A 33-year-old American executive is changing the way companies manage payroll in the Philippines.
Patrick Gentry, who grew up in a farm with no TV set in Oregon, is the co-founder and chief executive of Sprout Solutions, a two-year-old Philippines-based company that automates administrative tasks around human resources and payroll.
“From having just two employees [including me] when we started in 2015, we are now a team of 95 and growing,” says Gentry, who is married to Alex Gentry, Sprout’s co-founder and chief product officer. The couple has two children.
The company transferred to a bigger office at Cyber Sigma in McKinley West, Taguig in January this year to accommodate more employees. It has recently closed a seed funding round involving $1.6 million from Kickstart, Beenext, Wavemaker and Bridge Sea.
“Our growth has been overwhelming the past two years. Since we just closed our funding round, our plan is to build out the solution and the team as we continue our expansion in the enterprise space in the Philippines. There is a huge opportunity here in enterprise and it’s exciting to have the funds to tackle it,” Gentry says in an emailed interview.
Gentry graduated in 2007 with a degree in Environmental Science from the University of British Columbia. He started in the software industry as a project manager for a startup in Silicon Valley called Toolwire in 2008.
“In 2009, I became a founding shareholder of KMC Solutions with my friend, Mike McCollough,” he says. KMC Solutions is an office and staff leasing company with a headcount of around 800.
Gentry is also the founder of The Unconventional Farmer – an alternative gardening for those interested in zero-input farming. “This is a passion project outside of normal work,” he says.
Gentry says the business idea for Sprout “was born out of a pain point that I have observed while I was with KMC Solutions. Our goal is really to ease doing business in the Philippines.”
“Payroll calculations were tedious and error-prone, with a simple oversight potentially costing the company a significant amount of money, and the paperwork for keeping track of employees was getting overwhelming. HR software was already available then, but none of them was tailor-fitted to the Philippines so I figured, why not build an HR and payroll solution that would not only streamline processes but also empower local businesses?” he says.
“So in 2009, Sprout got started with KMC using its flagship software, Payroll Pie, internally. Payroll Pie eventually gained enough traction to step out and become an independent product offered to many businesses. In 2015, Sprout Solutions was incorporated,” says Gentry.
Gentry says while the original target market of Sprout was the local BPO industry, the company has eventually gained clients from various industries including tech, media, food and hospitality.
“From Payroll Pie [which is now called Sprout Payroll], we have expanded our product and service offerings. Now, we offer Sprout Payroll, Sprout HR; and the recently launched Sprout Insight and Sprout Recruit,” he says.
Gentry is optimistic about the future, as the company keeps “growing and exploring new paradigm-shifting technologies that will help business of all sizes in the Philippines.”
“I’m happy that more people here in the Philippines are becoming open to new technologies that will help improve their businesses. I believe that the key for this country to keep growing is for everyone to learn how to adapt to technology and use it to be better at what we do,” he says.
Gentry believes that analytics will be a huge thing in HR management in the coming years. “This is the reason why we built Sprout Insight, our new module. We want to help HR produce valuable data that will be very helpful for a company’s decision making process,” he says.
On other millennials who aim to become top executives one days, Gentry’s advice is to “look for what’s painful.”
“That’s how to start a good business. What sucks? What needs fixing? If you look at all of the successful companies, that’s how they did it. Back in the early days, you had to take classes just to do internet searches. It was terrible. People complained about it. A couple of guys decided to fix it, and they came up with a new way of searching. They called it Google. Imagine, that’s the story behind a ton of successful companies. You need to solve a pain,” says Gentry.
Gentry also advises millennials to choose the challenging path to success. “Starting with a cool idea is tempting, though. These days in the startup world, there are so many solutions looking for problems. So many people are developing things that are amazing and wonderful, and maybe you’d use them, just because they’re cool. But most of these are going to fail because they’re not solving a problem,” he says.
“So choose the challenging path. You become successful by working on a problem nobody else can figure out. You’ll make everyone else happier, too. It’s easy to think of solutions, but it’s hard to solve problems,” says Gentry.
Gentry won as Founder of the Year at the Philippine Rice Bowl Awards in October 2017. The Philippines Rice Bowl Awards is a circuit of the larger Asean Rice Bowl Award that celebrate entrepreneurship and innovation.