Outsource offshore

Finding worthy topics to discuss was the highest priority when I started the Churchill Club five years ago, so I sought advice from a number of quite senior people on what they thought were issues that mattered to the technology start-up community.

And like most advice in the world, it turned out to be horribly wrong. Eventually, I just started putting on events to discuss topics that I felt I would be prepared to pay to go to. Turns out, unsurprisingly, that I’m a good bellwether for events that matter to people growing new businesses.

So having decided to outsource some of the technology support parts of the Churchill Club business and not knowing how, I decided to have an event looking at outsourcing tasks offshore to get fast, quality service at the $10 an hour mark. The event focused on using virtual assistants, sourced through products like oDesk and eLance. And as per the Churchill Club model, I got three experienced people on the subject to share their learnings. So here is what they came up with on selecting staff.

• Start with simple, non-critical tasks until you improve at writing briefs and selecting people.
• When you post your job you will get lots of responses and many won’t have even read the details of the job. Therefore add something like, “Write ‘banana’ in the first line of your response”. If they don’t, ignore them.
• Maybe split your tasks into two pieces and select three people to do say, the first 10% then select one to complete. At this price it doesn’t matter there is doubling up. Lots of mini tests when selecting avoids heartache downstream.
• Remember you can post a job but only invite one person to do the work if you want to test them further and still take advantage of the off-shoring website’s features such as payment escrows.
• Avoid anyone who provides a generic response.
• Always use people with a high rating. But remember that people are comfortable adding positive feedback and are reluctant to add negative feedback, so pay attention to the number of jobs that do not have feedback recorded against them.
• Get sample work from all of your short list.
• The supplier’s portfolio may look wonderful, however if it’s a large company, be wary – you may get the junior assigned to your project.
• Consider outsourcing a portfolio of work to a consultant who then manages the outsourcing for you.
• Consider outsourcing work to company, rather than an individual if you want something like cutting edge SEO knowledge.

The three speakers passing on their hard won lessons were Pete Williams, Alex Levashov and Linh Hoang , all of whom had thousands of hours experience with outsourcing work to individuals and teams al over the world. Turns out, unsurprisingly, that this question about outsourcing effectively was on a lot of other people minds as well, so I’m glad I asked the question.

Brendan Lewis is a serial technology entrepreneur having founded: Ideas Lighting, Carradale Media, Edion, Verve IT, The Churchill Club and Flinders Pacific. He has set up businesses for others in Romania, Indonesia, Hong Kong and Vietnam and is the sole Australian representative of the City of London for Foreign Direct Investment. Qualified in IT and Accounting, he has also spent time running an Advertising agency and as a Cavalry Officer with the Australian Army Reserve.