation.

Derek Gallimore: Fantastic, and what are some of the hardest things you’ve found to bring over to outsourcing? If you’re dealing with plumbers, you can’t get your outsourced staff to go be the plumbers. But what are some of the stickier or things that that there’s more friction to outsourcing that you found?

Jethro Marks: Despite the fact that we have the cultural alignment, and despite the fact we have a lot of communication, I think the one bit that we still haven’t quite figured out is how to bridge the gap, the tyranny of distance where if I have two people in a room sitting next to each other in two rooms amongst each other, they can have infinite number of very short conversations face to face. And so identify and solve problems a lot faster. We just haven’t figured out a way to make that work as efficiently from between the different offices.

I don’t think that’s a specifically an outsourcing problem. It could be just that anytime a distance problem, but from our perspective, the bonds that people develop seem to develop within our teams, once they’re sitting alongside each other just seems to be that much stronger, that much faster. I think especially in the Philippines, one of the things that startle us is a quite a big cultural difference is the social aspect where people often go to work to be amongst their friends or their colleagues who they considered to be their friends. And that can almost be the main priority for why they’ve got a particular job, or they take a particular job.

Whereas in the West, certainly the career first and then if you happen to be working-class people, that’s a nice thing. But that wouldn’t be the reason that you would stay out or leave a job generally. And so I feel like to remove that component almost takes away one of the biggest drawcards to bringing in the best staff. We took the view that we went to the Philippines, and as a result of that, we were able to drop our costs quite substantially. So while we’re there, we’re going to have nice offices in the nice area, and just try and look after people as best as we can. Because the incremental additional cost of doing that is pretty marginal, but the benefit that we get is enormous, versus the benefit that we get just by being in the Philippines in the first place.

Derek Gallimore: Yeah, absolutely. That’s a very good point, isn’t it? It’s the savings are already so big, that you don’t really want to kind of saving every penny, you can, when you’re already saving 70% it’s better to go kind of mid-scale, provide good facilities, get good candidates, good employees provide a good environment where there’s a great culture, and they can really sort of bat for your company. And, and then that’s the sweet spot in terms of cost and productivity and results, I think, isn’t it?

Jethro Marks: Absolutely. Yeah. I, I, again, maybe it’s a philosophical issue, but I hundred percent believe it’s like, it’s just it’s proven itself time and time again.

Derek Gallimore: Absolutely. Jethro, it’s been amazing. And thank you so much. And, of course, if anyone’s going to check out your company, it is the nile.com.au is that right? So thank you so much for being on board with us today. And I want to get you back again. So we can talk more broadly about outsourcing. So I look forward to that conversation.

Jethro Marks: Likewise, thank you so much for having me on.

Derek Gallimore: Okay, that was Jethro Marks of the nile.com.au if you want to get in touch with Jethro or know anything about this episode, go to outsourceaccelerator.com/251 and as always, if you want to ask us anything, then just drop us an email to [email protected]

Listen to more podcast episodes here:

  1. Jethro Marks – Taking advantage of a single globalised workforce
  2. Joeri Timp – Outsourcing success for SMEs
  3. John Cannavo – Visiting the Philippines for the first time

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About OA

Outsource Accelerator is the trusted source of independent information, advisory and expert implementation of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO).

The #1 outsourcing authority

Outsource Accelerator offers the world’s leading aggregator marketplace for outsourcing. It specifically provides the conduit between world-leading outsourcing suppliers and the businesses – clients – across the globe.

The Outsource Accelerator website has over 5,000 articles, 450+ podcast episodes, and a comprehensive directory with 3,900+ BPO companies… all designed to make it easier for clients to learn about – and engage with – outsourcing.

About Derek Gallimore

Derek Gallimore has been in business for 20 years, outsourcing for over eight years, and has been living in Manila (the heart of global outsourcing) since 2014. Derek is the founder and CEO of Outsource Accelerator, and is regarded as a leading expert on all things outsourcing.

“Excellent service for outsourcing advice and expertise for my business.”

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