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How Offshoring Can Help Your Business Survive an Economic Recession

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The global economy now goes through a rough phase when everything is quite unstable, and many businesses face financial and employment difficulties. Needless to say that pandemics, aftermaths of all lockdowns, and many other political and financial factors influenced the economy and led to rising inflation. 

If you take a look at the fresh world economic outlook report from October 2022, you will see very surprising (not in a good way) numbers. Global inflation is expected to rise almost twice – from 4.7% in 2021 to 8.8% in 2022. This forecast might seem gloomy, however the inflation might decline to 6.5% in 2023. 

Many influential resources such as Bloomberg, Deloitte, representatives from the financial services segment and National Bureau of Economic Research claim that the probability of an economic downturn grows dramatically. According to the experts, we all can observe a deep recession by the end of this year. 

You may be wondering why we actually write about this topic, after all we are just a team of experienced software developers and not economists. Well, because we know that offshoring during a recession might be a game changer for many businesses. Operational efficiency is the key to business success, and it can be achieved through processes automation and custom software development

By investing in your own business solutions and offshoring services, you invest in the future of your company and overall global economy. In this blog post we’d like to cover offshoring and point out why it’s the best strategy in a recessive economy and what benefits you can get right away. 

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What is recession: definition and key indicators

First things first, so let’s speak about recession, what it implies, and what its main indicators are. Every business and economy has its cycles – expansion, peak, contraction, and trough. Business cycles reflect repetitive changes in the economy and looming recession that usually takes place when a significant decline in the economy happens. Here is an infographic demonstrating the turnover of cycles:

We all are used to seeing recession as a negative phenomenon that influences our businesses and quality of life. And although the recession might be challenging, it still drives innovation and allows companies to transfer smoothly to recovery and even grow. 

You should not forget that even after the most challenging recession, the recovery comes and brings sales and revenue growth, significant improvement in employment, and acceleration of production.

And to make the most out of recession and recovery, businesses should consider digital transformation. Custom development can deliver tangible business value and help you delegate low-value tasks to intelligent digital systems. 

According to a recent report, the global digital transformation market is expected to grow from $944 billion in 2021 to $1,178 billion in 2022. That is a considerable growth compared to other years, especially the one that brought us pandemics. 

And speaking about digital transformation and custom development, we should mention that offshoring also gains momentum. It is considered the most effective way to build high-quality, scalable solutions at an incredible price/quality ratio and with minimum risks. So let’s take a closer look at offshoring and why you should choose it in our recessive business environment. 

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Related post

Our experts have already provided some tips on how to choose offshoring development partners and what to expect from such cooperation. Take your time and check out this post to get a bigger picture and make the right final choice. 

Benefits of offshoring during a recession

Offshoring is used by many businesses these days, and in case you are still wondering what this kind of cooperation implies, we are going to provide some brief information right away. When you choose to offshore, you delegate some business processes like development to the vendor of your choice.

The vendor, in turn, offers you full-cycle development services, provides all progress reports, updates you on project budget, and guides you through all processes. As a result you get a desired project with minimum input from your side. 

During recession outsourcing becomes a real life saver, that allows you to reduce costs, proceed with faster operational streamlining, and get so many other business benefits. Speaking about the promised benefits of outsourcing, we’d like to highlight several particular ones. 

Cost savings

In a recessive economy it is extremely crucial to invest wisely, and that is exactly what offshoring allows you to do. To begin with, you will not need to pay any extra costs for office space, equipment or else since the offshoring vendor takes care of this and provides the employees with everything. Also the taxes and additional rewards for the tech team will not be your concern.  

Moreover, offshoring allows businesses to cut costs for duties and positions that do not require a full-time team. The costs that you save can be used to retain your in-house team or offshoring specialists and keep working on creation of the better, more advanced project. 

