What we saw back home

We grew up alongside people who went on to become engineers, accountants, architects. Smart, driven people. The kind you’d want on any team. But the reality after school wasn’t what any of us expected.

You spend years working toward finishing university, and when it’s time to get a job, the reality that you’re just getting started hits you like a brick wall. For a lot of people, the opportunities aren’t there, or if they are, the pay doesn’t match the hard work and money that was put into becoming qualified.

People we knew — educated, capable people — ended up burning out in careers where the pay just didn’t match the work. So they took call centre jobs. Not because it was fulfilling, but because it paid better. Others left the country entirely to start over somewhere else. But that usually means leaving your family behind to provide them with a better life than the one you knew.

We’ve stood at NAIA and watched parents say goodbye to their kids, not knowing when they’d be back.

What we saw in Australia

Over the past 7 years we’ve been in Australia, we’ve worked with small and medium businesses across retail, construction, logistics. Some were the kind run by a few people doing everything themselves.

We saw what that looks like up close. You’d watch your boss stress out chasing invoices from clients to make payroll on time.

We watched businesses choose between paying themselves, their suppliers, or their staff. We watched these businesses make hard choices. Every option had a cost, and none of them felt good.

The reasoning usually goes: hiring staff is expensive. Losing them is expensive. If you hire a recruiter or an agency, that costs money too. And if the person leaves after a few months for slightly better pay because the role was a stepping stone, you barely break even on the money you invested into hiring, training, and onboarding them.

This isn’t every business in Australia. There are plenty that thrive. But the reality is, a lot of small businesses get stuck because they need people to grow — but can’t afford to hire the people who would help them grow. Not yet, anyway. That’s when we understood the true value of the BPO industry we’d grown up around but never paid much attention to.

Why we built Noventralink

It gets a bad rap. We hear it all the time. It’s bad for the economy. It takes jobs away locally. Businesses only do it as a selfish cost-cutting move to replace local staff with cheap offshore hires, then bring it back onshore when things go wrong and leave the re-hired local team scrambling to fix the mess.

But the truth is, while it absolutely can go wrong, and it does, for a lot of reasons — offshore staffing is a lever businesses can pull when they need a lifeline. When they can’t find the talent they need here. When they’re stuck and need help to get unstuck.

It used to only be available to large enterprise companies who could afford to set up offices overseas and deal with all the red tape. But times have changed. Technology made remote work not just possible but practical. What was once only accessible to multinationals with local staff sent overseas to supervise can now be accessed by the small and medium businesses who need support to grow.

We saw this. We saw both sides — the Filipino professionals who deserve better opportunities, and the Australian businesses who deserve better support. And we saw the gap between what it could be and where it currently was.

There are companies doing it well, but there’s room for more who will. So we built Noventralink to actually do right by the people on both sides.