It’s official. I am destroying America.

Two days ago I had a wonderful ah-ha moment. I was scrambling to find someone to help with the coding of our wallhogs.com website – it desperately needs a facelift – and in a developer’s forum I stumbled upon a team in India. Normally I would have overlooked this, but the co-owners provided their cell numbers, email addresses, skype handles etc. Since I recently purchased some skypeout credits, I decided to call one of the co-founders on his cell phone to see if they would be interested in helping us out. I also was putting him to my “blink” intuition test. He passed. Not only was his English nearly perfect, but he quickly understood what we were looking for and gave us a quote nearly 4x less than what I was seeing in the states.

I must be overlooking something, right? They quality is going to stink or the turn around time will be lacking. What about the turn-around time? Oh yeah, 8 hours. I placed my order with his firm at midnight and the next morning (in America), it was off to the races. Quality was not an issue.

I must apologize to all of the American web developers out there who lost work because of skype, paypal, and low barriers to entry. If you have any problems with my decision, I would gladly give any of you the right of first refusal to beat my new development teams pricing, quality, and turn around time. I doubt I will get many takers.

I remember sitting in my MBA classes thinking about India and China. They always made for a great theoretical question. Until this quiet experience, to me, they were just concepts. I had no reason to reach out to hire a firm half way around the world to do anything for me… well, not directly that is.

I called them this evening to place a request for additional work. I was quickly greeted with a “Hello Mr. Kendall, how can we help you today? How’s Wallhogs?” If all goes well, I hope to continue my successful relationship with my new foreign business partners.

I know this is nothing new and many of you might question why I am showing up so late to this party, but until now, I did not have a reason to show up. If you are still new to the world of outsourcing, go pickup The World is Flat, by Thomas Friedman. If you’re an audible subscriber, get the abridged version, as he can get a little long winded.