Several of us came out of skilled migration. Under the old 457 visa scheme we recruited skilled Filipino workers and managers, skills-tested them and brought them to Australia to work. Boilermakers, diesel mechanics, regional store managers. The clients ran from national engineering firms to defence contractors to a pool builder. Australia was short of skilled people and there was a great deal of Filipino talent that could help. A skills test tells you what a person can do. It does not tell you whether they will fit the team they are joining. The placements that held were the ones where the person shared the values of the people around them and wanted the whole group to get ahead.

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Plenty of work still has to happen on site, and skilled Filipino workers still come to Australia to do it. By 2012 the office work behind a business, the admin, the books and the calls, could be done from anywhere. Corporates had worked that out and were running teams across Manila, Cebu, Clark and beyond. Small and medium Australian businesses had no way in. They did not know the market, did not know how to recruit in it and had no way to tell who would work well inside their business.

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The easy way to serve them was the model everyone else used. Take a floor, divide it into desks, put a person at each desk and sell the seat cheaply. Thin support, no development and the client carries the rest.

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None of us wanted to build that. So we built the opposite. Hire good people, give them a career worth having and put a team around them, so a client gets support rather than a name at the end of a phone line. A team that watches the work, catches problems before they reach the client and asks what the next three, six and twelve months need.

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That includes being straight about where the work belongs. Some of it should be automated. Some should stay local. Some belongs with a team in the Philippines. Our job is putting the work in the right hands, including when those are not ours.