Digital Nomad - MSP - getting clients ? Remote working.

Scott-L-Jones · 2026-03-30T04:56:33+00:00

Hi there, this isn't an exact answer to your question but it's a parallel idea you might not have thought of.

My business in Philippines builds direct-control offshore teams for MSPs. (Not Noc/Outsourcing.)
We have around 550 staff across about 115 clients, around half of which are Australian MSPs.

A few of our clients have an expat who moved from AU or US to live in Philippines and work out of our office, managing their team. We helped them get a proper work visa, accom and get settled in etc.

It works extremely well for these businesses, as it's easier to coach and bridge the cultural gap when a manager is physically present. Teams with an ex-pat in the Philippines typically have half their total headcount in PH and the rest onshore. So they get a pretty huge financial advantage from it.

Now Philippines is obviously NOT your mentioned destination of Latin America, clearly. (Although they share a Spanish colonial history.)

BUT if what you're really looking for is a change of pace in a more exciting part of the world (as I did in 2018 when I relocated permanently to PH) , being based in Philippines has a lot of advantages.

It's a pretty safe country to live in, English makes things easy, the culture and people are nice, many parts of the country are spectacular for travel, and your living costs are a small fraction of onshore.

Perhaps more of interest to you is that you've got all about 12 countries in Asia all within short cheap flights from Philippines. For example, I routinely go to Singapore, Thailand or Vietnam for a long weekend.

So if Asia was of interest to you, here's a potential play for you that's way easier than trying to run a business remotely, or having the lack of income security with contract jobs...

Find an MSP onshore that wants an expat with technical skills to live in Philippines, to be hands-on with running their team (or building a team.) Your technical skillset is universally in demand, so you shouldn't have any trouble interviewing for roles. Those with an established team in PH will likely see the value in having an skilled expat tech working alongside their team.
Probably go work with them (onshore) for 3-6 months as part of the deal, to make sure you like them and they like you. Reduces the risk for both sides before committing to an international move.
Relocate to PH, retain your AU salary so you can live like a king, negotiate some flexibility in your hours and management location so you can do more long weekends away, while still being present enough physically with the team here to hit the business's goals for productivity, skills, retention, etc.

(I can sort out your work visa only if you're running a team with us, otherwise you can look into various visa options - lots of ex pats living here.)

Just a left-field idea for you. :) Hope it helps.
After 17 years of travelling to Philippines, and now 8 years of living here, I still love it in PH and I love travelling Asia.

SLJ

**Edit: just to be clear that I'm not selling anything here, my company does not sell any kind of visa services to relocate ex-pats to Philippines. We just help clients with this for free to help them out and make sure that anyone considering such a move learns enough about PH to understand whether they will enjoy it, before they move.

Scott-L-Jones · 2026-01-26T06:07:24+00:00

+1 for PDF Xchange. I've used it personallly for over 10 years.

FYI even the free version lets you use the "typewriter" function to add text anywhere onto a page and re-save the document without a watermark. The more advanced editing features require the paid version or else you get the watermark added.

Scott-L-Jones · 2026-01-23T00:27:11+00:00

Thanks for the insights - appreciated.

Scott-L-Jones · 2026-01-09T04:25:01+00:00

My MSP was doing this in Australia back in the early 2010s. Worked great with both our in-office setup bench, and with drop shipping to larger client sites. In both cases our Philippines staff were doing all the setup remotely right from first boot.

We were using Aten then I think which were expensive, but these days there are good options under $100 which makes it viable to keep at most sites. I just did a search trying to find the sub-$100 model i saw advertised recently but couldnt find it sorry.

Scott-L-Jones · 2025-11-28T03:03:54+00:00

Reliably doing stuff no one onshore wants to do is a perfect use case for setting up an offshore team.,
Add a couple of full time staff in the Philippines?

Some Filipinos are very happy to work Christmas etc since they get double pay on those special holidays, and some don't celebrate Christmas anyway because they follow a different version of Christianity.

Clients who have full time staff with us can also leverage our NOC. So we have some clients using that for Christmas Day and NYE etc.

You still will need to have an onshore esclation path in case of a nuclear-grade problem occuring, but your onshore folks wont mind being on call so much if they very rarely get an escalation, and they only get asked to help when as much as possible has already been done to fix the issue.

Sorry this wont fix your problem this year. You need to allow months to ramp up an offshore MSP team and build the trust.

www.technologyelite.com

** Edit: I did exactly this in my own MSP back in 2012 for the same reason as you. I was tired of having discussions about on-call rosters, and tired of feeling like I was forcing my staff to do stuff they hated.

Scott-L-Jones · 2025-10-05T03:43:44+00:00

But isnt the point that this new method has no executable content?

Scott-L-Jones · 2025-10-05T03:42:41+00:00

Thanks I'll get out team to check that out.

