Outsourcing; Corporate America’s Nuclear weapon, with one click of the mouse or one international call , an entire staff can be wiped out. This effective form of increasing productivity while decreasing  cost has been practiced covertly by Corporations ultimately making assiduous employees redundant. We as entrepreneur should also take slices of this colossal outsourcing pie, but we must obey certain rules:

Rules

• Don’t hire employees with an intent to outsource in the future. If you wan’t to outsource; outsource from scratch.
• Choose carefully what it is you outsource and what you keep in-house, know your business inside out; familiarize yourself things you can handle yourself  and things that a better done elsewhere.
• Continual checkup, check-up consistently on your work thats being outsourced, often times your “outsourcee”  may lose direction and focus, this is where you will need to step in.
• Forging a strong partnership, choosing your outsourcing supplier wisely but continuing to work hard at the relationship after the contact is signed to make sure the partnership remains strong.

Now that we’ve gone over the rules, I like to think there are two ways to outsource not just the common hire a guy from india and pay him triple times less than what the norm usually is.

1) Your Friends: Your friends are a real life version of  a person holding a “will work for food sign”, because they will literally work for food or shelter. It’s this simple, you have a project that needs to be done and your positive your friends can handle the project and its quantity, then make it a Pizza night. Call a couple of your closest friends eat, bond , and watch them make you rich. The make you rich part was just a joke, but your drive and determination will inspire them ( considering your not friends with a bunch of immature imbeciles) so technically you are offering them something apart from free food. But you have to be very careful when working with friends; the line between work and play is severely blurred , one minute your talking about marketing your product like the way Modern Warfare 2 was, to actually playing Modern Warfare 2 the rest of the night.

2)  Third World Cashing-in : This is the outsourcing we are all familiar with, cheap labour and extremely hard workers. Remember a penny saved is a penny earned, all the extra cost your saving from outsourcing really is like profit and it should be used like it as well. Grow your company further with it, pay of debts and home grown employees. Two major sites to  go shopping for outsourcee’s are; www.elance.com and www.getacoder.com. There are a couple of things to consider if you decide to outsource internationally , which I somehow manage to disregard  and now paying the price.

• Timezone; luckily I have nowhere to be in the morning, so I spend all night working with my crew while the day is just starting of at their location.
• Language Barrier; Everything seemed cool when we where emailing back and forth, until one day we decided to have a video conference via Skype, I though his english sounded like that of  a caveman from the 1880’s and he thinks mine sounds like a bitching spoiled brat from the future.

Don’t forget to view your outsourcees as potential partners you would work with in the future again so before you pick one check references and remember the rule to try and forge a strong partnership.