This interview is with Tobias Fellas, CEO at Felcorp Support.

Tobias Fellas, Managing Director, Felcorp Support

Can you introduce yourself and tell us about your role as the Managing Director of a Business Process Outsourcing company in the Australian financial services sector?

My name is Tobias Fellas. I am the founder and CEO of Felcorp Support. We are a professional business process outsourcing company (BPO) that services financial services companies such as accounting, wealth and advisory, and insurance businesses. We provide offshore staff services in India and the Philippines to these firms, and we manage all the technical training, workflow, HR, payroll, and all other office costs. My role as the CEO is to facilitate the entire international workforce, sales, legal aspects, marketing, and ultimately board-level strategies. Essentially, my role is to bring together all the siloed parts of the business to execute our business plan according to our goals and budgets.  About 40% of my time is dedicated to sales, 30% of my time is dedicated to operational efficiency, and the last 30% of my time is dedicated to business planning and issue resolution. The difficulty is finding the right balance and prioritizing tasks.

What inspired you to start your own company, and how did your journey in entrepreneurship unfold?

My journey started not out of direct intent but from organic opportunities that pushed me into running my own business. I started as a personal contractor with some skills that I picked up during university. My first few jobs were working with small financial planning businesses doing basic back-office administration. After some months, my work was recognized and I received referrals. I was still studying at that time, and the demand for my contracting services was more than what I could give to my study time. I didn’t have any other job at that time, so this was my sole source of income. If I couldn’t deliver X amount of hours a week, I was going to lose those clients. It became a time in which I had to choose between my bachelor’s degree or my side hustle that was actually full-time. I chose my side hustle. It was shortly not long after that I decided if I’m going into business, then I am doing this full force. If it fails, I could always go back to uni the next year. I set up a website and got some more clients just from organic search. It then grew to the point I needed to hire staff. I found my first staff members from LinkedIn. One of them had a connection in India, and it was 3 months later and I had an office of 10 staff in India. My journey wasn’t deliberate. It has been rife with many disappointments and mistakes but also luck. Now I’m in business, this is all I know and all I want.

Throughout your career, what’s been the most challenging aspect of managing an international workforce, and how have you overcome it?

The most challenging part of the international workforce has been the set-up and management structure of the operations. I first started in India. India is not like the Western world in that its government administration and legal system crawls at a glacial pace. This was my first foray into Wholly Owned Subsidiaries, arbitrage pricing, and international corporate law.

Operating an international workforce is certainly not easy. I was quite green in my entrepreneurship journey when I learned about the importance of HR, employee satisfaction, sustained career growth, and opportunities for staff. The hardest aspect was ensuring both the staff member was satisfied in their job and the client was happy with the output. It is a marriage of talent and employer that is always changing. It is really difficult to overcome these issues initially when you don’t have the business expertise. It was purely from our experiences and issues that we learned from. We put policies and procedures in place to mitigate these future risks. Overcoming challenges is hard, especially when you encounter a financial loss. It takes a toll on your confidence, and you have to have the mental fortitude to keep going. You keep fighting.

Can you share a specific sales negotiation experience that taught you a valuable lesson about doing business in the Australian financial services industry?

I have written over 150 contracts and have done 250 sales calls of all sizes. There is one rule that I’ve learned. Never lead with your prices. If your sales pitch is your pricing, you’ve already lost. Once you psychologically tell your prospect that you are price-focused, their motivation is unconsciously to get it as cheap as possible. Forget all the benefits of your service; you are competing on a purely transactional exchange. What I’ve learned: you can’t compete on price. There’s always someone cheaper or willing to do it for peanuts.

So the trick here is don’t lead with price, lead with value. Showcase to the prospect how much they will get in return for your product or service. And why your product or service delivers more than the competitors.

So for example, we are a premium BPO provider. We are in the top 20% of prices in the market. We illustrate our value through showcasing that our service is backed by stronger data security, management processes, regulatory compliance and software. This gives us a unique selling point in the market as our operational procedures are designed to mitigate issues and ensure efficiency.

Ultimately, the financial services industry is motivated by long-term stability. And if a provider can deliver their service with minimal issues consistently, these firms will pay a premium for that.

In your experience, what’s the most common mistake small financial services businesses make when it comes to marketing strategies, and how can they avoid it?

Most of the small businesses in financial services I have come across that have fewer than 5 staff simply do not have the expertise or conceptual understanding of executing a marketing campaign. The common mistake I always see is that just developing a 5-page website is going to generate lots of business. It doesn’t. And it rarely does. The problem with marketing and advertising is that it’s not a one-channel concept. To make digital advertising work, for example, you will need a good-quality website; it has to be SEO-aligned, there needs to be a Google Ads campaign, a Facebook ads campaign, and ultimately a lead magnet offer to ultimately convert. This has been difficult even for me.

With the rise of AI in the financial services sector, how have you adapted your business processes, and what advice would you give to other small business owners facing this technological shift?

AI has just become a natural part of our business. We have agents that work side-by-side with our staff. This wasn’t a deliberate plan; it just became a habit for staff, so we weaponized it for our value. The biggest issue with AI is the lower adoption rates of older staff, say 50+ and above. Unfortunately, I am seeing financial services businesses skew to a younger workforce because their ability to use AI to problem-solve faster, deliver reports, emails, and analytics is delivering more outputs for the same resources. Ultimately, if a younger workforce can produce more work cheaper due to their habitual use of AI, it’s a commercial decision that businesses will make.

My biggest fear is losing my technical ability. Keeping up with the latest advances, software, and conceptual understanding of technology is becoming so much more of a requirement now. My technological ability is what enabled me to bootstrap my business without having to hire external specialists. AI gives those who know how to use it solutions to problems faster. It’s that simple.