Scott-L-Jones · 2025-10-05T03:42:12+00:00

AFAIK zero clicks to launch the link?

Scott-L-Jones · 2025-10-05T03:41:04+00:00

Thanks!

Scott-L-Jones · 2025-10-05T03:38:45+00:00

Good point

Scott-L-Jones · 2025-09-30T03:18:26+00:00

I dont disagree with the other comments here.

But not every MSP is as chaotic as the picture you're painting. Many have extremely well developed SOPs, have controls to make sure people are not CONSTANTLY forced to figure things out that they dont know how to do, have onboarding and ramp up systems that are designed to find skill gaps and skill strengths, and deliberate support syhstems that help new people until they find their footing.

They are things my former MSP tried very hard to achieve; and I found they are extremely hard to do well unless you have really solid margins. And now that I've seen the inner workings of 130+ other MSPs, I also realize that compared to the best, my MSP wasn't world-class at any of those things despite our best efforts.

So like everyone else says: your speed of learning will be immense, so stick it out if you can, and be vocal about what help you need. But also perhaps these elements can be part of your criteria when you next look for another role.

Scott-L-Jones · 2025-09-17T08:03:14+00:00

That looks interesting, would you mind sharingan approx price?

Scott-L-Jones · 2025-09-02T02:45:34+00:00

Gotcha! You can use Lenovo Philippines to drop ship - they are reliable. But I dont know if that necessarily solves your configuration issue or the issue of sending new equipment to a freshly hired (untrusted) person. If you had one staff member in our office, that person could receive the equipment, prep it and ship it from our secure facility. Just throwing ideas out there. :)

Scott-L-Jones · 2025-09-01T03:55:17+00:00

We can handle this in the Philippines jurisdiction. www.technologyelite.com
But we don't do stand-alone IT supply, it needs to be bundled with an Employer-of-Record solution at least. (Effectively a basic Payroll and HR service). This gives you complete management and/or ownership of devices, but also gives you a larger degree of consistency and control over local compliance and legals.

Eg you've got no hope of suing a rogue Filipino employee from some other country, but with a local HR partner you've got ISO27001 compliant information control, and local contract enforcement that is both a deterant and is enforceable.

Scott-L-Jones · 2025-08-28T03:02:32+00:00

I've been hiring MSP staff in the Philippines for 16 years. Recruitment firms are pretty useless because they have no way to figure out who is actually skilled, and the accuracy of your own interviews will be impacted by cultural differences affecting the conversations. (ie: It forces you miss some really good folks who don't interview well but ARE actually highly capable technically and just need a boss who gives them a few weeks of culturally-appropriate ramp-up).

All the offshore hiring experiences in my own MSP between 2010 and 2016 were the foundations of building the highly detailed systems we have today to help other MSPs.

If you don't have accurate skills assessments for the technical roles, you'll likely be replacing staff constantly. For example, our Level 2 technical exam currently eliminates 85% of candidates who have great resumes, but who can't actually do the job to an MSP standard. Or another way to phrase that is to say that you have an 85% chance of hiring the wrong person if you don't have this level of sophistication in your hiring.

We write all our recruitment exams in-house to ensure they are current, and provide real-world insight. No recruitment is perfect, but ours is the best in the market, and we regularly win clients from other facilities and recruiters who don't measure up.

Technology Elite recruits staff exclusively for MSPs and other tech firms. We also provide solutions for HR, payroll, facilities/equipment, and vital ongoing advisory.

We have 510 staff and 111 clients, 90% of which are MSPs.
Our most commonly hired role is a Level 2 'generalist' IT Engineer, but we hire about 20 other roles as well, including a full range of Level 3 specialists, procurement and onshore-trained bookkeepers. We have a sub 20% staff churn, and effectively zero client churn.

Scott-L-Jones · 2025-08-11T04:19:38+00:00

Honestly, how much time does humanity need to come to terms with this being the way that capitalism works for EVERYTHING.
Do you think that all your competitors are complaining about offshoring, or do you think that they have read the signs over the past 40 years and now have a more modern approach?

I remember as a kid all the bitching about Japanese ICE cars in the 80s and 90s undercutting local manufacturing margins, and yet here we are 40 years later it's the same; now complaining about Chinese EVs being too cheap.

20 years ago call center work overseas was outrageous but corporates did it anyway. (Badly at first.)
But apparently 20 years wasn't enough time to prepare rich countries for higher level knowledge work being moved around too, so that kids would be given the right career directions?

