Transcript

How Global Teams Scale Fast and Filipino Talent is the Best | Nicolas Bivero: Build Offshore Talent

From Founder's Story · Episode page · Watch on YouTube

· 21 min · 4,285 words · 41 timestamped sections

This is the full, timestamped transcript of "How Global Teams Scale Fast and Filipino Talent is the Best | Nicolas Bivero: Build Offshore Talent", an episode of Founder's Story published December 9, 2025 (21 min, about 4,285 words). It mentions 8 people, works and ideas, including Human resources (HR), Pen Brothers, Cultural differences (cross-cultural communication), Aikido, Co-working space.

What this episode is about

The discussion centers on the evolving landscape of outsourcing, highlighting how companies can achieve significant success with minimal full-time staff by leveraging global talent, particularly from the Philippines. Key points include the importance of quality over merely filling positions with "warm bodies" and the necessity of thoroughly assessing needs before sourcing talent to ensure effective team building and business scalability.

Key takeaways

  • Success isn't headcount but the right talent: even billion-dollar firms thrive with just 40 employees.
  • Outsourcing's Achilles' heel: quality, not quantity, must drive successful team building.
  • Think global, act local: worldwide talent pool ensures skills fit like a bespoke suit.
  • Warm bodies fail: clear expectations shatter geographical barriers in outsourced roles.
  • Cultural literacy cuts through global divides, making remote hires truly at home in your company.

Who speaks in this episode?

What is discussed, and when

  1. – 5:00: Pen Brothers
  2. – 20:00: Co-working space, Pen Brothers
  3. – 21:18: Nicholas Bavo, Pen Brothers

Notable quotes from "How Global Teams Scale Fast and Filipino Talent is the Best | Nicolas Bivero: Build Offshore Talent"

  • When you started pen brothers what were some of the mistakes that you saw companies were making when they thought about outsourcing I think outsourcing offshoring doesn't.
    about Pen Brothers · at
  • Had at the beginning and we started in 2014 with scaling is at that time there was almost no co-working space and all our clients or the majority of our clients wanted people…
    about Co-working space · at
  • Enormous change in a whole generation of wealth which is incredible. But u thank you Nicholas Bavo Pen Brothers man what you've been able to do is incredible.
    about Nicholas Bavo · at

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

Books & papers

Companies & orgs

Concepts & topics

Full transcript with timestamps

And there's something really interesting that's going on where the badge of success for a company was, how many people can I get? And we're seeing these companies now where they're outsourcing a lot of the talent and they're making billion-dollar companies with like 40 full-time people. At the end of the day, you still need the manpower to deliver your service. Now, the question is, how do you source that manpower? How do you build those teams? You can really build teams globally, remotely, and really go where the right talent is for whatever position you're trying to fill. You can still build those teams, but you built them across the globe.

What were some of the mistakes that you saw companies were making when they thought about outsourcing?

I think outsourcing offshoring doesn't work when you look at it only like I need a warm body and you're not really looking for quality. You're just looking for that warm body. Then more often than not, we have seen that it doesn't work. it's not really delivering what you're looking for because you never sat down and assessed what is it actually that I want that person to deliver. But if you actually turn this around and say like let me f first figure out what I need and what this person is supposed to do and then fill that position with a good person then more likely than not it will be successful.

Yeah. So Nicholas really great to have you. Outsourcing has been something that has completely changed and revamped my entire company

and many people that I know it it's been the absolute game changer for them. And there's something really interesting that's going on where it used to be the badge of success for a company was how many people can I get? Like I want to make a billion dollar company that means I need to have 10,000 employees, right? And we're seeing these companies now where they're outsourcing a lot of the talent and they're making billion-dollar companies with like 40 full-time people. What do how do you see this this all being transformed in a world where we are so global?

