The Team That Set the Standard

Part One

Back around 2020, I was looking for a new gig. A friend in the call center business kept encouraging me to join him. He had a partner running an active remote call center, but they wanted better margins and weren’t satisfied with their numbers. Money was being saved by not having a brick and mortar and paying rent in utilities and having the reps be remote, but still, the margins weren’t high enough to satisfy my partners.

After many conversations, I met his partner—and ended up liking him more than my friend. I was excited to help. They gave me free rein over the methods, recruiting, hiring and firing, training, infrastructure, and choice of dialer. They also assigned me a tech-support person who turned out to be pretty good.

I met the team in a Zoom call. It was a pleasant introduction to about 15 to 17 ladies. They worked on several campaigns, but their main one was U.S. health insurance. Their main job was to transfer prospects to licensed insurance companies in the United States; they weren’t the licensed agents selling the policies.

Their KPIs were good. My new partner said SPH—sales per hour—was the most important measure. To him, it gave the pulse of the call center and told the whole story. SPH was a useful top-level measure of the sales output generated each hour. But as I learned more, I saw that it couldn’t explain what was driving the number. For that, you had to understand the rest of the operation.

What seemed simple turned out to be complicated. The dialer had to match the campaign’s capacity and needs. Leads were often poor because the information was inaccurate, and lead brokers created another challenge. The client was a middleman, making money by marking up the transfers before passing them to the American insurance agents.

The ladies were awesome, but at first they resented a new guy taking over parts of the operation that could affect their future. My partner was an accountant and strictly focused on numbers. If someone missed a KPI, he believed they should be cut quickly, with little chance to turn things around.

At one point, three to five reps were below standard, and my partner recommended terminating them. I refused. I told him in no uncertain terms that if he did that, I would leave—and I won that argument. I interviewed the ladies to see whether they had the right attitude. They all did, so I believed training could take care of the rest. I was right: within two to three weeks, they were out of detention. One went on to become a top performer in the call center. It started with my belief in them—and the trust they placed in me.

The first thing I did was open a general chat where we could all interact during the day. To keep that from getting overwhelming, I also opened a motivational chat and individual chats with each rep.

They had never experienced that level of interaction before. My partner held one sales meeting a week and might post an opening and closing comment each day, if that. I was hands-on every minute—to the point that I sometimes felt bad even going to the bathroom.

It wasn’t about the money. I cared about seeing the growth. Our SPH rose rapidly, and we hired a few more ladies, bringing the team to around 20.

I had a superstar. Anna produced 20 to 25 transfers a day—about twice as many as the second-place producer. A few other ladies made 8 to 12 transfers a day, which was superstar performance too, but Anna was on another level.

I once asked Anna what mattered most to her success. Without hesitation, she answered with one word: “Attitude.”

Jennefer, our second-best performer, had all the skills to give Anna a run for her money. But breaking new records was unfamiliar territory. I encouraged her to set goals, write them where she could see them every day, and stay focused on reaching them. She did—and exceeded even her own expectations.

Jennefer also had strong contacts, recruiting and sales-closing skills, a nice voice, and the respect of the team. I made her my right-hand person, able to take over some of my responsibilities if I was sick or overloaded. She also handled overall quality control for the team. I never regretted it. She became essential—in my opinion, indispensable.

Over the next few months, our numbers kept climbing. The ladies no longer resented the new guy. Their paychecks grew, they trusted me, and they told me they liked me. They could sense that I wanted the best for them and wanted to help them grow.

From the information I could gather, our SPH was higher than any other call center in the Philippines by a wide margin.

Many times, our center was running at 2.6 to 2.8 SPH. On very good days, some of our top producers reached 4.0 to 7.0 individual SPH.

Part of our success came from the last-hour drive to hit our goals. I kid you not: they seemed impossible, but we reached them almost every day—sometimes in the final 30 seconds before shutting down. That made the work exciting and helped the ladies grow more confident in their skills.

I kept refining the script, cutting unnecessary fluff and breaking the call into three or four phases. The first 15 seconds were crucial, and I became a master instructor at helping the reps get through that opening.

If they reached minute two or three, I believed they had a 40-to-60-percent chance of closing. Around the eight-minute mark, they probably had the deal wrapped up. The reps learned to think of the pitch as a series of phases, each one moving them closer to the transfer.

The chat rooms became the beating pulse of a collective team. Shifts lasted eight or nine hours, so people naturally got tired. Mid-afternoon, while the ladies were still dialing out, I dedicated an hour to waking everyone up with a game called the “Two-Dollar Question.” Everything was cold calling; there were no incoming leads, so they still had to keep dialing.

I’d ask questions unrelated to work: What city is Michelangelo’s David in? Which chess piece moves in an L shape? Which American actor had won the most Oscars? Some ladies were so good at Googling they won two dollars often—and sometimes ten dollars in a shift.

So I started asking questions that weren’t easy to look up, along with opinion questions that threw people for a loop. A couple of reps always rose to the top, and everyone tried to emulate them.

