David Carney is the chief executive of Virtual Business Planners.
Our business provides admin support to financial services companies via offshore staff.
My background is I spent 20 years in the financial services industry, and the majority of them as a planner. Then I sold my business for various reasons. It was partly because of opportunity and partly because of circumstances – my wife had breast cancer. (This was five years ago, and she’s fine now.)
So I decided to consult back to the industry as a business coach. But I found there was a bottleneck in the industry around compliance and paperwork, so that’s the role we found ourselves filling.
There are a number of technologies we use.
A lot of the stuff we do can be remote access. So we use the key technologies you’d expect, such as Google Drive and DropBox. We also do a lot of video capture and teleconferencing, via Citrix GoToMeeting.
We offer a fairly bespoke service. All businesses do things a little differently, so we spend a lot of time on teleconferencing.
The key thing is to manage my 45 staff in the Philippines from Australia and the flexibility to do it from my home office. So you can have a bigger business and manage it from home using the right technology. I still fly over there occasionally but this allows me to get face-to-face contact every day.
Andrew Sadauskas is a former journalist at SmartCompany and a former editor of TechCompany.
