FILIPINO-AMERICAN brothers Patrick and Brian Murphy grew up in the United States but moved to Costa Rica a couple of years later, with no knowledge of the Philippines until they reached adulthood.
“I was given an opportunity to study and work in the Web business either in France or in the Philippines,” he says. “I chose [to be here] because this is where my roots are. I didn’t know anything about the [country], but I wanted to see it.”
But he said it was not supposed to be a long-term arrangement: His plan was to stay in the country for three months and then fly back to Costa Rica. In fact, he had already purchased a return ticket back to his hometown, which he ended up canceling because he fell in love with the country.
“The Philippines, of course, is very different from the US but very culturally similar to Costa Rica and I was very comfortable with the environment,” he observed. “The people are great. It was relatively cheap to live here. I enjoyed what I was doing.”
After two months of staying in the country, he eventually moved to Baguio City and became accustomed with the weather, the people and their honesty.
When Brian learned of Patrick’s whereabouts and decision, he decided to follow suit.
Humble beginnings
IN late-2010, after working for a web-development company in the Summer Capital, the brothers wanted to find a way to leave behind their 9-to-5 jobs and be in control of their destiny.
Thus, they formed Linkage Web Solutions, which they planned to be at the forefront of taking advantage of the growing market trends as demand increases.
“I provided the sales and marketing expertise, while Patrick provided the technical and production knowledge. We complemented each other,” Brian described. “We started the company from our rented one-bedroom apartments and worked throughout the night to generate paying customers. We did it with nothing more than a computer, a headset and a lousy Internet connection.”
Within six months, the company had its first employee and on its first year, they were able to move into a three-story home in Camp 7, then expanded to eight employees.
However, they learned the path to success wasn’t paved in a straight line—in fact, it was more like a “two steps forward, one step back” process.
“The struggle was real,” Brian recalled, when the time the Internet lines in their area were literally severed by a typhoon.
“There was no Internet, and I had four sales people who couldn’t make sales calls. We had no funding; the cash we produced from our sales was used to cover our payroll, and we were in big trouble.”
“So what did I do? I loaded up the entire sales team in my car and drove around Baguio City at midnight looking for Internet cafés to do work. We were getting kicked out because people thought we were credit-card scammers. Sometimes, you just have to man up and do whatever it takes to stay in business.”
In fact, Patrick admitted the company would not have survived if it had not been for the fact that Linkage was operating in the Philippines, where the cost of living and wages were a fraction of what they would have been in the US.
“It helps a lot when you earn in dollars and your expenses are in pesos,” he claimed.
Turning point
BY 2013 Linkage moved into a proper office; this time their space was ideally located at the heart of the City of Pines and surrounded by local universities. This enabled the brothers to grow their business substantially since they had better exposure and access to talented staff.
“The minute we moved in, we became famous,” Patrick said. “Students and teachers alike began to look for us. We were able to use affiliations to hire, train and scale a large staff of designers, programmers, marketing, information technology, customer service and sales people.”
Brian shared with the BusinessMirror that, “We were able to nurture a good sales force which allowed us to grow. We came up with a sales system and product, which we call Hybrid Solutions. We were closing 40 to 50 deals, which was essentially [the same number of] new billable credit cards every month that we could charge for our subscription service. Within a matter of months, we had hundreds of clients we could bill regularly.”
Presently, the brothers have in their employ a total of 50 employees, and offices in Baguio City and Angeles City, making up what is considered one of the largest and most successful web site and online marketing companies in the Philippines.
“This has been a growth process, and we are in a good place,” Patrick stated. “We are finally in a place where our foundation was built and that took us six or seven years. It was not that easy. We were looking at a five-year journey before we became stable. We had no experience and we were making things up as we went along.”
“We have the best of both cultures,” Brian added. “We are both American and Filipino citizens, so we understand the quality of work that our American clients expect, and we are bringing our expertise to the Philippine market while raising the bar for our Filipino customers, as well, and that is very exciting!”
In the coming years, the two will be unveiling a game-changing technology in the Philippines under the code name “Ikonek,” a state-of-the-art online marketing platform that will change the way Filipinos do business online.
The Murphy siblings are living proof of how a successful online business with no money could be created; all that is required is passion, hard work, creativity and relentless persistence.