OutsourceSurvival.com

This article discusses one of the major problems encountered by inexperienced entrepreneurs in using international freelancers- project turn around time.

Many entrepreneur’s first and only freelance experience ends with them feeling deeply disappointed by either the speed or the quality of the work. They hear about guys you can hire for $4/hr, and rush off and splash some cash on the next big thing. Like many of the internet pot-o-gold stories, it turns out to be less successful then the flier suggested so they return to lurk in forums with their stories of woe.

Sometimes projects are so slow!

I am all for hiring freelancers in developing nations… but…

It can be very, very, time consuming. What you save in $$$ you need to invest in time. There is no way around it… at least not that I’ve found. Be prepared to invest a lot of time on the first few projects. You can’t leave them on autopilot, they will crash. With practice you’ll get faster, better results, but it will never be the same as buying services from your shop down the street. Read the rest of this entry

I accidently skipped over this, so a quick rewind to define outsourcing. I decided to outsource this to Wikipedia, you can see their definition below:

“Outsourcing is subcontracting a process, such as product design or manufacturing, to a third-party company. The decision to outsource is often made in the interest of lowering firm or making better use of time and energy costs, redirecting or conserving energy directed at the competencies of a particular business, or to make more efficient use of land, labor, capital, (information) technology and resources. Outsourcing became part of the business lexicon during the 1980s. It is essentially a division of labour.” www.wikipedia.org

A little too convoluted to be useful for our purposes but a thorough definition I think you’ll agree… it would make a lovely quote in an MBA essay or if we were putting together a textbook…

This is part of the problem with understanding outsourcing for small business. A great deal of the popular media still describes it in terms of its government or corporate function. It’s all very 1990s It conjures images of 10 000 page service agreements, teams of lawyers negotiating the smallest details of who’s responsible for what, where, when and how much. Read the rest of this entry

This started out as 1 article, but started to get a bit on the long side, so for your convenience I’ve split it into two parts. Part 1 discusses purchasing power, whilst Part 2 discusses scale and efficiency advantages.

Successful outsourcing creates LEVERAGE and UNLOCKS your time so that you can focus on the things important to you.

Off load the junk, low value activities or the things that you don’t have the skills or resources to do efficiently. Doing this frees you to apply more resources (time/money) to the important activities within your business. And that means increased profit.

In this article I’m going to discuss the leverage advantages of using freelance providers. What do I mean by leverage? I’m talking about Purchasing Power + Scale + Efficiency. I’ll discuss these in the context of outsourcing below:

Purchasing Power: You’re actually a lot wealthier than you think…

If you’re reading this from the US, UK, Australia, Canada or any one of the first world nations your local currency has a lot of purchasing power. If you’ve ever travelled overseas you’ll know what I mean, $60 a night for 5 star accommodation, meals and drinks? You won’t find that at home!

Buying locally with your local currency means you only achieve 1 to 1 relationship; your dollar is worth the same to you as the guy that you’re giving it to. But shop overseas and you can achieve 1 to 20 ratio (or more), because your currency is worth more (relatively speaking) to the guy you’re giving it to. I’m not an economist, so I’m not going to try and get into the details of this effect, but to summarise; it works because of the relative wealth and economic stability of your country compared to that of another. Wages, living costs, food, standards of living tend to be proportionately lower in the less wealthy nation, and this has a direct impact on the cost/value of labour (what people will charge for their time and skills). For example, it costs less to put a roof over your head and food in your stomach in India, so the minimum price you can afford to charge for your time is less. Makes sense right? Read the rest of this entry