When we set out to grow our MSP and SaaS company in 2012, it was obvious that offshoring was going to be crucial to our success. What was not so obvious, was how to go about it.
We thought about assembling our own team through outsourcing, but were concerned we’d lose quality control over our services. There were just too many horror stories. Freelancers working for multiple MSPs, constant interruptions from blackouts and internet outages, and very real cyber security threats. Just too risky.
We tried using a professional Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) company, but soon realised the term ‘professional’ means different things to different people.
Sure, a few BPOs could help us hire staff. But they put the wrong people in the wrong positions. And they offered little cultural guidance to help us integrate new staff with our onshore team. Frankly, it cost more in time and frustration than it was worth.
That’s when we decided to start our own facility and develop a framework to find the best people.
Perfecting our framework took years of trial and error. And many costly mistakes. We had to learn hard lessons like:
And we suffered expensive and time-consuming frustrations including:
Where offshore staff say “yes” but do nothing
Where offshore staff simply stop communicating with you
Where offshore staff leave without notice or reason
And most importantly, we learned the intricacies of Filipino culture. And how to help our team feel secure and appreciated, so they could commit to continual learning and become valuable contributors to our company.
At the heart of our offshoring success was our Elite Hire Framework. Since selling our MSP in 2018, we’ve used the same proven framework to help 160 tech companies achieve offshoring success. It’s best explained in three sections:
Map out your overarching offshoring strategy.
Identify your biggest bottlenecks and inefficiencies.
Design job description(s) to address your skills gaps.
Build remuneration and benefits package to attract top talent.
Executive Advisory Sessions to prevent common mistakes and ensure a smooth onboarding experience.
CONCEIVE Reach high-caliber candidates using job boards, Technology Elite database and internal network.
We sift through hundreds of applications, so only the very best candidates are progressed to the assessment stage.
Proprietary exams and assessments that accurately measure on-the-job ability.
We provide a candidate shortlist, complete with a summary of each individual’s strengths and weaknesses, so you can make an informed decision.
You conduct final interviews and make the ultimate decision on which candidate to hire.
COORDINATE Onboarding for new hires, including cross-culture training and Technology Elite workplace orientation.
Periodic “refresher” sessions to improve cross-cultural strategies and strengthen effective multi-shore practices.
Monthly Team Advisor sessions providing two-way feedback between offshore staff and business leaders., so you can make an informed decision.
Daily Work In Progress (WIP) meetings.
Weekly team meetings conducted via video.
Quarterly performance appraisals.
Guided salary, role and benefits reviews to maximise performance and improve retention.
cultivate Gain clarity around your goals, access your current staffing status, identify staffing shortfalls, and design a strategy to bridge the gaps.
This includes specific role descriptions, remuneration and benefits packages, and ways to effectively manage change as you integrate offshore staff with your onshore team.
In short, we help you get your offshoring plan right from the start, so you get the right people in the right positions.
Tap into our internal network, database, and job boards to attract potential candidates with the right skill combinations. But we don’t swamp you with resumes.
We handle all preliminary inquiries, interviews, and testing (that eliminates up to 96% of applicants) so we can present you with a shortlist of the very best candidates. Then we continue to support and guide you as you conduct final interviews and choose your new superstar team member/s.
Our local knowledge, network, and proactive coordination saves you months of tedious candidate vetting and ensures the best chance of offshoring success.
While other offshoring providers consider recruitment the end of their job, we know that real offshoring success is dependent on your ability to manage and retain quality staff that add value to your business. That’s why we provide ongoing support and guidance in critical ways including:
We don’t merely help you find offshore staff. We teach you how to offshore. And we guide and support you every step of the way.
We’ve helped more than 160 tech firms build a superstar offshore team. Here’s a small sample of what they are saying about their results and experience working with Technology Elite:
“As cliché as it may sound, we’re focused on delighting our customers.