Well, first of all, thank you for having me and I think that's a very interesting question. At the end of the day, it's still I guess when you look at the what you just said about the example you just gave, the success for those companies is still the same. you still need the manpower or to some degree the manpower to deliver your service. Now the question is how do you source that manpower? How do you build those teams like globally and so if before you had to hire a ton of people wherever you were because you had a factory or you had a service office or whatever now and specifically of the co you can really build teams globally remotely and really go where the right talent is for whatever position you're trying to fill.

But I think if I understood you correctly, the success of those companies is still based on the fact that they need to build those teams. Maybe not at the 10,000 people scale, maybe at a smaller scale, but you still need tallet. And so then that's where outsourcing offshoring like this type of service comes in because you can find let's say you need in your case really good people for your for your web agency for your marketing agency whatever it is you can find them in the Philippines or you can find maybe somebody really good who speaks Spanish in Colombia or you can find somebody who can cover certain time zones who's also very good in South Africa for example. So now you can still build those teams, but you build them across the globe, you know, and that allows you to find better talent, fill the positions with people that have the right skill set or work in the right time zone or also have the right cost

profile that you need to make your company successful. So I think it it opens the door to be much more creative when it comes to building those teams. when you started pen brothers what were some of the mistakes that you saw companies were making when they thought about outsourcing

I think outsourcing offshoring doesn't work when you look or is difficult to make it work when you look at it only like I need a warm body you know I just need somebody to throw at this problem at this whatever it is at the floods of emails I'm getting or customer complaints or customer increase whatever it is that you're looking for or um accounts payables like doing if it's just a warm body but you don't really know what to do with that body and you're not really looking for quality. You're just looking for that warm body.

Then more often than not, we have seen that it doesn't work or it gets frustrating very quickly because then yes, you have somebody on remotely let's say sitting in the Philippines but it's not really delivering what you're looking for because you never sat down and assessed what is it actually that I want that person to deliver. But if you actually turn this around and say like, let me first first figure out what I need and what this person is supposed to do and then fill that position with a good person regardless of where in the world then more likely than not it will be successful because then you you also find the right person for those tasks that you're trying to get done.

Yeah, you bring up a good point too and I think what I've seen where my friends go wrong is they hire somebody like you said kind of the warm body They also don't really know how like the questions to ask like there are cultural differences in people all around the world and if you've never I think experienced going to that place the people there I mean it's one thing having friends or knowing people but it's hiring somebody and then having them fit into your organization. So after what do you do to ensure that people are successful after the hire?

Good question. So in our case we actually spend a lot of time working with our prospect clients and clients before the hire to actually set them up to make this more successful from being the partner in the Philippines to really help them identify what is it that you're really looking for. What are the must-haves, the nice to have, the cultural things that you also need in that particular talent so that it fits your team? Because if you don't if you don't look at that and you just pluck somebody like a warm body again and put it in there, it might actually be technically speaking a great talent, but it might not fit your team from a culture perspective, from a from a personality perspective. So that's part of it. Then once you onboard the person and let's say the person gets hired and you onboard the person, then you still need to help bridge that gap a little bit. specifically it's if it's

the first time the the the company's doing this having a remote person in the Philippines in particular um because yes as you said the culture in the Philippines is not the same as the culture in the US or in Australia or anywhere in other countries. So then once you bring that person in you still need to help bridge that gap um help get a little bit better understanding of certain culturally ways how Filipinos work, how Filipinos communicate and vice versa. You also need to help the Filipino talent. If for that person is the first time working with a foreign company or a foreign team for you also need to try to help them to understand how do you work with let's say an American or how do you work with an Australian or whatn not. So it's briding that gap that becomes very important. I mean we call it hyperare. I think that's where you're going with this. But it's a it's it's called hyperare in the sense that we're trying

to take care of both the client and the talent and bridge that gap as much as possible. Now that said, it doesn't always work. I mean, we're still talking about human resources. Any organization when you hire 10 people, it's likely that maybe one or two won't won't be the right fit. Even if HR did the best job, you did the best job interviewing, humans don't always work out. So, that's I think why people so excited about AI for a lot of other things.

