When Outsourcing is Transparent

• November 15th, 2007 /
•  Chris Schultz

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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.

• Our team in Russia all have masters degrees in computer science and recruiting additional team members is much easier there than it is here in New Orleans.
• Flatsourcing built siteMighty. This simple fact means that support for siteMighty is handled closer to the developers responsible for it by locating our support team in Russia. We reserved a New Orleans-based Skype phone number that actually rings to our support team leader, Dilyara, in Russia. Call us @ 504-717-4717.
• We time shifted our office hours so that our Flatsourcing Russian office overlaps with our clients in the UK, South Africa, and the US. Coverage isn’t 24/7 yet, but we’re moving that direction.
• Knowledge is transferable. Rather than hiring a SEO/PPC manager here and training them, and after a bad experience with outsourcing this to a Florida-based company, I made the decision to work through training these processes with our Flatsourcing team. After a few months of work on our projects, this will actually be a service that we can market to clients.

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.

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