By Rome Jorge
Bryce Maddock knows an opportunity when he sees it and seizes it. He’s been doing it since age 19 when he and his partners put up the first all age nightclub in Los Angeles appropriately named Access. So it was no surprise when, at age 27, after graduating Summa Cum Laude from New York University and gaining experience as an investment-banking analyst on Wall Street, he founded customer care and back office services outsourcing TaskUs, one of the fastest growing companies in the world employing over 5,000 in Santa Monica and the Philippines. He even finds time for TaskUs Foundation that finances education for children in the Philippines and the Global Student Entrepreneurship Awards for student startups as well as Ironman Triathlons.
The globetrotter shared some of his valuable time to answer a few questions for adobo magazine:
1. What makes TaskUs ridiculously good as an outsource service provider for customer support and back office support? What makes companies such as Tinder, Shopify, LinkedIn, Twitter, Groupon, and Autodesk entrust you with their continued success? What differentiates you from the competition?
Call Center Outsourcing is a boring old industry with a bad reputation. At TaskUs, we’ve challenged every assumption about call centers. This begins with our obsession over the employee experience.
For any business, there are three parties and one has to choose which is the most important: the customer, the owner, or the employee. Call centers typically only pay lip service to being customer centric, while in fact, they are really owner-centric enterprises focused on maximizing stockholder return. This sort of focus completely neglects the employee experience.
At TaskUs, we believe that providing the world’s most #ridiculouslygood employee experience enables us to attract the world’s best talent. With that talent secured, we earn the opportunity to support the world’s most innovative customers.
So we do things like providing 120 days of paid maternity leave, paying for the private education of our employee’s children, and sending our top-performing staff on tropical vacations, crowdsourced tattoo designs from social media for our people. We even launched a TaskUs – Twitch.TV channel for employee engagement. These sort of things may not be novel at Silicon Valley startups, but they are totally unique in the call center outsourcing world.
The other thing that is broken about call centers is the economic model. Call centers make money by providing more people. This breeds inefficiency.
At TaskUs, we challenge this model. We look for ways to partner with our customers by taking on both risk and rewards as a team.
Over the next five years, much of the work that is currently completed in call centers will be automated by technology. TaskUs stands on the forefront of this revolution by piloting app support, chatbots, and robotic process automation for our customers.
2. How has locating in the Philippines shaped how you do business? How has the Philippine experiences shaped you as a person?
In 2009, and almost out of money, I went to the Philippines to set up our first office. We had just enough money to buy five computers and one flight to and from Manila for myself. Jaspar Weir, my business partner, stayed behind to focus on selling our “services.” I focused on building the ‘operation.’
Without money for a hotel, our first hires were generous enough to open their homes to me. For a month, I stayed in our staff’s homes off on Aguinaldo Highway in Cavite (a province approximately an hour south of Manila).
That trip continues to inspire me. I learned about the people we employ first hand, including their fears, dreams, and hopes.
At TaskUs, our mission comes from that first trip: to provide opportunities for meaningful employment for hundreds of thousands of people around the world. It’s a powerful mission and one that excites me to work hard each and every day.
3. Your blog reveals several of your passions: Iron Man triathlons, the Global Student Entrepreneurship Awards and the TaskUs Foundation for education, and entrepreneurship at such a young age Access, the first all age nightclub in Los Angeles. How have each of these passions and experiences informed your business leadership today?
In 2015, I made it a personal mission to complete a triathlon, more specifically, an Ironman, and that year I did my first full Ironman in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho in June. Since then, I’ve competed in four more half Ironman races—and have more on the docket in 2016 and 2017. In a triathlon, the race is comprised of swimming, biking, and running consecutively.
As I’ve continued to train, I’ve realized that not only do I need the time that I dedicate to training to clear my head and re-centralize myself, but I also have drawn a number of comparisons from doing an Ironman to starting a business.
Swim: Just as timing and strategy is the key to the swim, timing, and strategy forms the basis for starting a business. Bike: Trusting your bike and your skill as you race downhill is a huge risk and like riding your bike in a triathlon, taking risks and innovating are both very important in starting a business. Run: Just like how the run is the true grind as you push yourself to your limits towards the finish line, running a business requires grit, grind, and hard work.
4. Congratulations for making it Inc.’s “30 Under 30 List” this year. At 29 years of age, what life goals do you plan to achieve by 30? Which of these have you fulfilled and what more need to be done?
I turned 30 a couple of weeks ago, and it made me reflect on my life goals that I hoped to achieve by the time I was 30. When I graduated high school, my teacher asked us to write down what we hoped to accomplish in the decade following graduation. I wrote (1) travel the world, (2) start a global business, and (3) find inner peace and enlightenment.
I am confident to say that I completed the first two of my goals but am not even close to completing the third.
5. What’s next for you?
I am passionate about continuing to grow TaskUs and make it even larger to provide meaningful and purposeful work. I have set a goal to employ 10,000 people by the end of 2017 and we are constantly looking at how to expand our presence in the Philippines like launching new sites in Pampanga. Stay tuned.
