Business View Magazine | February 2018

158 159 with a few early clients.My partner is an amazing operational and financial wizard, so I knew that if I could bring these companies in, John’s teamwould deliver and build out successful contact centers and put smart, talented people on these programs to achieve great success.” BVM: Any other aspects of FCR’s overriding philos- ophy? Achak: “It was really built around colleague reten- tion.We wanted to measure our colleagues’ reten- tion in years, not months, as most outsourcers do. You see, in our industry retention is the biggest chal- lenge most outsourcers face. If you build a large call center in a place like Phoenix or Las Vegas or Den- ver, people are going to turn over regularly because everyone competes for the same labor and thus agents will jump from company to company quite readily. But,what if you built a model where people were encouraged to, and incented to, stay a long time.A place where you paid raises, and provided health benefits with a better, healthier,more inclu- sive environment to work in.Would they stay a long time? That was the idea and we built from there. “Roseburg was our first site.Then,we expanded and expanded.We opened up Grants Pass, and we really seemed to strike a chord with many of these companies in the “disruptor space,” companies that are always looking to push the envelope on how business is conducted.These organizations move quickly and need a savvy support team that is capable of moving fast, thinking on their feet, and adapting to new trends in service and support as they evolve. FIRST CALL RESOLUTION The concept was to pay better wages, provide health benefits, a much better working environment and more fulfilling work, allowing our people to build ca- reers, thus bringing real opportunity to towns where none had previously ex- isted. Many of these towns have been almost forgotten. MATTHEWACHAK CO-FOUNDER “After Grants Pass,we opened up our Coos Bay site on the coast of Oregon.As Coos Bay expanded, our business really started to take off, so we opened up our Veneta,Oregon site, followed shortly thereafter by our Eugene base camp–our headquarters site.Fol- lowing that we opened up our Independence site.And then,just last year,we opened up our first out-of-Ore- gon site in Great Falls,Montana.And that site is really starting to fill up; we believeMontana is,inmanyways, a cultural and demographic twin to Oregon. “Finally we just announced our first near-shore lo- cation in Tijuana,Mexico,which is going to help ser- vice the growing Spanish support need that many of our clients have been asking for.We have already begun moving forward and expect to officially open that site for business in earlyApril. BVM: So, howmany employees do you have and howmany clients do you currently service? Achak: “We have over 70 clients and we employ