Entrepreneurs who start up a new company often naively assume they will be able to cover all parts of their startup operation themselves. Legal and compliance work, company secretary duties, client relationship building, product design – in the early days, the entrepreneur of a startup usually handles all of these activities himself or herself.
However, once a company is up and running, the owner of a successful company will be wise enough (or simply exhausted enough) to know their own strengths and weaknesses – then concentrate on their areas of strength, building the product etc, and hire people where they are weak – building client relationships, legal etc.
There’s an interesting parallel in the offshoring world, particularly amongst software vendors. For some reason most software vendors build a great product and hire good people in their local markets offshore, but also try to build inroads with the client onsite by themselves.
Looking at the example of financial services, it is well known that financial hubs such as the City of London and Wall Street are tight-knit communities with very strong networks.
Any software vendor who has a proposition to bring to these hubs needs to know the local market, the people who make decisions and have an inside track on exactly what these people need. Spending most of their time focussed on building their local teams in India, China, Brazil or other low cost locations, they are not equipped with the knowledge needed to close the deal.
There are a huge number of outsourcing and offshoring firms coming into Wall Street and the City of London and introducing themselves in the hope of doing business – but for a scalable model this simply will not work.
Any firm that is serious about building its offshoring and outsourcing franchise needs to bring in local talent – insiders who have been working in the financial hubs (in this example) for years. Ideally these are people who have spent extensive time on the delivery side of projects at their target clients, or failing that someone with a very good network in the financial services industry.
How to find such candidates? Clearly firms will encounter good advocates and backers in their client firms they have shared project successes. If that doesn’t turn up the right candidate then a good look at well connected people in that company on LinkedIn might reveal the answer!