You can't outsource this

Early on in my particular outsourcing history, we were pretty careful about letting clients know about our offshore partnerships. It was actually sort of our dirty little secret, and besides, what if our clients bypassed us and went straight offshore to get their work done? Where would we be then??

One time a client realized after the fact that much of the work on the elearning course he'd hired us to create was developed by members of my offshore team, in India. He was a little incensed, and wondered why he was paying me instead of going right to the source and paying an Indian firm less to do the development for him.

What he failed to realize was how thoroughly I earned the money that he paid me to manage his outsourced project for him. He didn't know that behind the scenes, I'd had to schedule meetings around a 11.5 hour timezone difference, perform quality control on "final" products, and communicate constantly with folks whose native language is not mine and whose English is not my English.

That client is still my happy client, but things have changed. There's more recognition of two facts:

1. Offshore outsourcing is not evil; it's necessary and part of the evolution of the global economy.
2. Offshore outsourcing is not easy; it's fraught with peril and requires expense, attention, and more human resources here at home to accomplish successfully.

Our outsourcing is no longer secret; it's a selling point. It's a valuable and marketable expertise. It's what we do now.