How Does Outsourcing Help America?

A rant and a strategy for combating our outsourcing competitors.

If you read any of the websites about outsourcing, like Outsource2India, they tell us that there are  nothing but great benefits to American companies who send our jobs, manufacturing and service technologies overseas:

• Take advantage of the cost-advantages!

• See an increase in your business

• Save Big!

• Get access to specialized services

• Concentrate more on your core business

• Make faster deliveries to customers

• Improved customer satisfaction

• Benefit from time zone advantages

• Increased efficiency

• Give your business a competitive edge!

• Outsourcing countries also benefit from outsourcing

• (I took these sub-headlines directly from a page in their website.)

My opinion is that outsourcing has mostly to do with business owners and multinational corporations minimizing costs and maximizing profits, without regard to displacing workers in the USA, minimizing investment in the USA and minimizing taxes paid to Uncle Sam.  Workers are expendable, it doesn't matter where they live.

Try finding anything made in America at Wal-Mart.  The world's largest retailers are among the worst culprits in creating and supporting job losses and the demise of the American economy.  It's the Wall Street mentality like we have seen recently - short term thinking and greed that has resulted in a total meltdown of our financial system.  The greedy top dogs "made off" with what they wanted before they flew away in their Gulfstream G550s to their gated communities in tax havens Bermuda or the Caymans.  They should be permanently outsourced?  I'll help buy the plane tickets if their G550s are repo-ed.

Wal-Mart says they are offering great prices to American consumers, and this is true, but great prices aren't much help to folks who are broke because they don't have a job?  It's a destroy your own market strategy.

The current Wal-Mart marketing slogan is: Save Money. Live Better.  I would add: Die Broke.

Read the truth about Wal-Mart.

Outsourcing is a short term vision based on short term thinking, greed, no vision of home or place or community, with a high disregard for the environment.  The excuse?  We have to be competitive.

Perhaps with the exception of Internet, IT and communications technologies, outsourcing is a short term strategy made possible by cheap transportation = cheap oil prices.  As oil prices rise, and they will, and the effects of climate change are addressed, and they will be, all the manufacturing jobs sent across the pond to China and India will come home.  The cost and environmental impact of long haul transportation will price the outsourced products out of the market. 

The workers who are employed by the outsourcers are just as expendable there as they have been here.  I believe in the long run this will result in big problems for large corporations whose only vision is the reported results of the next quarter.  American corporations today are not managed even remotely close to the founding principles of America: generosity, service, courage, resilience. 

The corporate Golden Rule is he who has the gold makes the rules, and we would rather lay you off than lose any of our gold, even if only for one reporting quarter.  It's what I call Rhett Butler management: "Frankly, my dear [workers], I don't give a damn."

Read Exploring America’s Founding Principles.

The problem is that in the mean time, the American economy has been disadvantaged, our balance of trade is upside down, technology development in many industries has been diminished, jobs have been lost and worker skills are also diminished because OJT (on the job training) is nonexistent.

Henry Ford realized that if he was going to be a success in marketing the Model T, he had to provide enough pay to his workers that they could afford to buy his products.

A solution: We have to be competitive with a vision for the future.

If we cannot take care of ourselves, we cannot take care of anyone else?  Much of the world depends on the wealth and generosity of America to help them.  If we cannot take care of ourselves, we cannot help anyone. 

The long term future of manufacturing, agriculture and almost everything else is localization.  One of the greatest advantages we have is where and how we choose to spend our money.  A system based on greed responds to declining dollars in their coffers.  The corporate Golden Rule is at risk!

In the web design and search engine optimization world, I receive a dozen or more unsolicited emails like this one every week:

Hello,

I am Kalpana Shrma [from India] and I am contacting you after looking at your website.

We are a ISO certified company and one of the very few company which offer Organic SEO, PPC and Link Building services with full range of supporting services such as one way themed text links, blog submissions, directory submissions, article writing and postings, etc.

We are a team of 70+ professionals which includes 18 full time SEO experts. We are proud to inform you that our team handled 100+ SEO projects and obtained 20000+ manually built links in the past 1 year.

Top 9 Benefits of Our Service:

Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah 

We will be glad to assist you with offering our services.  Look forward to hearing from you soon. Have a nice day ahead.

Thanks and Regards

Kalpana Shrma
SEO Specialist

My reply:

Hello Kalpana,

I am responding to your email tagged as SPAM out of American kindness and the hope that we can help you be successful in your Internet endeavors.

We insource SEO work from SEO companies in India who cannot optimize their own websites to earn top rankings on Google.  When this happens, they don’t have to send unsolicited emails like the one you sent me which end up in the SPAM folder and are deleted.

As you know, unsolicited email is the lowest form of Internet marketing and is highly detested here in the USA.  This can only diminish your honorable reputation – SPAM is a four letter word.

It must be very discouraging to you to know that you are working hard trying to communicate, but you messages are seldom read and most people who receive them automatically despise you? 

This is not a good way to earn new business.  This is why I am replying to your message.

The days of outsourcing SEO work from the USA are coming to a close for Indian companies who cannot be found by their top rankings in Google for their own websites.

If you cannot do this for yourself, and the only way you can market your services is by sending SPAM emails, why should someone in the USA believe that you can do it for them?

Most importantly, we also assist Indian SEO companies with excellent copywriting and copy editing by expert American copywriters.

Many Indians write and speak American English very well, but not good enough to be competitive with the best American native English language copywriters.  This little difference is a huge competitive advantage. 

If you expect to earn top rankings and conversions to inquiries and online sales, this nuance is extremely important.

If you are looking for the ultimate competitive advantage available to an Indian SEO company, we will be pleased to assist you.  The power of an American SEO company helping you is unassailable in these challenging economic times and you will be able to out-compete all of your Indian SEO competitors.

Contact us today.  We will help you succeed.

Best wishes,

Ron Castle
Ron Castle Webs

SEO companies in India are no threat to me.  They will never be able to do what I do as well as I can do it.  Creating doubt in your foe is a key competitive strategy.

My favorite question to ask an outsourcer: If someone else can do what you do as well as you can do it for less money, will you outsource your work to them?  The sardonic thing is that they don't think it can happen to them.

The future is localization.

Here in Winchester, Tennessee, we are a small part of an effort to renew our downtown area.  Our local merchants are the core of our local economy.

My recommendation to you is think locally, insource locally.  Do all you can to help your neighbors so that they can help you.  Support your local economy.  Buy from your local merchants.  Eat at locally owned restaurants.  Buy your fruits and vegetables at the local farmers' market.

Tell Wal-Mart that you don't shop with them as often as you used to because they don't have anything made in America in their stores. 

The outsourcers will eventually fade away and our manufacturing jobs will come back to where they belong: at home here in the USA.  Tell your local merchants that selling Made In The USA products is a competitive advantage over Wal-Mart et al.

For more information about the future of localization, please visit my good friend and client Lester Brown's website EarthPolicy.org and read his books Plan B 3.0 and Outgrowing the Earth.

In the near future I will add a link here to what's happening in Winchester.  We are going to succeed.

Want to sound off about this? Go post your comment in my blog.