DECEMBER 4, 2024

Today I am excited to announce that one of my companies, very near and dear to my heart, has officially been acquired. 

I will tell you all about the buyer in a moment and why I am so excited about this deal (for YOU), but before that, here’s a little background. 

The company I have just sold is “Virtual Staff Finder”, a business I established way back in 2010, almost 15 years ago. At the time I was living in the Philippines, where I set up a call center business and it quickly grew to more than 400 staff. 

Along that journey I had dozens of friends from the UK, US and Australia reach out to me to help them hire other types of roles in the Philippines.

At the time, the term ‘Virtual Assistant’ had just taken off and with the proliferation of cloud software and social media, people were starting to see the benefits of having a portion of their staff in a lower-cost environment. 

Essentially, for the first time, a very small business could have 5 or even 10 offshore staff helping them grow, whereas in the past they could afford only 1 or 2 onshore. With my local knowledge and the support of my amazing wife Erz, we put together a superstar recruitment team and within days, we began helping people to hire staff.

Fast-forward to today and we have now hired over 8,000 people for entrepreneurs in 45 countries, including for names like; Jeff Walker, Michael Hyatt, Chalene Johnson, Pat Flynn, John Lee Dumas, Lewis Howes, Amy Porterfield, Nathan Chan and Gideon Shalwick to name a few.

Another entrepreneur we first hired for way back in 2011 was Dale Beaumont. At the time, Dale was building his company Business Blueprint, which has today become one of the largest and most successful business education companies worldwide. 

After helping him hire his initial team, I then became what Dale calls the “V.A. O.G.” and spent the next 7 years educating his clients on the value of building teams in the Philippines. 

One of those clients was Kody Thompson. Kody read my book, Virtual Freedom cover to cover and then went onto build a wildly successful business which was powered by an amazing team of 65 staff in the Philippines. 

While I loved what we achieved over the time with recruitment, over 75% of the clients we hired for asked if they could have their newly hired team member work from an office. I won’t go into details now, but suffice to say, anyone who has hired staff in the Philippines knows there are typically a lot of challenges with staff that work from home. 

So in 2014 I set up the first co-working space in Cebu and it worked great. However, 3 years later, Erz and I made the decision to move our family back to the UK, so I needed to shut down that side of things.

Now, to the question you are asking, who bought “Virtual Staff Finder”?

Well in 2019, Kody and Dale (mentioned above) established a business called WrkPod, which not only helps you recruit and hire amazing staff in the Philippines, but they also give your staff a beautiful place to work and a space that you can scale.

Not only do I know and admire their business acumen and personal values, but I have seen their office set up and it’s brilliant. Right now they have over 800 staff working in their facilities and WrkPod is on track to have 1,000 staff by the end of this year.

Realizing this is exactly what my clients need, I reached out to Kody and Dale, and we began chatting. During the process it became clear I still had a deep passion for helping people build teams in the Philippines. I love the country SO much. It gave me my wife, my children and a major part of my business success. 

So we decided, why not join forces? And after a number of chats here we are!

Not only has “Virtual Staff Finder” been acquired, but I have decided to convert the value of that acquisition into shares and become a co-owner of WrkPod.com, which is something I am thrilled about. 

Kody and Dale will be running the day-to-day with their amazing team and I will be coming on board in the role of ‘Chief Evangelist’ to help the business grow even more in the UK and the US. What sold me was WrkPod’s vision to create 10,000 jobs in the Philippines. You know the saying about teaching a person to fish, right? Or that a job is the best form of charity??

Clearly we have a lot to do to achieve this goal, but for now, I am so proud of this decision and finding the new path for “Virtual Staff Finder”.

I want to say ‘thank you’ to all the people that ever hired staff through our company. If you are one of those people, let me know by commenting, I would love to hear from you.

To my staff, thank you for all you have done! And I am delighted that our journey will continue so we can create even more jobs in the Philippines.

As you can now see, I’m delighted to say this is not the end, but rather the start of an incredible new chapter. And if you are a business owner that needs to hire staff in the Philippines, please drop me a comment, or send me a DM.

I truly believe, by joining forces, we now have the best team, the best offshore staff offering anywhere, and the most scalable solution for businesses that want to grow – fast. 

Welcome to the new era, welcome to WrkPod! More updates to follow 🙂