Thought Leaders in Outsourcing: Interview with John Meyer, CEO of Arise Virtual Solutions (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You mentioned Ireland as a region. How many people do you have working there?

John Meyer: Right now there are about 180 in Ireland and 1,400 in the U.K. In Canada we have about 3,000. So much is based on the customer and the acceptance of the customer. I was at the infancy of the outsourcing market space with EDS. I can remember the days when people were laughing us out of their offices because we said, “Just give us your computers, your people, and your network and we will give it back to you cheaper and better.” They thought we were crazy, until all of a sudden in 1985 the business model became accepted and everybody said, “You are right. Why aren´t we doing this?”

We are at that tipping point for our model, because people understand outsourcing and accept it as a way to do business. People are coming to the realization that they work at home, they can tap into a latent workforce that is a better caliber than they can get sitting in their physical location eight hours a day. They are accepting that as a business model. Then this concept of people who are dealing with independent businesses as opposed to individual employees is just coming of age. People are saying, “I get a better individual by contracting with them as a company. They have more pride in what they do, they have more responsibility, more accountability, and they are easier to deal with.”

SM: Of the 26,000 reps, how many companies do they represent?

JM: Ten percent of the workforce work for other companies. So 90% of those have a lot of solo companies. They have actually advocated it to someone else, teaching them how to set up a legal entity. We advocate that because we find that people who have their own company have a greater sense of pride in what they are doing, and they generate good results.

SM: We have done a bunch of stories around the whole freelance exchange team: Elance, oDesk, etc. One thing that came out of that is that there are lots of companies that built themselves up by leveraging these platforms into what we have called the million-dollar-freelancer trend. It could be a company in India or in Argentina, and they have used these platforms and not only gotten projects for themselves, but now they are running companies with 20, 50, or 100 people depending on the region and what the rates in that region are. They have built up substantial companies. The question I am getting at is this: what is the parallel between that trend and your community? I am referring to the 10% that are actually running businesses.

JM: It is a trend that continues to grow. We have a program called the Premier program of those individuals – the best of those companies that have employees underneath them. Would you like me to give you an example?

SM: Absolutely, because that is where the parallel to 1M/1M really comes into place. Solo freelancers are not going to get to those kinds of numbers.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Thought Leaders in Outsourcing: Interview with John Meyer, CEO of Arise Virtual Solutions
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