It's one of the reasons why I never started in a company of offshoring. People ask me before and I'm like, I don't want to be in the business of HR personally. know it's a great business and and I think it's incredible to help not only the companies but also helping you know people all around the world uh make money and prosper I think is amazing but is definitely has its intricacies. You you said something that really stuck with me in my corporate experience the biggest downfall I felt that they would do is they never put people in the right place. It's almost reminded me of strength finders if you ever read that book. It's like if somebody's not doing well in a job, they performance improve them out. They try to get them fired even though maybe they'll be doing great if they were in a different position.

So, I've always always had that in the back of my head like, is this person not doing the job because they're not a good employee or not a right fit for the company or is it that they're not a right fit for the role? So, how do you see that when it comes to just leadership in general? How do you recognize that if somebody is good still for the company but maybe just needs to move to a different position?

Yeah, that's an excellent question. I think that's that's the real tricky part of HR and organizations. Um, how do you deal with those circumstances? Sometimes I think there is no cleancut answer to that. In my opinion, in my experience, it really comes down to the situation itself. You might have situations where you can experiment. You can actually move a person from one team to another team. Thinking that okay, maybe this person is a better fit over here um with the environment or the team or even the boss can make a big difference. But I think also sometimes you don't have the luxury of time to do those experiments and play around. So I think there you need to be more I guess conscious of what priorities do you have, how much freedom you have, how much time you have. that that applies to my own company, but I guess also to my clients.

Um, and sometimes you might have just to bite the bullet and say like, listen, maybe this person would work somewhere else, but I don't have the freedom or I don't have the time to try it out, so let's replace. And other times you can actually try it and you can move people around and see how it goes. So, it's it's it that's really tricky because it's not a clearcut situation.

There's a saying in the starter world, higher slow, fire fast. I'm not saying it's the right thing to do. I'm just saying like it's definitely something I think it's kind of been a a phrase that's been slowing down, but I remember many years ago I had so many mentors, bosses were like stick to this phrase, right? I don't know if it's probably not even a good thing. Let's go back to your your story, though. I know you've had the incredible opportunity to live in different places around the world,

which I think is the most amazing thing that anyone could do is travel around the world if they can. Uh, how did you get to here in the Philippines, which by the way, we're we're filming now in the Philippines, which I think is amazing, but how did you get here?

Oh, that's a long story. So, after university, I had the opportunity of spending about 6 months in Japan to do martial arts. Um, I had been doing martial arts on and off since I was 6 years old. Um, had been already one time over the summer during my studies in Japan. Um, and truly enjoyed it. Fell in love with the country and with the people. So I got this kind of like what do you call this like a sbatical opportunity after finishing my master degree went to Japan spent six months there learned some Japanese thinking that it was much better than it really was but at least I thought I could now understand a little bit of what was happening around me um and then decided to do an internship at a try to get an internship. I got lucky to be very honest. Uh I was very fortunate to get the opportunity to be hired as an intern by a Japanese company. Um, it was a amazing and also very scary experience.

Scary in the sense that I was the only foreigner in a big medium-sized Japanese company. Um, I the beginning, the first two weeks is literally what you said, like I was a warm body. They needed somebody who speaks English, but they really didn't know what to do with me. So, they hired me, they put me there. My boss wasn't there. He was on a business trip. So, the for the first week I was just sitting there um and going for lunch with them and then sitting back on the table and doing nothing. Um but over time it became a really great experience and that work with a Japanese company and business development for them in Southeast Asia including the Philippines brought me to the Philippines for the first time in 2005. Um and had a great ex great great first trip here, great experience. Uh we built some really interesting really fascinating fast growing companies and for me that was a exposure also to the Philippine culture

and to the Filipinos. So we were building joint ventures in the Philippines at that time and for each of those joint ventures we needed a Filipino team and that's where I realized how how great they are from a talent perspective but from a personal perspective from a team perspective. So that exposed me to to really working with them and building teams with them and and seeing firsthand with while I was working with them how good they are and and how diverse of a talent pool you actually have in the Philippines. I mean a lot of times unfortunately the Philippines has a little bit of a of a reputation of having certain type of titans. You know if you talk to I mean it's either seaf farers or cleaning ladies or nurses or nannies. Correct.

