There are benefits associated with outsourcing services such as reduced costs, improvement of product quality and access to highly skilled personnel. This is on the client side. For the service providers, it helps create employment and is a source of foreign exchange inflows where the outsourcing is offshore. But a process outsourcing company in the developing world also faces a number of risks and challenges. An outsourcing company can only succeed if it knows the risks and finds a way to deal with the obstacles it meets during the course of business.

One of the greatest challenges facing the process outsourcing company today is the ever-increasing levels of competition. While in the early throes of the outsourcing services industry in developing countries there seemed to be more opportunities than there were businesses to provide them, that is not the case today. There are new companies making their way into the market. Countries such as India that have traditionally held a dominant position in the outsourcing market but have to contend with competition from many other Asian countries such as the Philippines, China, Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia and Sri Lanka. There is also competition from African countries such as South Africa, Nigeria, Egypt, Ghana and Kenya. Thus, the process outsourcing company that will survive must find a way of adding value to the service they provide to their clientele.

The other challenge facing many a process outsourcing company in the developing world is concentration risk. As the market thins out one must now compete for lucrative contracts with more businesses. Many businesses must now make do with just one major contract. If that contract is for some reason terminated businesses in the developed world may not be able to survive much longer.

Another setback for the process outsourcing company, especially the ones based overseas, is geographical distance and subsequent difference in time zones. Some process outsourcing companies have to resort to having their employees working day or night shifts. Sometimes, this may lead to the lack of sleep and in the long run, the staff mental and physical health as well as overall morale may be affected. Eventually, the outsourcing company may get into a vicious cycle where it tries to meet the client’s expectations but never has the right employees to effectively perform the work to the client’s requirements.

Daven Michaels Author of the book Outsource This!

Bookkeeping is a word that scares a lot of people in the United States, which is why a lot companies have chosen to outsource their bookkeeping tasks. Many businesses choose to outsource their bookkeeping tasks because it affords them the opportunity to focus on their core or other business activities. These other important tasks may include producing products, marketing their products, client liaison, procurement, human resource management, and a host of others tasks. You will feel very comfortable knowing that an expert bookkeeper is handling the business requirement of your company.

America is a land of opportunities and a lot of people want to leave their countries and take up permanent residence in the United States. Thanks to the Internet, people from poor or developing nations do not have to leave their countries in search of a job in the U.S., they can simply telecommute which is one of the things that makes outsourcing really interesting.

If you have decided to outsource any of the following business tasks, it is important for you to do the necessary things.

Outsourcing Writing Tasks
The truth is that you can only get the most affordable writers offshore. You might be cautious about starting to outsource writing tasks to non-Americans but the truth is that there are a lot of non-Americans who can write well and will not charge you an arm and a leg. You must make sure that you request samples from the outsourced firm or person and if the outsourcing provider cannot send over copies of previous work done, then you should not do business with them, period.

Outsourcing Telemarketing Tasks
There is a big difference between outsourcing web content tasks and telemarketing tasks and the difference is that you can never hear an “accent” when you read content! You need to hire an outsourcing firm that employs workers who speak English flawlessly. You must also make sure that you hear these telemarketers over the phone so that you can be sure that you are actually hiring employees who are audible to customers and potential customers. You need to understand that people don’t respond well to people with difficult accents. For instance, the Philippines is quite popular when it comes to call center outsourcing.

Outsourcing Web Design Tasks
Web design is a really important task and it is up to you to choose an outsourcing company that specializes in delivering top quality web sites only.

Daven Michaels Author of the book Outsource This!

You have made up your mind to start outsourcing – well done!

You will quickly notice the positive impact that outsourcing will have on your business, and go on to wonder how on earth you ever managed without it. Outsourcing is very important; if you really want to grow a lucrative business you cannot do it all by yourself. It is time to build a network of competent individuals around you that you can outsource daily projects to.

But where do I start outsourcing?! For a couple of people, making up their minds which aspect(s) of their business they should or could outsource is pretty simple. To these people, it makes sense to decide which regular activities to outsource. But for some other people, they are absolutely clueless as to how to start the whole outsourcing process because there is no aspect of their business that stands out as being more easily outsourced than any other part of their business.

Start by keeping a log of your day – this way, you can identify what aspect of your business to outsource. Try your best to keep close track of your work activities each day, doing this for a week is ideal. It may seem rather difficult to start this, but it will help you save precious time in the long run. As soon as you have done this, just sit back and take a look at the time log. Then start to spot:

1. Any task that you would really like to hand over.
2. Tasks that could be done by another person.
3. Tasks that in a perfect world, you would naturally hand over.

Say, for instance, you do not like doing the company accounts, or you wish that someone else can write your company’s articles, and press releases for your website. Make sure you highlight each time during the course of the week you spend doing the accounts or writing articles for your company’s website. You will be surprised at how much time you spend on tasks that are not even part of your core business. These tasks can be handed over to someone else to handle.

This is of course where you should start outsourcing, as soon as you start this process you will surly get totally hooked. You will begin to notice all the other things that you will need to delegate. So what are you waiting for?!

