A tower made of spaghetti is a modest test of management. It offers no corner office, no impressive job title and very little structural forgiveness. At Luck to Sand Beach in Dapitan City, it was one of the exercises in an OBI Services leadership gathering on September 13, 2025. Cliede Castañeda, the company’s founder and CEO, joined colleagues for a program of games, dinner and reflection. His remarks that evening returned to a shared direction: “it’s about moving forward together.”
The setting was a beach. The concern was familiar to anyone who has had to get a group of people through a working day. Who understands the task? Who listens? What happens when the plan needs changing? Castañeda’s business depends on teams answering those questions for clients elsewhere. His public working life runs through support queues, sales operations and the arrangements that allow one company to entrust its daily work to another.
Seven years before the founder’s title
Before OBI Services, there was Convergys. Castañeda’s recorded career includes seven years as an eService manager there, from June 2007 to June 2014. The dates matter because they give the founder’s title some depth. By the time he started his own business, support operations had occupied a substantial stretch of his professional life.
His next recorded appointment was sales and retention manager at Phil-Am Outsourcing Solutions, from June 2014 to August 2015. In January 2016, he moved into a role combining leadership of an English call center with business development at REERACOEN BPO. That appointment ran until March 2017. OBI’s founding year followed: 2017.
The sequence brings several sides of a service business into view. Support deals with what customers need after a purchase. Retention concerns whether they stay. Business development asks where the next relationship will come from. These were the responsibilities on his résumé before the responsibility for an entire company arrived.
eService management
Sales & retention
Call center & development
Founder & CEO
The cost of starting over
OBI’s account of its beginnings describes Castañeda and a small virtual-assistant team hearing recurring complaints from clients: inconsistent work, disappearing freelancers and the time consumed by teaching replacements. The company developed an approach built around dedicated, office-based staff. The underlying problem was continuity. A client might hand over a task successfully and still have to explain it all again when the person changed.
That origin story helps explain Castañeda’s stated aim of integrating his staff into clients’ working teams. The word extension carries a practical obligation. An external team has to learn how the client works, rather than simply receive a pile of tasks and send back a pile of answers.
“Our goal is to act as an extension of our clients’ teams.”
Cliede Castañeda
Consider an online shop’s product records. Names, descriptions and images may look like small administrative details until somebody has to keep them consistent across a growing catalog. The same is true of an unanswered customer inquiry or an untidy customer database. Such work has a talent for remaining invisible until it goes wrong.
Castañeda’s company sells help with that everyday accumulation: data entry, virtual assistance, customer support, technical support and lead generation. The attraction is easy to grasp. A business owner can delegate recurring work. Making the arrangement useful requires attention to the less glamorous details of instruction, coordination and follow-through.
OBI also offers different ways to pay for the work. Its public descriptions include hourly and performance-based arrangements. An outsourcing directory advertises outbound lead generation from $12.50 per lead. That is a listed starting price for a specific service, rather than a price for everything the company does. For Castañeda’s customers, choosing an arrangement means deciding what work they need and how its completion will be measured.
The business has a Philippine base and an international audience. Its current company listing places headquarters in Dipolog City; an outsourcing directory also lists a Mandaue address in Cebu. Castañeda’s own founder profile gives Mandaue as his location. The shared geography puts his work within a network of Philippine offices and client relationships that crosses national borders.
The software still needs someone
One revealing corner of Castañeda’s business is its software support offer. On a page fronted by him as founder and CEO, OBI has advertised help with setup, troubleshooting and maintenance for business applications. The list includes SuiteDash, WordPress and Flowlu. There are forms to configure, pages to assemble, teams and users to set up, and errors to investigate.
A software subscription can arrive almost instantly. A useful working system often takes longer. Someone still has to decide how the forms behave and which users belong where. A dashboard, however handsome, will not perform its own introductions.
The offer makes that gap tangible. Clients supply the necessary content and design material; the support team helps put the tools to work. It is an unusually concrete way of looking at outsourcing. The assignment may be a particular configuration problem rather than a whole department. Castañeda’s business appears in SuiteDash’s validated agency partner directory, linking his name directly with that implementation work.
There is a thread connecting this service to his earlier roles. Tools, customers and staff all meet in operations. The founder’s challenge is to make those encounters productive enough that the client can get on with the next piece of work.
A beach, a tower, a shared direction
The Dapitan gathering offered a view of the relationships inside that operation. The program brought leaders to Luck to Sand Beach under a theme of leadership in action. Alongside the spaghetti tower were communication exercises and activities involving trust and coordination. There was a seaside dinner, then conversation around a bonfire.
Castañeda’s emphasis on advancing together fits the setting. A tower-building exercise has a useful impatience with hierarchy: it will stand or fall regardless of who has the grandest title. The evening gave colleagues time to discuss their experience away from the normal rhythm of client assignments.
Around Castañeda sits a named leadership group. OBI’s public team roster lists Jowie L. as chief operating officer, Kristine O. as chief marketing officer and Ester G. as chief finance officer. It also introduces account managers, supervisors, recruitment and technical staff. The roster gives his language about teams a visible cast of colleagues, each with a different part of the operation to mind.
Trust has an operating cost
Two days before the beach gathering, on September 11, 2025, OBI published an announcement of ISO 27001:2022 certification. Castañeda’s accompanying remarks focused on continuing to improve security practices and preserving clients’ confidence in how their data would be handled. The certification was an organizational milestone; the responsibility he described extended beyond the announcement.
The company outlined employee training, audits, security tools and access controls as parts of its approach. These are practical concerns for an operation whose staff work with other businesses’ information. A client handing over records is also making a decision about who can see them and how the work will be managed.
That adds another dimension to Castañeda’s promise of an integrated client team. Familiarity helps people collaborate. Clear processes help define the boundaries of that collaboration. His public comments put information security alongside efficiency and reliability, giving all three a place in the commercial relationship.
The aspiration is ongoing improvement. In his account, earning certification belonged to a longer effort to keep strengthening practices. For a founder selling dependable service, that is an exacting ambition: the next ordinary workday still has to justify the client’s confidence.
Eight years, with the whole room in the picture
On October 12, 2025, OBI marked its eighth anniversary with a Thanksgiving gala at Amorra. Castañeda was named among the executives introduced at the event. The program included employee performances, a talent competition, recognition and formal clothes. It was a chance for the people behind the work to become the evening’s principal attraction.
The group photograph suits this part of his story. A founder has a name and a title; a service business has to turn the efforts of many colleagues into something a client can use. An anniversary briefly puts those colleagues together in the same frame. The inboxes can wait for the photograph.
Castañeda’s path to OBI passes through years spent managing support, retention and business development. His remarks since founding it keep returning to people working together, client continuity and the care required when handling information. These concerns belong to the same working life. A team needs to understand its assignment, know its colleagues and remain worthy of the responsibility it has accepted.
There is a certain charm in a founder whose business can be explained through such ordinary things: the record entered properly, the tool configured, the colleague who understands the handover. The beach tower lasts an afternoon. The work of being counted on resumes the following morning.