We’re a young passionate company, focused on making a difference to the lives of the isolated elderly across London and the UK, through companionship and personal development.

Keeping Good Company is a London company with a team proudly based in the Philippines. The Philippines presence allows us to source fantastic people with amazing qualifications, at a lower cost than we can in London. This enables us to dedicate as much time and resource to this cause as possible – and make it accessible and economical for everyone.

Who we are & why we do it

We’re guided by our mission and core values. This shapes who we are now and leads our evolution.

Our mission

To bring conversation, companionship and personal growth to the isolated and lonely, in an affordable and sustainable way.

We do this with our core values in mind.

Our core values

Passion, compassion, curiosity and communication

These core values dictate how we conduct ourselves, and who we have on our team.

Keeping Good Company is in the people business. It’s all about our clients, and it’s all about our team members making a big difference to the lives of our clients. Without a great team, we have no product. So we intensely focus on getting great people who are personally aligned with our mission and core values.  See below to learn more about our team.

Derek Gallimore, RN

Derek Gallimore, the founder, graduated with a nursing degree from New Zealand. He practiced as a registered nurses in three countries and across many hospital and community settings.

He was originally interested in athletics, and studied nursing with a view to get into sports medicine. The sports medicine didn’t happen, but five years after graduating he’d worked in multiple medical specialties including ICU, HDU, respiratory, urology, surgery, and community; and worked in New Zealand, Australia and UK.  So he developed very valuable real-life ‘people’ experience, early on.

New horizons

Derek later left nursing to pursue his entrepreneurial passions – developing businesses in property and serviced apartments, in the UK.  He had a secondary office in the Philippines for his other business, and this opened his eyes to the incredible people and resources available in that country. Having a secondary support office is commonly referred to as off-shoring or outsourcing.

With the optimisation of technology and the huge labour resource in the Philippines, Derek feels that high cost – yet, under-resourced – economies like the UK could – and should – be taking advantage of off-shoring opportunities more.

Consequently, the concept of Keeping Good Company arose by combing the need of companionship with the abundant available supply of well qualified, highly personable communicators in the Philippines. Read more about ‘why the Philippines’, below.

Derek has brought together his nursing experience and his knowledge of outsourcing to attend to the UK’s loneliness epidemic – through companionship.  To read more about Derek’s journey, click here.

If you’re interested in knowing more: sign up to our mailing list today. You (or a friend) even get a complimentary 25-minute trial session.

Passionate people

First and foremost we need our team members to be great communicators, and great listeners – but that’s just the beginning.

The Keeping Good Company team forms the essence of who we are. Thus it’s critical that the values of our team match the values of our company, and that we’re all aligned on our mission.

Thus, the core values we need from our team, in order to deliver great companionship are: Passion, compassion, curiosity and communication.

Furthermore, we predominantly gravitate towards nurses, psychology and communication university graduates. Most of them are female, and many of them are mothers.

Transparent practice

Because our people are our business; we place a strong emphasis on training, mentoring and also measurement of their quality and performance. Hence, to best manage this, we observe a set of key performance indicators, or ‘KPIs’. This is a concept of self monitoring and continual mindful practice and improvement.

Many companies use KPIs to internally measure their teams. We do as well. However, the difference, is that we share these measurements with you, our clients. In an effort to be completely transparent, we have all measure elements live on our site. Consider it similar to a Trip Advisor review for each team member. So, check out each of their bios for more.

The Philippines

Philippines has had a long and, at points, unfortunate history of early colonisations. First from Spain, Japan briefly and then the US. For many years, the Philippines was a strong military outpost of the US, from which the two countries became very close – politically, culturally and economically.

In the latter half of the 20th Century, the US began outsourcing a lot of its manufacturing. People are familiar with China now being the proxy manufacturing hub for the US, but few know that initially the US looked to the Philippines to manufacture items. This was initially successful, and Philippines was arguably on a trajectory to become the manufacturing juggernaut that China is today.

However, due to Philippines’ government labour-law and political changes, much of the manufacturing was moved from Philippines over to China. This resulted in China becoming the powerhouse it is today, and left the Philippines’ growth trailing behind.

Opportunity comes calling

As soon as telephone technology (and cost) allowed, the Philippines also became a service-based outsourcing service provider to the US. The US had it provide office back-end services such as accounts management, administrative assistance and customer service voice support, as far back as the 1980’s. Back in the early days, outsourcing was only accessible by the big conglomerates.

Despite the political changes which caused the manufacturing to move to China, the back office and offshoring functions remained in the Philippines. This is in part due to the Filipino’s fantastic grasp of the English language, an easy and comfortable accent, a very high saturation of spoken and written English literacy, and good cultural alignment.

These off-shore staffing solutions are often referred to as Business Process Outsourcing (PBO), off-shoring, or outsourcing.

With the advent of the internet – which enabled faster and cheaper communication and transfer of information, the Philippines back-office could increasingly perform more and more remote services effectively. The internet, which led to everything becoming ‘paperless’ enabled the Philippines to become central to many American conglomerate administration processes.

And as the sector matured, the services became affordable and accessible to small and medium sized businesses, and the Philippines started servicing a broader base of countries and companies.

The Philippines has had political instability in the past, but has been very stable in the last few decades.

Economic boon

The BPO industry is booming, and the country’s level of English literacy, language skills and cultural alignment are becoming more and more pronounced. Of the 100m population maybe 80-90% live hand-to-mouth in near poverty. There is a rising middle class though as more and more of the very young and energetic population get graduate degrees and take up careers within the BPO sector.

In 2013, the BPO sector employed about one-million people, and contributed 10% percent to the country’s GDP. It is projected that a further 1.3m jobs will be added at a 17% annual growth rate over the next four years. Read more here.

As a result, the Philippines of today, championed by this burgeoning sector, has one of the strongest economic growth stories in the world – outpacing even China in 2015.  And consequently, the BPO sector is providing the Filipino people with a great opportunity to bring the country out of poverty, educate their children and develop a strong and stable middle class.

Beautiful people

The Philippine people are loving gracious and warm people. They have a very strong sense of family, and have strong adherence to tradition and moral code.

This captivating country and beautiful people are part of what makes Keeping Good Company special, and we hope to share a little bit of this growing success with our clients.

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