But there's it's a big economy. There's so much more. And so that working with the for the Japanese company with Filipino partner was very eye opening to me. And then in 2011 they actually asked me if I wanted to come over for two years. That was the original plan. So I volunteered. I came and I stayed. So So it's been 14 years here.

So you started this company. Uh you've in some categories you've grown to being one of the fastest growing companies here in the region which is amazing. I mean thousands of people are being helped every year. What is it to you that when you look back and say, "Wow, success to me means this."

For me in particular, I mean, I'm I'm half South American and half German, but um I grew up mainly in South America. And unfortunately the country where I am from and this applies to a lot of South American countries there's a lot of migration out of those countries um because there is just not enough jobs enough opportunities enough uh yeah options of things that you can do even if you have a good degree and so for me what is success particular with Benweather and here in the Philippines is really seeing how we can not just build teams for our clients but really create super interesting jobs for Filipinos without them actually having to leave the Philippines or having to leave the countryside nowadays after co I mean a lot of our people actually work remotely. Um to give you one simple example we've we create or not created we didn't create this job but we have a client German client who needed a

Germanspeaking accountant. Now, we didn't know if we could find somebody in the Philippines, but we gave it a try and lo and behold, we found a Filipina who is half German, grew up in the Philippines, speaks perfect in Germany, worked for one of the big consu uh accounting firms, but had started a family, was works in the country or lives in the countryside and was looking for an exciting job, but wasn't finding anything. So, now she works because of us or with us for a German startup, has a super exciting job, is really happy, the startup is happy, so everybody's happy. And these are this is what makes us happy like creating those sometimes unique opportunities that otherwise wouldn't exist or enabling Filipinos to have super interesting jobs where they can also learn and grow as per on a professional level on a personal level.

So that's what we see as success. Yeah, there's some amazing talent here. Amazing talent. like you said, they're they get put in a box sometimes internationally as certain things, but when you're here, you realize that they're I mean, they're super highly educated. I didn't even graduate college. It like 90% of the people I meet here graduated college, and it could be, you know, so I'm amazed by the talent. When you look back at scaling for your organization, what was a moment that really stuck out to you where it was maybe harder to scale than you thought or it's something that happened while you were scaling the company that you never even anticipated?

I think I would have to break this into like two. So one of the challenges we had at the beginning um and we started in 2014 with scaling is at that time there was almost no co-working space and all our clients or the majority of our clients wanted people in the office even though they were working remotely. So scaling at that time always came with the added complication that you needed to create a space and that's a surprisingly expensive um thing to do and can be very um how can I how can I call this? It can be very um it can slow you down. uh it can make things difficult. So that was the first challenge. Nowadays um I think space is still sometimes of a requirement, sometimes of a problem, but you can also hire a lot of people now remotely which is exciting. So it allows you to scale a little bit faster without that need for space. But then you have all the other challenges because now

you're working with a large group of people who work remotely around like nationwide. So how do you keep in touch with them? How do you make sure that they're taken care of, that they are um have the right work set up, that they that you actually know them, you know, that you you you can you meet them, you talk to them. So, that comes with other challenges that are not easy to to scale because you know, this this takes a lot of effort, people by itself, um systems and structure and processes. So, I think it's really learning how to do that. So, so skating has is never easy. Let me try to put it this way. But the challenges you have when you scale, they change over time and that you need to adjust to it and and do your best to overcome them, learn from them.

