What happens when location doesn’t matter, communication is instant, and we are all connected through the Internet? New business opportunities abound.
The New York Times had two interesting articles on outsourcing in their small business section on Tuesday. The first, a review of two Indian virtual personal assistant (VPA) firms was interesting. But the second one really caught my attention, the story of a company that provides tech support Yonkers, NY businesses from Bogotá, Colombia.
Etectonics is a company that has taken all operations that can be virtualized and located them in Bogotá, while maintaining a feet-on-the-street tech support in Yonkers. The interesting part of this is that for all intents and purposes the company is actually based in Bogotá, not in New York.
Outsourcing customer service and help-desk function is hardly novel. But few businesses have gone to Colombia; even fewer small businesses have integrated off-site offices as neatly in their operations as this six-year-old computer service company, which serves around 200 small and midsize businesses in the New York area through a voice-over Internet protocol call to Bogotá and keeps a videoconferencing portal on from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. That way, the workers in Colombia, 2,500 miles away from those in Yonkers, can act is if they are in adjoining cubicles.
Interestingly enough, this is much of the same approach that we’ve taken here with Voodoo Ventures and Flatsourcing. When we lost a key team member here in New Orleans this summer, I spent a lot of time thinking about how best to reengineer our company. I examined all of our business functions and found that though we had core competencies with our team here in New Orleans, because this is a knowledge-based business, it made a lot of sense for us to train our Flatsourcing team in Russia on these competencies, and ultimately this was a more scalable solution for us than hiring additional staff here in New Orleans.
The factors in this decision for me really turned inside out the way I think about our business.
So, interestingly, we now are very much a US-based company, where most of our work is done virtually in Russia. At this point I’m the only member of the team here in the US, and we have anywhere between eight and 12 staff members in Russia. And after a few months of training in transition, we’re firing on all cylinders like never before. It’s amazing how flat world is.
Nov 15, 2007 at 5:44 pm
» outsourcing Cost Cutting Cost Savings News: Cost cutting / Costs savings B2B blog news says:
[...] When Outsourcing is Transparent By Chris Schultz fs-vv-sm.jpg What happens when location doesn’t matter, communication is instant, and we are all connected through the Internet? New business opportunities abound. The New York Times had two interesting articles on outsourcing in their … Voodoo Ventures – Idea Fuel Blog – http://chris-schultz-stage.flatsourcing.com [...]
Nov 16, 2007 at 8:35 am
Great post, Chris! It really is amazing how world is “flat”! Guess we all need to learn how to benefit based on it. In Russia for example actually outsourcing in construction is also very popular as local companies just don’t know how to build skyscrapers for example…really amazing..
Nov 16, 2007 at 8:58 am
hi Oleg, thanks for your comment he really is true world is flat. It was so amazing to me is how this IT company is based in Bogotá Colombia but operates in New York. In a big sense, similar to our arrangement with Kazan, Russia operating in New Orleans.
Nov 19, 2007 at 5:19 pm
Chris -
Sounds like there may be some opportunities in places like Columbia or Panama, where operations could be run on a cost efficient basis!