Rick Latona has never been one to stand pat and his latest venture, adult webmaster staff leasing operation iWebmasters, is a good indication why—he’s been damn successful taking calculated risks.
The six-month-old operation, which is reminiscent of an outsourcing company, provides inexpensive labor from qualified applicants–writers, graphic designers, programmers, and media managers to webmasters.
“We’re not an outsourcing company,” Latona told AVNOnline.com. “We don’t do projects and won’t argue about background colors and the like.
“We are simply webmasters’ remote HR office in an inexpensive English-speaking Asian country.”
With labor costs approximately one-fifth the amount they are in the states, iWebmasters has quickly built a roster of more than 100 clients.
“We’ve been experiencing hyper-growth. We’ve had to lease new office space five times already,” Latona said.
“I truly believe that iWebmasters is the hottest product in the industry at the moment.”
Although Latona’s latest venture has taken off like a rocket, the journey to here hasn’t been a short one.
“I’ve spent the last couple of years and a tremendous amount of money traveling the world studying the international game,” Latona said. “I wanted to get great at the whole holding company/trust element, but also maximize all of my revenue while minimizing all expenses.”
Latona started in Panama because it occupies the Eastern time zone and offers the cheap labor he was looking for. However, he soon realized that even though he could speak Spanish, the language barrier was still too tough to overcome. That difficulty, coupled with a smallish labor pool, made Latona move on to St. Petersburg, Russia.
There, Latona found plentiful cheap, high-tech and skilled labor, along with a canyonesque divide in culture and communication.
Next stop, India, which seemed to fit all the criteria. That is, until it became obvious that the presence of similar companies made it hard to keep workers, who would quickly jump ship for a slightly higher offer.
“They are too advanced in India now. I needed the next hot thing. I needed a place that had masses, fluent in English, a similar culture, a high-tech infrastructure and low costs. There are more than 20 million people in the greater Manila area. By law, all students must go to schools that have all classes in English,” Latona said.
“The Filipinos are great, hard-working and honest people. It was just a perfect place, so we set up shop to work on our own projects.”
Four months later, Latona brought on Deepak Agarwal, the owner of Dee Cash, as a partner and iWebmasters was born.
“I wanted to have recurring revenue, a simple sales pitch and a scalable model. When the idea struck about staff leasing, it was immediately exciting,” Latona said. “Today we have hundreds and hundreds of people leased out. I plan on closing 2005 with more than 1,000 and 2007 with 5,000-plus.”
The biggest question that remains for the adult webmaster is, can I trust these workers to do a good job?
“Quality must be managed. You can’t hire someone through staff leasing and expect the product to get delivered without ever talking to the guy,” Latona said. “We put the employee on the same hours. If you need them to work 8 a.m. until 6 p.m. EST then that’s when they’ll work. You can call them on the phone, hit them on ICQ, watch them through a webcam and view the desktop on their PC by using a spyware app. The only thing you can’t do is pat them on the head.”