Sometimes we work with people on we have some some businesses here that require people in in very small provincial islands

and I never would have thought this if I had never been there around the power and internet. So we had to buy them Starlink because the internet was going out and like every time it would rain something would happen like there's small things that we never expected y that were like okay we never expected this but we need to put in this solution and this solution. So I could see if I had never been here I don't know if I would have continued because

I wouldn't have known like what to put in as a solution. So, I could see the importance of having some sort of partnership like Pen Brothers, you know, working with an organization that's here that knows everything versus like trying to find someone online and just hire them. So, just to finish out, if you were to give two tips to anyone who's like, "Okay, I need to I need to look at offshoring outsourcing. I really need to build my company and I need staff in the Philippines, for example." What are two tips that you would give that everyone should know? Well, I mean, rounding it out what we talked before, I mean, first really understand what are the road that what's the tasks that you really want to get done and what are the what does success for that task or for that staff look like so that you when you hire then somebody remotely be at the Philippines or anywhere else you are able to set

that person up for success instead of just a warm body that will be most likely frustrating because nobody really knows what that person is supposed to do. That's number one. Number two is, and now I'm obviously a little bit biased, find a good local partner because it's not easy. I mean, there's a lot of talent in the Philippines, but it's not easy to find the talent, to interview the talent, to like make sure the talent is properly set up. As you said, there's a lot of local idiosyncrasies that people don't think about because we don't have those problems in in Germany or in in United States. Be it internet comes out when it rains or typhoons, you know. I mean, yes, if you're in Florida, maybe you're a little bit aware of hurricanes and that you need to have some redundancies, but if you're not, you never crosses your mind. Um, that electricity might be spotty in some place and so on and so

forth, you know. So, all of those things can be overcome much easier and smoother when you have somebody can can help you locally to be

Well, I appreciate what you do. I appreciate what you do. I think it's amazing anyone that can provide more not only jobs but jobs that pay well enough where people here can I mean it changes their life like you're saying it's it's amazing how not a huge amount of money can completely not only change one person's life but their entire family it could change a whole generation they can put people through college they they can do a lot of things and then also means they don't have to go travel to certain countries to then work in in certain jobs so I think it it helps them better way of life. They can spend time with their family. It really changes when you when you see how the culture is and doing what you're doing could make an an enormous change in a whole generation of wealth which is incredible. But u thank you Nicholas Bavo Pen Brothers man what you've been able to do is incredible.

Thousands of employees helping thousands of companies around the world and and you're like the Steven Seagull of the 2000s.

No, I don't think so. I have been haven't been practicing for a long time. So, um I when I was younger I would have said I wish but maybe not anymore. Yeah, they got ship sailed

doing all that. They Well, you and I are going to have to do some iikido. Yeah, true. I haven't done it for quite a while now. It was like hurt a lot afterwards.

So, we'll be in a lot of pain because I've never even done it. But this has been great and thank you so so much for joining us today on Founder Story.

Yeah, thank you for having me.

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "How Global Teams Scale Fast and Filipino Talent is the Best | Nicolas Bivero: Build Offshore Talent"?

Nicolas Bivero (Guest), Unknown (Founder's Story Host) (Host).

What is "How Global Teams Scale Fast and Filipino Talent is the Best | Nicolas Bivero: Build Offshore Talent" about?

The discussion centers on the evolving landscape of outsourcing, highlighting how companies can achieve significant success with minimal full-time staff by leveraging global talent, particularly from the Philippines. Key points include the importance of quality over merely filling positions with "warm bodies" and the necessity of thoroughly assessing needs before sourcing talent to ensure…

What is mentioned in this Founder's Story episode?

8 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Human resources (HR), Pen Brothers, Cultural differences (cross-cultural communication), Aikido, Co-working space, Nicholas Bavo. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "How Global Teams Scale Fast and Filipino Talent is the Best | Nicolas Bivero: Build Offshore Talent"?

The episode runs 21 min; the transcript is about 4,285 words in 41 timestamped sections.

More from Founder's Story

About this transcript: the episode's spoken words as captioned on YouTube, split into timestamped sections. Reclip.Me locates every person, work and idea in the text, keeps the time it is first named, and quotes the words around it verbatim. Last updated January 24, 2026.