We Thought We'd Build the Next Big Outsourcing Company

While I was teaching Computer Science, I was also getting exposure to contract and consulting work for an outsourcing company.

One day, I happened to see what web-development consulting looked like from the business side—not just the code we were writing, but the fact that companies were building businesses around providing that work to clients.

A thought got stuck in my head.

Why don't we build our own outsourcing company?

I gathered some friends and told them the idea.

The reaction was roughly what you would expect.

“What? Where are we going to get the capital?” 😄

It was a fair question. We weren't wealthy entrepreneurs with investors waiting outside. We were technical people with skills, ideas, and a lot of optimism.

But I was persistent. I thought there had to be another way: find someone willing to provide the startup capital while we contributed the technical work and built the company.

Then came Yahoo! Messenger

This was long before Facebook Messenger, Slack, Teams, or Zoom became normal ways to build professional relationships online.

Back then, there was Yahoo! Messenger.

Through it, I connected with an entrepreneur in the United States. I explained what my friends and I wanted to do: create a small software outsourcing company, contribute our technical expertise, and find backing for the initial capital.

Somehow, the proposal worked.

He was willing to support the idea, and his business would become our first client.

Suddenly, the company my friends had laughed about wasn't just an idea anymore.

ITFamilyCorp, Inc.

We formed ITFamilyCorp, Inc.

The name reflected how we saw ourselves: friends in IT trying to build something together—an IT family.

We had startup backing. We had a real client. We had software to build. And, most importantly to a group of young technical people, we had a company of our own.

For someone who had graduated wanting simply to become a programmer, this felt much bigger than the job I had originally been chasing.

We weren't thinking small

One memory from those years still makes me smile.

The area that would eventually become Cebu IT Park was still largely open land. My friends and I would go there to jog, spend time together, and imagine what the future might look like.

We would look at that place and dream that someday our outsourcing company would have a building there.

We weren't thinking small. 😄

When you're young and something you imagined suddenly becomes real, it is easy to start imagining the next ten steps too.

We were excited about what could happen next.

What we weren't doing enough of was asking what could happen if things went wrong.

We had a client. We hadn't built a market.

Our first client gave us real work, and we became deeply focused on building for that business.

That focus felt productive. We were engineers, after all. There was software to design, problems to solve, and work to deliver.

But while we were building the client's business, we weren't building enough of our own.

We didn't establish a strong pipeline of additional customers. We didn't diversify. We didn't build a backup plan for what would happen if the business supporting us could no longer do so.

A customer is not the same thing as a market.

We had proved that someone was willing to back us and that we could build software for a real client.

We had not proved that we could repeatedly find the next client.

Then the thing we hadn't planned for happened

Eventually, our first client's circumstances changed and the financial support that kept our company operating could no longer continue.

Without a healthy pipeline of other customers, we discovered how fragile our business really was.

There were people who needed salaries. There were real operating costs. Enthusiasm couldn't pay those bills.

Eventually, ITFamilyCorp could no longer continue operating.

And I went back to being an employee.

The building that never happened

Years later, Cebu IT Park looks nothing like the open place where my friends and I used to jog and imagine our future.

The technology companies came.

The buildings came.
Ours didn't. 😄

ITFamilyCorp didn't become the large outsourcing company we once imagined.

At the time, returning to employment probably looked like going backward. A dream had ended, and survival mattered more than the title of entrepreneur.

But I left that experience knowing something I hadn't understood when we started.

Building software and building a software business are two very different problems.

What Computer Science hadn't taught me

I knew how to learn technology. I knew how to solve technical problems. Teaching had even trained me to understand things deeply enough to explain them.

But a company needs more than software.

It needs customers beyond the first customer. It needs sales and marketing. It needs cash flow. It needs resilience when assumptions fail. It needs a plan for the problems nobody is excited to think about while everything is going well.

I didn't understand enough of that yet.

I was a young Computer Science instructor and developer with ambition, technical skills, friends willing to build with me, and someone willing to give our idea a chance.

That was enough to start.

It wasn't enough to make the company sustainable.