Converting Philippines Office into Clear Cafe Internet Cyber Cafe!

Tonight had a rather long meeting with my Philippines accountant and Marie about converting the startup office into an internet cyber cafe “CyberCafe.com Inc”.

For the most of 2010 I have been “dabbling” with doing business in the Philippines…..having home based workers, leasing a small startup office, training programs, interviews at Philippines government centers, and running a quick twitter social media meetup…..just took about a year to figure it out.

I have been investing a lot of time and money here – training, hiring, buying computers. LEARNING, submerging into the culture. Learning about the people, the way people work. Transportation center, locations.

There are a lot of online online work from home platforms, many talk about odesk.com , where workers can work remotely for American or western online businesses, and never have to meet the employer face to face. I have tried these platforms, freelance systems….but just haven’t been so successful. I just don’t feel anything real. Sure I’m a fan of the internet….but still think there needs to be a human touch to the workforce system.

Clear cafe will be a hybrid of pure online work from home platforms and a full serviced outsourced office. This way we can physically meet the new workers, even if they will work from home, we will know where their workstation is, have a form they filled out, and can drop in to check on them at different times. Pretty excited about this, and think its the best decision to move forward effectively in the Philippines.