There are a lot of businesses that rely on outsourcing functions overseas. Call centers, document processing, administrative tasks – it seems like a great idea for the bottom line especially when shareholders are involved to be as profitable as you damn well can. I mean, that’s America, right? Land of the free, home of the brave, make a wheelbarrow full of money and become an influencer or a guest on Dancing with the Stars, amirite? 

But while you’re busy thinking, “I can’t believe how cheap this is / why didn’t I do it sooner,” consider the tradeoffs from staff either in your own office or just located elsewhere across one of the six time zones we’ve got in the US (seven if you count Puerto Rico). 

A fast growing company needs to scale quickly, and the temptation is to find somebody with labor to spare to just offload the repetitive, tedious work. Leave the sales and the high-touch stuff to the onshore staff. But whether you’re doing it five feet from your office door or five thousand miles away, there’s still training and managing a team. 

You know what else you sacrifice when you outsource core functions? Control. So if you’re going to do it, there’s the need to doubly and triply make sure that no, an unqualified agent whose written or verbal language skills or lack of support doesn’t cost you business. How much of your expensive time will it take to get another client for a money-saving front-line hire’s error?

It’s a choice to offshore, and one that companies need to consider carefully. Hand-in-hand with that offshore outsource is also the question about remote workers. 

The pandemic was and continues to be hard on people. I didn’t study Greek and I can tell you, I’ve no interest in learning any more of the alphabet, but somebody mentioned “Deltacron” to me and I swear it sounds like a Transformer and not a COVID mutation. 

Blk Out wants the most talented people we can find and I’m sorry / not sorry that not all of the jobs we have can be remote. We can’t remote dock staff. We can’t remote dispatchers – there’s a need to have people close by one another to make split second decisions about allocating people and power for the kind of urgent, high-touch work we do.

Hey, I get it. Construction sucks. Rush hour sucks. Some people chose to move to BFE because they don’t like people, wanted a million acres in the middle of nowhere or both. But they’re crazy-ass great at what they do and can push a company forward better than anyone else who’s applied for the job. And hey, yeah, we’ll listen to that where it works, but it’s gotta be real special.

I guess what I’m saying is that when you’re thinking about outsourcing and remote work, your mileage may vary. There are positive and negative aspects to both. Making a job work really depends on what your company’s DNA is and how you roll. If you can afford to have an off-site team that’s supervised and remote workers who are supported in the office and grown-up enough to manage their own shit, that’s an amazing talent pool to tap into.

If you can’t and need people on-site, offer great benefits, support and raise people up and have the culture that they’re willing to drive and spend time with people they’re not married or related to and join you in your facilities. 

We think that by doing the right things culturally to inspire loyalty and devotion, we’ve got the advantage. Happy employees = a successful business. Here at Blk Out, we inspire loyalty by being 100% real with our people.

Whether you’re looking for a remote job, or you’re ready to get out of the house and work for a business and people who care that you’re there every day, we’re hiring and you should have a look at what we’ve got available. We do amazing sh*t for some low-key kinda household names and keep it pretty quiet. Apply and find out for yourself.