What Is Strategically Right When You Are Starting a Nearshoring Journey
Starting a Nearshoring journey the Company needs to have a GOAL and a STRATEGY to reach that goal. I will try to provide a couple of sample GOALS below to then reflect on their STRATEGY planning.
So, the GOALS might be, for example:
- increase own development processes velocity
- diversify own development workforce
- extend own team with rare talent client’s local market does not offer
- extend to 24×7 (16×5) time coverage by the dev team
- decrease cost of team’s ownership
To each and every of these goals, working with the VENDOR (or, a Nearshoring Consultant) is strategically right at least until the new market is clear and verified to be attractive to the Company to enter one by itself. I know it is bad analogy but you don’t go Peru mountains without a guide, you do not dive for the first time without a coach, and you do not drive without an instructor.
I mean, you COULD of course, and some people do it, but when it’s not about just being extreme macho – I think most will agree, a way safer and wiser entrance is through someone whose job is to guide you there. And building a business, one brave dive on when someone decided to actually run that business is enough not to be repeated.
We often get clients who entered the market (Ukrainian labor market) themselves, remaining in Poland, France, Japan or Canada. Who spent 3-6 months paying random local consultants not being part of Client’s bigger picture – recruiters, coworking spaces, accountants, hardware vendors and event organizers.
These clients we get are known to be one of the best retainable it us – not because we do better for them but because they already were “on the other side” of the quality line, spending a fortune on making simple things work, fixing previous mistakes and gaps in planning. They had paid their price for getting the lesson, yet the sad part is that they did not need that lesson as the knowledge they receive was for how NOT to do things, while the lesson they needed was on how to do them.
And, again, this is not because the vendors they find are bad. This is because the client’s company decided to save a penny in their intent “not to feed the middlemen” and “i know my project manager can do no worse”.
Nearshoring is not for poor, but it is neither for rich.
Nearshoring is not a fast solution to whatever you may have planned, and definitely is not a solution to something you had not planned at all.
Nearshoring is a tool for business goals achievement, that needs to be thoroughly planned, understood, practiced, scaled to the needed size. And right Vendor must only be of a help making that journey faster.
Kate would not have hit it right if she had not practiced before. Be like Kate :)
