Guest: Mike O’Hagan
Presenter: Wayne Bucklar
Guest Bio: Mike was born a Kiwi moving to Australia at the age of 17. For the next 10 years Mike moved around Australia, doing a wide range of jobs. At the age of 34 he started and grew an Australia-wide short distance removal business – MiniMovers. This business topped $30M turnover with 500 staff.
In 2007 Mike exited the day to day of this business (still retaining full family ownership) and started educating himself. He completed a 3 year Masters in Entrepreneurship programme at MIT in Boston USA; he became a Commissioner on the Fair Pay Commission charged with setting the Minimum Wages in Australia; and he took up several Board positions.
In 2010 his Australian business was affected by the GFC. It plunged into a +$1Million a year loss. Using Offshoring strategies – his own people, in his own space – trained and managed to his processes with his work culture – Mike turned the loss into a substantial profit – within a few months. He followed this up by using his Philippines team to build a new way to market to new customers and added new services to the business, which were possible due only to the lower costs.
Mike returned to Australia and shared this with other business owners. They didn’t “get it.” Until an informal group of 10 business friends asked Mike to show them the opportunities in Manila. During a rather disorganised week Mike showed his business friends the Offshoring Opportunities he was seeing and using. At the end of the week everyone raved about what they had learned – Mike’s Business Tours was born.
Segment overview: Mike O’Hagan has structured a 3 and a half day business tour that goes through all sorts of different businesses where in they visit about 20 different businesses. They have 3 to 4 long structured lectures around different structures that business owners could use, why they would use each structure, why they wouldn’t use each structure. They also talk about locations that tour participants can operate in, some work better for certain things, some for other things, and they talk about managing them and setting out the management processes and then how to extract a lot of productivity out of it.
The tour gets the full range from everything coming here and participants are curious about the Philippines and that is why they have decided that they need to learn what to do before they do it which is highly advisable.
Mike has seen a lot of train wrecks here from people that are trained to outsource here. Tour participants have no idea what they’re doing and they want to learn before they do it, and they find Mike’s Tours an all-around source that teaches everything they need to be able to go about it in the right way. It’s across the board, all sorts of businesses, entrepreneurial, sometimes the participants have growth pains, sometimes they’ve got margin squeeze, sometimes they’re just simply looking for new ways, for new opportunities to sidestep the massive growth changes that are coming their way.
To know more about Mike’s Manila Tours, listen to the podcasts below.
The interview will start at the 12:00 of the podcast episode.
The interview will start at the 20:10 of the podcast episode.
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