Families now send small jobs overseas
posted in Outsourcing News and Top Outsourcing deals, New Outsourcing Destinations |Source:www.dailyherald.com
When David San Filippo decided to create a tribute video in honor of his sister’s wedding, he could have gotten a recommendation from a friend or looked up video editors in the phone book. Instead, he did what big corporations have been doing for more than a decade: sent the work offshore.
On the Internet, San Filippo located a graphic artist in Romania who agreed to do the whole thing for $59. The result was a splashy two-minute video with a space theme and “Star Wars” soundtrack. It won raves at the wedding.
Offshore outsourcing has transformed the way U.S. companies do business. Now, some early adopters are figuring out how to tap overseas workers for personal tasks.
Americans are turning to a vast talent pool in India, China, Bangladesh and elsewhere for jobs ranging from landscape architecture to kitchen remodeling and math tutoring. They’re outsourcing some surprisingly small jobs, including getting a dress designed, creating address labels for wedding invitations or finding a good deal on a hotel room, for example.
Such “personal offshoring” is still new and represents a tiny fraction of the more than $20 billion overseas outsourcing industry. But management consultants and economists say it’s likely to evolve as offshore workers identify the opportunities.
Thanks to instant messaging, computer scanners and e-mail attachments, any work that doesn’t require meeting in person has the potential to be done overseas.
The approach relies on the same model that drives corporate outsourcing: labor arbitrage, or benefiting from the wage differential between U.S. workers and those in developing countries. In the U.S., tutoring services charge $40 to $60 an hour for math help. Some skilled tutors in India are paid $2 to $3 an hour.
Sending personal work offshore requires Internet proficiency, and some patience as well. Though a few firms have begun tailoring their services to consumers, most deal primarily with businesses. Tapping this bargain work force means knowing about the online bazaars where workers abroad compete to bid for small projects.
Some big free-lancing sites include Elance.com, Guru.com and Rentacoder.com. In a recent study on the growth of offshoring services to small businesses and homes, market researcher Evalueserve found more than 90 such online marketplaces, with 500,000 vendors from low-wage countries using them.
Consumers must also be able to recognize when a routine task can be done digitally, and across time zones.
Earlier this year, Dan Frey went in search of an artist to illustrate a children’s book his mother had written for the grandkids about her life growing up in New York City.
He thought about finding a student from a local art school, but then it dawned on him that he could outsource it without leaving his house. The job didn’t necessarily require a face-to-face meeting — he could just e-mail the draft.
He logged on to Guru. Within a week, 80 bids had come in from countries such as Lebanon, Ukraine and Malaysia. To narrow the field, he had 10 finalists send him sample drawings depicting a young girl.
The woman he finally hired lives in the Philippines. He says her drawings, styled after Japanese anime, were more cheerful than other entries, and he was impressed by her polished portfolio. She offered to do 25 drawings for $300 — what some others wanted for a single illustration.
“I was kind of amazed at how easy it was,” says the 36-year-old sales and marketing consultant. He says his mother was “overwhelmed” when she saw the finished product.
It isn’t always easy to evaluate a vendor. Language gaps can lead to misunderstandings, and if projects involve revisions, they could take more time — and cost more in long-distance bills — than they’re worth.
When reporters tried outsourcing personal tasks, they were offered a range of prices, making it difficult to know what they were getting.
Some labor experts are skeptical that this kind of outsourcing will ever go beyond a small group of enthusiasts. And though it’s hardly the political hot-button that’s provoked industries like manufacturing and information technology, many are stumbling into their own versions of corporate responsibility in terms of working conditions and fair wages.
Architects, accountants, landscape designers and other professionals say it’s too soon to tell if outsourcing poses a threat to their business. But American free-lancers say they’re getting hit.
Tanisha Coffey, who does small writing jobs through her Atlanta-area company, Scribe Etc., says while she asks 50 cents a word for a long article, some offshore firms charge $3 for the whole thing.
