PHX Reporter

One decade ago, insurance, tax and real estate entrepreneur Edward Moore was presented with a problem. 

Approached by his Arizona State University fraternity brother, Kim Curtis, Moore was challenged to expand a business by nearly 3,000 miles, across multiple nations and bodies of water. What started as the mere seedling of an idea quickly grew into something more and, eventually, customer service and outsourcing solutions company, Peak Outsourcing. 

"(Curtis) and his partner, Joe Devine, had an existing U.S. business doing some outsourcing of chat support in India. The service was good, but something was missing," Moore recently told PHX Reporter. 

Curtis believed that Moore, who had frequented Southeast Asia in his past travels, could help strengthen the outsourcing business by placing roots in the Philippines. 

"Through my travels here, I saw the Philippines on multiple different levels. I had great times out on the islands, the beaches and the water, but also within the city itself I saw that ... there's a lot that's happening here and there's a lot that could be done here," Moore said. "I always thought that it would be a good place to have some sort of business."

After mulling the challenge over, Moore sought out another old college colleague, Patrick Freking. Together the two discussed the potential for the outsourced customer service model to thrive in the Philippines and, after determining that an excellent idea was afoot, embarked for Manila to study the ins and outs of starting a business in Southeast Asia. 

By mid-August of 2011, the first Peak Outsourcing office opened its doors with a team of five agents. Moore's first client was his own first business partners, Curtis and Devine, whose U.S. Business had been using an Indian outsourcing company for chat support. 

In the beginning, Peak Outsourcing focused on lead generation chat support, where a visitor browsing on the client's website is looking for information and an outsourcing agent will collect details to connect the customer to the client. 

"I think almost immediately we knew that (Peak Outsourcing) had some potential," Moore said. 

With two American co-founders closely overseeing the operation and the agents' training, Moore thinks that there was little lost in translation and a lot more hands-on interaction that made Peak Outsourcing successful. Southeast Asia and the U.S., he explained, have very different business practices and cultures, so the connection between the two was invaluable. 

"We got positive feedback almost instantly from the clients on how they saw the potential here, but after a few months when we started surpassing KPI and quality conversions of the Indian group, we knew we had it figured out," Moore said. "We equated it to what we would call our secret sauce or our secret ingredient."

After some trial and error, Moore says his company struck a balance between Southeast Asia culture and Western business practices: a family-oriented work culture and the tearing down of a company hierarchy to put all members on the same level.

In the years that followed, Moore's company grew quickly and organically after he and his partners cultivated relationships with clients and asked for a chance to do their outsourcing. While Peak Outsourcing's first industry was customer chat support, the team moved into travel support for flight disruptions, medical record retrieval, construction, B2B legal matters and e-commerce while maintaining chat support for thousands of URLs.

Altogether, Moore says Peak Outsourcing has about 15 lines of business and doesn't rely on its founders to network for clients anymore. Today, Peak Outsourcing has a team dedicated to marketing, sales and client services.

Peak Outsourcing has expanded to offer content writers, bloggers, social media markets, technical support and more. 

Some of that work is boots-on-the-ground rather than support from behind a computer screen. 

"One of our smaller lines of business is construction takeoff, so our agents here on the ground actually do the work within the software and share it back with the clients as they start takeoff for construction bids," Moore explained. 

With Peak Outsourcing thriving as a hub in the web of global commerce, Moore's days of running a tax and insurance agency in Arizona are long behind him. 

Peak Outsourcing’s records retrieval service was growing at an explosive rate, with several hundred agents dedicated to this service and Moore’s company began to serve key accounts in e-commerce and fulfillment verticals; today, chat and phone customer support in the e-commerce, legal and records retrieval industries comprise Peak Outsourcing’s largest client base and highest speciality. 

"I was always curious about doing business overseas and starting something that was outside of the norm," he said. "Many people thought I was crazy to move overseas and try to run a business in a foreign country, but I had my business partner, Pat, who was equally skilled and committed to help co-run the business. He just felt confident that we could do it... so we just literally went for it."

While Moore finds time to come back to American soil a couple of times a year, he spends most of his time at the Peak Outsourcing headquarters—or on the powdery beaches of one of the Philippines' over 7,600 islands, among his new community whom he calls "an extremely warm and very accommodating" people.