Kevin Thompson.
032 Outsourcing (the name is a reference to the phone code for the Philippine province of Cebu) assigns its customers a “publishing virtual assistant superstar,” according to the needs of the media company. All compensation, benefits, and labor-related issues are handled by 032 Outsourcing, but otherwise, the virtual assistant acts like any other employee. Day-to-day communication, instructions, job scope, and any other topics related to the role come from the publishers, and 032 Outsourcing remins accessible to assist in supervision and any other needs. We ran into the team from 032 Outsourcing at a recent conference, and immediately wanted to follow-up to learn more—and share our conversation with you. We spoke to Co-Founder Kevin Thompson, who was based in the Philippines until recently. Here a transcript of the interview.
Fox Tales: Describe the scope of the demand in the magazine/media space for outsourced services?
Kevin Thompson: Overall workforce, experience, and expertise are in high demand. As you know with Fox, experienced, accomplished salespeople are always highly sought after by media companies. Similarly, as media companies become more multi-channel content distributors, capable individuals are needed to either fulfill the expanded workloads and business processes or relieve core team members of day-to-day tasks, allowing them to step into gaps that technology cannot fill.
Fox Tales: Of the services you offer, which are the ones most sought by your clients? Why would that be? Which are second, third, and so on?
Thompson: These and more.
- Page Make-Up: This can range from complete cover-to-cover design and layout of publications to handling overflow work, such as laying out a single article, ad design, special publications, or relieving an overloaded in-house designer when needed.
- Virtual Assistant Services: These services cover a number of functions specific to a publisher or media company. What sets us apart is that we hire, train, and deploy our team to publishers. The training provides a primer coat of general publishing business processes, which helps our team better understand the context when deployed to work with the client and trained on subject-specific information, processes, and workflows. Functions include production assistance, project coordination, content management, digital advertising, sales support, finance, and administrative tasks.
- Audience Development: We work with audited publications to handle re-qualification and acquisition efforts.
Fox Tales: Of all the places for offshore outsource services, such as India, Jamaica, etc., why did you select the Philippines?
Thompson: It’s kind of a funny story. While working for a publisher earlier in our careers, [Co-Founder] Mike Obert, as VP of sales and customer service, was tasked with launching an office in the Philippines. Mike presented me with an opportunity to move to the Philippines and manage an ad sales team, as well as assist with customer service and other teams. The plan was for me to spend one year overseas and then return home to manage remotely, 12 years later I finally moved back home to the U.S.!
We immediately fell in love with the culture and noticed the availability of a wide range of skill sets and capabilities. After seeing all the Fortune 500 companies throughout the country utilizing offshore opportunities, we wanted to bring the same opportunity to media companies and introduce a way to get more done and scale without requiring a massive in-house team, all the while we’re creating job opportunities in an area of need.
Fox Tales: What are the next-gen areas of need for outsource services by media companies?
Thompson: The easy answer is AI, which seems to be the answer for everything right now. In all seriousness, there is an opportunity to achieve efficiencies through the power of AI, which may still require human intervention to run or QC. These are great areas to outsource.
Technology in general is another! It is expensive to build, grow, and manage technology stacks and teams, yet it’s becoming essential to remain competitive.
Anything you don’t like doing or aren’t good at—large global companies have been leveraging offshore outsourcing for years, and the same results can be achieved by media companies. The growth of available business services is tremendous. Outsourcing functions like bookkeeping, HR, production, and other essential business services creates the opportunity for media companies and publishers to focus on what they do best: creating quality content and growing audiences.
Fox Tales: What’s the profile of your typical media-company customer?
Thompson: We have quite a range. We work with larger B2B multi-title media companies as well as single-title, solo publishers. Most of our publishers, whether B2B or B2C, are niche or regional, with the majority producing 3-5 titles.
Fox Tales: Tell us how 032 might complement Fox Associates’ work and vice versa.
Thompson: Sales support! We can take tedious details off a salesperson’s plate, such as proposals, scheduling, follow-up, ad trafficking, etc., allowing more time for actual sales situations.
Also, publishers that work with Fox may have other workforce needs beyond the sales scope that we could fulfill, in turn creating new revenue opportunities for Fox.