In the last hour—especially the final half-hour and the last 15 minutes—the motivational chat became a powerful force. I reminded everyone that the seed of greatness lived inside them. All they had to do was release it and pursue their dreams—which, in that moment, meant hitting their daily transfer goal.

Our growth seemed limitless, but little did I know there were serious clouds looming on the horizon, that could easily shut down the whole operation and leave everyone without a job.

Part Two

We had reached the pinnacle of success in the Philippine call-transfer business. I had helped build a well-oiled, strategically engineered, world-class operation. More than that, we felt like a family. The culture was unlike anything I had experienced in my life.

But in business, as in life, even something that feels close to perfect can begin to unravel. For us, it began with a heartbreaking tragedy.

Analeen was one of our beloved phone reps. Everyone liked her for her kind spirit and positive attitude. If I remember correctly, she had children. She was also carrying a tremendous burden: kidney failure that required frequent dialysis.

Management understood what she was going through. My policy was simple: if you were sick, stay home. Take the time you need for medical care or personal matters. I wanted everyone to be healthy and happy when they were on the phones. We were especially mindful of giving Analeen the support and flexibility she needed. She already had enough to deal with.

As her condition worsened, we urged her to take all the time off she needed. We told her we would help her and her family however we could. But Analeen refused to stop working. She continued right up to the end.

The day before she died, she thanked me and the management team for giving her the opportunity to work at BDL. She told us the job had helped her feed her family and had been one of the best experiences of her life. She didn’t tell us that she knew her condition would soon take her life. It did.

We were all devastated by her death. The management team came together and donated a sizable check to her family. It was one small way to show how much Analeen meant to us—and how much we cared about the people who had become part of our team.

In the weeks and months after Analeen’s death, we carried the memory of her kindness and spirit with us. We used it to spur ourselves on to hit our end-of-day goals. Our SPH was higher than ever.

Then another tragedy struck.

The American insurance market changed. AI started to replace individual callers, and it became more profitable for some centers. That shift, along with changes in the law, abruptly ended our health-insurance transfer business.

My partners wanted to close the whole operation down. I believed we had another option: switch to final expense life insurance. We had only about two weeks of funds left, so there wasn’t much time. I stayed awake almost around the clock, re-engineering the operation to fit the new strategy.

Almost everyone thought failure was just around the corner. Even our phone reps weren’t sure their jobs would be saved. But I believed the strategy I had developed made sense, and I trusted that if we kept working at it, we could turn things around.

At first, it was painfully slow. Our center average fell to 0.33 SPH—not enough to sustain a business. But from there, it never went down. We improved in small increments. Within three weeks, we were close to 0.9 SPH. Within two months, we had matched the level we had reached with health insurance, and then we exceeded it, climbing to almost 3.0.

We didn’t just save the center. The team’s attitude and confidence grew stronger because we had faced extreme adversity and overcome it together.

I thought that success would be enough to satisfy everyone in management. But my original friend, who had criticized my decisions along the way, became increasingly jealous of what we had accomplished.

He kept coming up with campaign ideas that I believed wouldn’t work. He pointed to his 20 years of call center experience and my two years as proof that he knew better. His ego was large, and our disagreements became deeply personal.

That difference in judgment led to fights and shouting matches. Eventually, I was terminated.

After I left, they continued by bringing in reps they could rent from recruiting and training companies. The old team began to unravel. Many of the reps reached out to me, but I didn’t say an unkind word about my former partner or about what was happening at the center.

Eventually, the center dissolved.

Looking back, I learned that numbers matter, but numbers alone don’t tell you how to build a successful operation. SPH gave us an important measure, but improving it required understanding the whole business: the campaign, the dialer, the leads, the script, the training, quality control, and the people making the calls.

I also learned that potential deserves a chance. Some reps were below standard at first, but they had the right attitude and were willing to learn. With support and training, they improved—and one became a top performer. Good leaders need to see the person behind the number.

The culture we built mattered just as much. Communication, coaching, encouragement, games, recognition, and the feeling that we were all working toward a shared goal helped turn a group of reps into a team. When Analeen died, her memory reminded us of the human beings behind the work and the people we were working for.

The change in the insurance market taught me that a business has to adapt quickly when the ground shifts beneath it. We had only two weeks of funds left, but a new strategy and a team willing to keep trying gave us a way forward. We started at 0.33 SPH and kept climbing.

The most personal lesson was to choose business partners carefully. A good partnership requires more than experience or good ideas. It also takes trust, mutual respect, room for disagreement, and the ability to work through conflict without letting ego take over. If the fit isn’t right, it may be better to walk away or build a deal on your own. In the campaigns that followed, I did just that.

I will never forget my BDL family. We still stay in touch on Facebook, for the most part. The reps who were part of that team have found good positions with other companies that appreciate their skills and attitude.

I lost my position, and eventually the center closed, but I remain proud of what we built together. We gave people a place where they could grow, earn more, support their families, and believe in what they could accomplish. That is what made BDL special—and why I will always remember the team behind the numbers.