We offer to outside clients many of the services we use internally.

For you as a client, this means a number of advantages:

• Dollar for dollar or pound for pound you can by more IQ when you use our services. Our team consists mostly of university graduates or folks, who are well on their way. This shortens learning curves and allows you to use the staff more flexibly.
• Dollar for dollar or pound for pound you can by more IQ when you use our services. Our team consists mostly of university graduates or folks, who are well on their way. This shortens learning curves and allows you to use the staff more flexibly.
• You can buy staff better suited for a particular task. For instance, if you are looking for a web designer who is also supposed to acquire customers, you will almost always have to make a trade-off somewhere. A good technician or a good graphic designer will not usually be your star salesperson and vice versa. Perhaps you'd be better off to hire a dedicated sales person or part-time sales person and handle the grunt work of web design through outsourcing. Or if you are looking for a bookkeeper - would it not perhaps be more effective to have someone with a high level of qualification to do the bookkeeping work and leave the filing to someone with lesser skills? Why compromise by having a highly qualified bookkeeper file papers or by leaving the accounting work in the hands of your secretary?
• " You don't need to worry about driving up your costs because of sickness, maternity, labour disputes, separate men's and ladies' washrooms, room costs, etc.

What kind of objections do we hear against outsourcing?

One of the major concerns arises out of the area of confidentiality and competition. Let's tackle that subject head-on.

Let's say you are running an advertising agency and you do graphics work for your customers. What will protect you from your outsourcing partner working around you and stealing your customers?

Well, the fact is, you can better protect yourself against such breaches in confidentiality dealing with outsourcing partners than you can, dealing with your own staff. Labour law in many countries is quite restrictive in the degree of protection you can enforce vis-à-vis your staff (or ex-staff) on the subject of non-competition. By contrast, you have complete freedom to structure your contracts with your outsourcing partner and you can build in non-competition and confidentiality clauses with real teeth right up front. We are quite prepared to enter into such agreements with our clients, which would render a breach totally uninteresting. We do the same with our staff and free-lancers.

Outsourcing Off-shore or In-house?

One question which should be addressed from case to case is this: Does it make more sense for us to work on your computers through remote control or would it make more sense for us to do the work on our computers.

This will depend on the circumstances. Let's take bookkeeping as an example. How often do you want to access your accounting data? If you want to have round-the-clock access to up-to-date bookkeeping information, then it might be best for us to do the work on your computer. This has the additional advantage that we can use your software, which may be different from ours.

On the other end of the scale, we can do the bookkeeping entirely on our system and you will get the monthly reports at the end of the month. This would be the case, for instance, for companies presently engaging an external accountant to do their bookkeeping (only cheaper). Or, in between the two extremes, we can do the bookkeeping on our computers and you could have access to your account on our computer through remote control. This would be a possible solution if you need to get into your data only occasionally.
(Please be advised that we offer bookkeeping services only to the extent permitted by national law in each country we serve)

Customer Contact:

Sometimes we hear the objection "this position requires customer contact. Therefore, we must do it in-house". This is not so. In our company, incoming calls can (and are) picked up in different countries. Any incoming call can be transferred to any other staff member at the click of a mouse.

The mere fact that a position requires customer contact is no reason why you have to live with the disadvantages of building up your own staff levels. Even if you can't or won't make any changes to your telephone system, nothing will prevent you from sending an instant message to the responsible individual on your remote team and have him or her call the customer back. Alternatively, the customer could call us directly. This is no different than the situation of many companies who presently have more than one office without a common telephone system for all of the offices. As a third solution, you can simply transfer the customer through the public telephone system. Compared to what you pay extra and all the extra headaches you have by staffing up yourself, these are cheap solutions, indeed.

Are there any questions we have not answered?

We look forward to your enquiry.