Luck vs. Strategy
Mark Cottle | Founder and CEO
June 27, 2025 • 2 min read“You are so lucky you don’t need foreign management in your business”, an expat acquaintance told me over lunch a few months ago.
I understand why she made the comment.
Her own business required a lot of hands-on work by senior foreign managers because their Filipino team wasn’t up to the task.
While I understand the comment, my response was sharp and immediate.
“It’s got nothing to do with luck. I hired the right people, trained them, and trusted them to do their jobs and run the business like it’s their own. If I hired the wrong person, they were moved on quickly.”
I touched on this point in our book and in another article recently about my approach to human resources.
It’s a conversation I’ve had a bunch of times over the years with firms all over the world. I will paraphrase...
“My Filipino team is doing a much better job than I expected. Having an offshore team is amazing!”
I’ve never really been able to wrap my head around this.
If you hire people who are hungry to learn, have a desire to grow, appreciate the opportunity you are giving them, and fit into the culture of your organisation, then, of course, they are probably going to do a good job.
It seems unsurprising to me.
But...
My viewpoint could be because I’ve been on the ground in the Philippines for over a decade.
I know the people.
Culturally, I understand their differences...
...and I also understand the cultural differences in Australia, the UK, and the US.
People in the Philippines are no different from people in Western countries.
ALL of us have slight cultural differences, but we are FAR more similar than different.
And therefore, I am not surprised in the slightest when a client tells me how amazed they are with their Filipino team.
But I do pause, and consider that our clients are scattered all over the world, thousands of miles away from the Philippines.
Most of them have never been to the Philippines before becoming a client of Frontline.
So, it’s only natural for them to have a perception of what working with an offshore team in the Philippines might be like and ultimately get a pleasant surprise.
We’ve advocated since the day we came here in 2011 to treat the staff the same as the local staff in a Western country.
Give them a career path, challenging work, and stretch them. Extract the best you can from each person.
Building our own management and support team to run the day-to-day operations at Frontline was a challenging process we had to go through, just like when each of our clients trains their team members.
It took us multiple years.
So...
Are we lucky we don’t need foreign managers, like my acquaintance told me?
I think not.
Jon and I made a deliberate choice about our approach to building people’s careers and then spent over ten years consistently working on it.
Many of our clients have also been with us, doing the same thing for more than a decade too.
I suggest you do likewise. Take a long-term view and help your team carve out careers they will be proud of.