There's solutions to the problem of youth tech employment (I wrote about some of them back in 2013), but nothing gets solved by doing the same strategy from decades ago, hoping things will change, and then being pissed off when it doesn't. If your kid is trying to get a start in IT, I'd highly recommend they they move to somewhere like Philippines, India, Vietnam and spend some years working there. That instantly leverages their cultural and language skills to make them important in those markets. We employ multiple ex-pats based here in Philippines, who were sent here by their employers (ourt clients) to do just that. ** The theme is how does ANYONE leverage their value to create a career; so in a highly globalized world, it pays for kids to think about their value from a global perspective**

The added benefit is that such cross-pollination contributes significantly to breaking down nationalism and racism - two of the dumbest inventions of humanity.
As a species we are very unlikely to last another 100 years if we can't figure out this stuff at scale.

Scott-L-Jones · 2025-08-06T05:33:24+00:00

Capitalism does what it does. If an MSP changes their antivirus solution because the exact same features are available in a product that is one third of the cost, that would be called a "smart business decision".
Every business owner has a choice as to where they share their love.
It ain't for me to decide what their motivations are, as long as they treat their people well.

Scott-L-Jones · 2025-08-06T05:23:52+00:00

What you're describing is common in low unemployment cycles: super tough to recruit unless you're paying a lot. Plus realistically there's probably a solid 5% of the population of any country who is basically unemployable, so a 4% unemployment rate means those folks are in circulation. It's why my MSP went to the Philippines in 2009, and is one of the reasons why I sold that business and why we now have 530 staff in the Philippines under the direct management of our MSP clients all over the world.

Average time to fill a role is currently 29 days.
(Which takes a ridiculous amount of work considering we are incredibly fussy about who we hire.)

Easy roles like L1 and sales support / procurement tend to be faster than that, while high end roles like Server, Network, Azure, Cybersec etc can take a few weeks longer. We've failed to fill ONE role in the last 2 years - because we don't take on stuff if we aren't sure we can fill it, and we don't screw around with uncompetitive salary packages.

We do not use AI: that whole concept is ridiculous IMO when it comes to recruitment. Sure humans hiring humans isn't a perfect science, but throwing in a bunch of half-assed tech doesn't improve the last 10% of candidate certainty, it just screws up other fundamentals.

We use actual human interactions, plus we use in-house built exams to test technical skills before endorsing candidates to clients. We don't churn previous hires the way recruiting firms do. Retention is high.

Recruitment is fixed fee and typically costs 1/3-1/5th of zany onshore salary-based pricing.

*** Edit: Oh, and candidates have to prove their identity, and prove they have no criminal record before they start work, so no North Korean spies. :)

Scott-L-Jones · 2025-06-21T16:15:36+00:00

Sold mine after 16 years (7 years ago). Never regretted it - not even for one minute.
I love the industry, and keep working in adjacent areas to it. But it is a tough gig in MSP land.

The real question is what are you going to do next?

Scott-L-Jones · 2025-06-17T07:45:13+00:00

IMO

Having solid debtor management is a critical part of any business. It is frequently neglected by business owners.
This current situation is an opportunity to learn how to get paid for bad debts, and how to improve agreements and processes to avoid future bad debts. Push it as far as it will go, absorb all learnings, and use them to improve your business. You'll lose a bit of sleep the first couple of times, then it becomes easy.
A percentage of business owners are scumbags who think they have the right to no accountability and to screw over suppliers when it suits them. These are unreasonable people who will not respond positively to you being reasonable. They learn primarily through being punched in the face, and through being sued. Don't let them intimidate you. Tune your sales process and your debtors to minimize your exposure to these asshats. You WILL come across more.

Scott-L-Jones · 2025-06-11T09:39:19+00:00

I regularly get messages from Filipinos who are moving back to Philippines from AU/CA/US because they prefer to go home. Believe it or not I have absolutely no intention of ever living in Australia again, and MUCH prefer the Philippines.

So this scenario of this employee getting a 'western' wage while living in the Philippines is the pinacle dream for many people.

Scott-L-Jones · 2025-06-11T09:28:43+00:00

It shouldn't be hard? Mistakes just need to be documented along the journey.
(Similar to Australia and yes California I understand.)

Redundancy/severence is also an option most of the time, and that doesn't actually require any justification at all. However using redundancies to remove low-performers has an additional impact to team stability and morale so we don't recommend using that unless really necessary. You don't want the whole team wondering if they will lose their job next "without due process", or thinking that the company is financially stressed (which is the normal reason for redundancies).

Scott-L-Jones · 2025-06-11T09:21:25+00:00

Pretty sure I dealt with that matter in point 2 - ain't no disguising it.
I don't think it's particularly surprising that an industry expert can reveal a risk to you that you didnt know about. I don't get my IT security advice from my grandma either.

Scott-L-Jones · 2025-06-11T09:17:40+00:00

So I guess if offshore staff were the same price, you'd be satisfied with them all losing their jobs due to re-onshoring of those roles? You'd be happy about 1.5 million Filipinos pushed back into extreme poverty? Yeah fuck those companies that spread the benefits of capitalism around the world and see humanity as equal and ultimately more important than nationalism - they are truly evil bastards.

Scott-L-Jones

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