Outsourcing is Overrated (Conspiracy by the West?)

The West promoted this evil “outsourcing” concept in the Arab world in order to keep Arabs from learning new skills. They want Arabs to pay others for things that Arabs could do themselves. This way Arabs wouldn’t learn any new skills to compete with other economies. MUAHAHAHA!

Yes, I’m an economist and I know about comparative advantage vs. absolute advantage, but this is also a part of the elaborate Western conspiracy. Damn those scheming cowards!

The above is what’s been reported to me as said by some Arab economist in Dubai.

Do you think what he said is beyond ridiculous and outright insane? Wait until you hear what I have to say about the subject!

First of all, I should make it clear that I don’t have a company of a few hundred or even dozen employees. I work alone. And from my lone-wolf perspective I write this post.

I’ve read a few books that sang the praises of outsourcing. And there was a time when I tried to outsource a lot of my tasks. The truth is: I ended up wasting a lot of my time and money because I didn’t know about the practical drawbacks of outsourcing. Even though the books I read were indeed written by Western authors, I don’t think these drawbacks or downsides have anything to do with a Western conspiracy. These are just practical obstacles to outsourcing that are often overlooked.

Quality

The benefit of outsourcing is easy to understand. You specialize in what you’re good at and delegate what you’re not so good at to someone else. This way, you produce more and at a higher quality. How nice! Except in reality, it doesn’t quite work like this.

When you hire someone to perform certain tasks for you, they’re interested in one thing: delivering the minimum requirements, sweeping things under the rug, and moving on to the next task/client. This will be especially true for someone who tries to outsource on the cheap. The outsourced work you usually end up receiving is crap that barely fits into your project, if at all.

Of course, this is not always true. Some times you might get lucky and find a starting up, cheap provider that does quality work. But even without luck, there are ways to avoid receiving crap outsourced work. Two words: Pay. Up.

Pay with Your Time

Many people think that when you outsource something, you no longer have to worry about the method with which your tasks are being done.  But that’s not entirely true. To make sure that the tasks you delegate are completed in the manner you envisage, you have to do one of two things:

One thing you can do is supply extensive documentation and descriptions of the desired deliverables; leave no room for assumptions. The second thing is micromanage the process. That is, supervise at every step of the way. Ask for regular updates and snapshots of the completed work. Give instructions and feedback along the way. Of course, you can also utilize a combination of these two methods.

But the problem remains the same, you haven’t really completely freed yourself. You still had to dedicate a big portion of your time to the outsourced tasks, even though they are outsourced!

Pay with Your Money

But are there providers out there that are smart, creative, and have high standards of work ethics that they don’t require supervision or extensive instructions? Well, of course. But no one is gonna give you their hearts and souls on the cheap. Good people are expensive.

So, you could outsource tasks with minimum description, provide no supervision and still get above expected results. But that’s only if you outsource to really smart people that dedicate themselves to your stuff. And in many such cases, it’s not financially feasible to outsource.

When it is Easy to Outsource

I still outsource some tasks. In fact, I’m waiting on deliverables as I write this.  But I’ve learned to only outsource repetitive, data-collection or data-entry types of tasks that don’t require a lot of creativity and that are easy to describe.

Outsourcing could also work for high level tasks such as content writing if you don’t care about the quality, i.e. you’re just looking to fill out a website or template with a bunch of text. But if you want writing (or any work) that is of high quality, full of insights, expertise, and intelligence, you’ll have to either do it yourself, or pay up!