Daven Michaels Author of the book Outsource This!

It is no secret that the Philippines is a globally recognized outsourcing destination. The reasons are that there are no language barriers, you get highly skilled workers, and of course, low rates. India has dominated the BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) industry for a really long time. But there is a new player in the game that has raised the bar for BPO standards.

Like a lot of other Asian countries, the Philippines offer low rates for very skilled professionals – which happen to be one of the core reasons for outsourcing in the first place. Sure, India has been the premier outsourcing destination for a pretty long time and China is now entering the outsourcing field. The Philippines sure have distinctive advantages over the other outsourcing countries in Asia because the outsourcing firms in the Philippines are very familiar with the American culture – this is the reason why a lot of call centers for United States based companies are in this country. This country was colonized by the Americans for quite a number of years. The educational system in the Philippines is patterned after the American educational system – that explains the reason  Filipinos really understand the American culture and work ethics. Filipinos write English and communicate like typical Americans.

It is true that in the early years of the new millennium there was a lot of speculations from (certain quarters) whether or not the Philippines can actually become a major player in the Business Process Outsourcing field. Now, the Philippines BPO industry has grown to a 3 billion dollar industry and it is still growing. According to a Goldman Sachs report the rate of development of the BPO industry in the Philippines has really been very impressive. It is really clear that the Philippines has stamped its presence on the global outsourcing map.

Presently outsourcing firms and their branches are springing up from the country’s capital to various parts of the country. The expansion is not as a result of the increase in demand of phone call centers, but also other complicated and highly skilled services such as:

1. Website design
2. Software development
3. Medical transcription
4. SEO services
5. Animation
6. Legal services, etc.

Daven Michaels Author of the book Outsource This!

To a lot of people outsourcing might seem like a waste of money and precious time, as well as an unnecessary complication. After all, why should one send business abroad when the same job could probably be done better right at home? To anyone running for office, the topic on outsourcing serves as a real objection to “taking work” away from “our citizens.” Compassion towards this topic will only elicit a couple of votes and nothing more.

But to all businessmen and women, outsourcing is a modern day boon, period. Outsourcing offers all types of businesses the liberty to dump non-core but still important sectors of their administration on firms that specialize in those individual aspects – leaving business owners the freedom to totally focus on those areas of their business that bring in the real dough.

The most alluring advantage of outsourcing is the cost effective feature. Information Technology and human resource services in Europe or the US is not exactly cheap. Let’s simply say that outsourcing is typically an alternative that provides these services at a much lower cost by providing a cheap yet highly productive work force.

Let’s take Asia (India in particular) as an example. Thousands of highly intelligent people graduate in different fields every year. The truth is that almost all of these graduates speak impeccable English and dream of earning good income in a short period of time. Thanks to the boom of BPOs in the past ten years, it has given them the opportunity to realize their dreams. It provides them with the great opportunity to stay close to their home and earn almost the same income as they would if they worked abroad. An individual would earn on average about 300 to 500 dollars each month. Yes, it may not be much to an average American but believe it or not, an Indian would be quite contented with that salary taking into consideration the conversion rate. So it is a win-win situation for your company as well as the firm that you are outsourcing to.

There is something wonderful about Americans: a lot of American business men and women will never take advantage of outsourcing if it means that it is going to mean that other people will be working their fingers to the bones without being duly compensated.

Daven Michaels Author of the book Outsource This!

These days, people talk about outsourcing. A lot of people say that it saves you money and precious time. Is this really true? Let’s take a look:

Virtual assistants only charge for the specific time that they have worked.

Virtual assistants will only use their own equipment

You do not have to worry about paying sick pay, employment insurance, worker’s compensation, employment insurance, or retirement plans.

You do not have to pay agency fees. Temping agencies are known to charge an agency fee to be able to work with them.

You can also benefit from time zone advantage, your virtual assistant is working for you while you are sleeping.

You do not have to think about paying training expenses for specialized skills because virtual assistants are already qualified.

Here are a couple of the tasks you can delegate to your virtual assistant:

a.A virtual assistant can go to your company’s website and add press pages to it, every website should of course have a press page. A virtual assistant can even create a press page and also add links to articles that feature your company on a daily or regular basis.

b.A virtual assistant can post your company’s video on the internet (on YouTube). Yes, YouTube is known to reach over one billion views per day. You would agree that it sure makes a lot of sense that your company’s video get posted online and get advertised on YouTube.  A virtual assistant can help:
Set up an account for you
Post your company’s videos
Send out links on Twitter and Facebook
Embed the videos to your company’s website

c.Assists you in distributing your company’s articles and press releases on various directories. It is very pertinent to write articles and press releases regularly. But, it is also very important that these articles and press releases are distributed to people who actually read them. A virtual assistant can distribute them to different directories on the internet.

d.Help to translate your company’s website. Are your doing business with a lot of clients who do not speak English (which happens to be a universal language)? There are virtual assistants who are multilingual and can easily translate your website into different languages. Okay, they may not be certified translators, but they can also offer the same quality for a very pocket-friendly price.

Daven Michaels Author of the book Outsource This!