Without Tech Elite, and the ability to rapidly spin up this capability, we would have missed this opportunity and potentially lost the client to an MSP with greater global capabilities.
But when we started talking to dozens of clients with a global presence, it was too much. We needed to do something.
Our initial attempts at building an international team were grueling. Like everyone in tech, we’re control freaks. They’ve helped us with everything including recruiting, wages, benefits, healthcare, employee evaluations, and nurturing our team. It’s very co-managed, we’re very much in it together.
Not only has StoredTech been able to maintain exceptional service to their growing list of global clients, but they have also slashed waiting times for some of their most popular services. Our waiting list to migrate clients to M365 used to be 90 days. Now it’s down to just 7 days. And we can easily complete 20 projects per month, which gives us a huge advantage in the market.
One client even confessed that he asked his buddy, another IT veteran, to poke around their company’s IT environment and see how he thought StoredTech were doing.
The friend came back to the client and said that there was nothing more he could recommend – their bios, firmware, and patches were all up to date.
We’ve reduced the stress and headaches across our team. They’re not up all night working. They know they’re supported when they leave the office at the end of the day.”
“Recruiting the right people locally was a big challenge. All the applicants seemed to jump from one MSP to another. Or they didn’t seem aligned with our values or culture.
Meanwhile, we were really excited about how our experiment with offshoring was going, so we thought, why not keep building the offshore team?
It’s paid off.
The offshore team hold us together when our local staff are sick, have a publish holiday, or take leave. These guys just keep everything going.
We’ve got four great local engineers. But when they have on-sites, our other client work used to build up. That’s no longer an issue because now I can just ask the offshore team if they’re available to work an extra couple of hours to get through the backlog.
Previously, we just weren’t keeping up with alerts, patches and backups. Now the offshore team have a weekly rotation around alerts and maintenance. It’s fantastic that someone owns that – now I know it’s actually getting done.
Really, this whole thing started as an experiment and it’s paid off 150%.
Our team, our clients and our directors are all really impressed. We’ve actually just increased their salaries again to reflect the value they’re bringing to the business.”
“We’ve seen a lot of growth in the last few years. Particularly as we got more involved with virtual desktop stuff for school districts and businesses.
We were having a lot of trouble finding and retaining local staff for our 24/7 support graveyard shift. A lot of candidates would claim they could do it, but only stick it out for a month or two. Leaving us to pick up the pieces.
That meant we were often short-staffed and scrambling to fill the shift, which was hard on our core team.
We started with another offshoring company for 6-8 months. But it wasn’t working. The staff they gave us were working across a number of businesses. It was too rigid and did not allow us to train people on our specific processes. Our environments are pretty complicated, so training the right people to our systems is really important. Tech Elite let us do that. They gave us employees who work directly for us.
As we grew our offshore team, our local team were able to focus on more complicated and more important jobs rather than the phone calls and tickets coming in. It also allowed us to handle more work.
Today we’ve trained our offshore team on more and more tasks. Now they assist with the project side of things, like creating new environments, expanding things for clients, more complicated tasks.
If we found Tech Elite sooner, we could have grown our company faster. The old way of hiring is so time consuming for a small team like ours. We used to be overwhelmed with resumes. There was no vetting process. And the vast majority of people weren’t even taking the time to read our job description.
We really love Tech Elite’s vetting process. They don’t just throw resumes at you. All the people you interview have been vetted with multiple interviews and practical tests. That’s been really, really, really helpful.
We are very impressed.”
You’ve learned about some of the common mistakes tech companies (including our own MSP) make when building an offshore team.
You’ve been introduced to some of the cultural contrasts that can derail your offshoring plans.
…And you’ve heard how our proven Elite Hire Framework has helped 160 tech companies overcome these challenges and scale their business (and profits) through successful offshoring.
The next step is to schedule a Free Offshoring Opportunity Analysis with an experienced Offshoring Expert.
Book Your Free Offshoring Opportunity Assessment