Speaking about the development rates that also influence the cost of your project, they differ depending on the company location, expertise and seniority level of developers. We have explored the market and now can provide you with some real numbers:

Resources flexibility and scalability 

This benefit will be so much appreciated by the companies that attempt to scale efficiently. The thing is that offshoring teams always have a wide talent pool where some specialists can be interchangeable.

So in case something changes and one developer gets sick or leaves the company, there is always another specialist who can replace the gone one fast and do not influence work speed or quality. So you will not need to spend extra time on candidate screening and hiring, and the cost of development will stay the same. 

What’s even more incredible is that a wide tech talent pool means you will have access to a huge variety of specialists who work with different technologies, techniques, and more.

Whether you are hiring a full offshoring team or resorting to selective outsourcing, you have all chances to build even the most complex project way faster. 

Motivated and experienced team

When it comes to software development, dedication and expertise of your tech team mean a lot. After all, a product of poor quality will require additional investments. But who wants to splurge in times of recession? Thanks to the offshoring option you can get a team of motivated, dedicated and highly experienced developers, QA engineers, business analysts, designers, DevOps specialists and even marketing experts. 

Offshoring vendors have a cohesive team and know the seniority and domain expertise of each team member. Therefore you can be sure that your core team will be selected according to your business and project needs, requirements and pre-defined budget. 

Offshore companies know how to form a perfect team, how to spread load on employees to keep them productive and motivated. As a result, you will waste no time and pay no extra money during the development process. 

Extra services included 

This is one of the best benefits of outsourcing, since by hiring a vendor you get a cohesive team of specialists who provide not only the development but also a lot of other services. They may include holistic research of the market and similar solutions, writing of all technical documentation, preparation of the marketing campaigns, business analysis and many more. 

Let’s take Altamira as an example. By cooperating with us you can complete full-cycle product development, benefit from manual and automated testing, market research, MVP development, project modernization or even continuous software maintenance. 

We offer a personalized approach to every client and business, therefore you can be sure that whatever your goals are, we will meet them. In the end you will get a feature-rich solution built using advanced technologies and following latest market trends. 

Focus on long-term partnership

Offshoring does not always mean that right after you get your project, your cooperation ends up. In most cases businesses need to keep scaling and improving their solutions in the future. And sometimes the development of business tools takes years. So you need to be sure that the team of your choice is the right partner who will stay with you all that time and continue their work.

In case with offshoring you can totally rely on your vendor. For example, here at Altamira we always guarantee deep involvement into the project of our client. Therefore we invest a lot of time and resources in exploring your industry, challenges, pain points and then building solutions able to transform your business. 

If you build a project with a team like ours you can be sure that it is going to be a fruitful long-term cooperation and the outcome will be predictable. On top of that, you will deal with way less risks, and that is crucial when the economy is wobbly. 

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Must-read

Due to the increased offshoring popularity, we decided to share with you some practical tips on how to arrange offshore development centers and manage them effectively. In the blog post dedicated to this topic you will find out what legal and operational risks exist, how to mitigate them, what billing method to choose, and how to organize all processes. 

Where to begin with offshoring: Tips by Altamira

The Altamira team has been a reliable offshoring and outsourcing provider for more than 13 years. We have been working with clients from the US, UAE, Eastern and Western Europe.

Our solutions already serve so many businesses starting with healthcare and real estate, and ending with finance and manufacturing. Just take a look at our portfolio to find out what incredible software we created. 

So by now we discovered everything about offshoring and how it contributes to economic efficiency of businesses. And now we would like to share with you our knowledge and valuable insights that will help you to make the most out of offshoring. 

Tip #1 - Find a reliable team 

It can be quite challenging to find a great offshoring and outsourcing partner. After all, the market is full of software development companies and the search can be intimidating. And to make it easier, we would highly recommend you to visit Clutch and GoodFirms since these two resources have well-organized catalogs of companies. 

On Clutch and GoodFirms you can find offshoring vendors from different countries, check out their domain expertise, hourly rates, tech stack they work with, values they offer, and even take a look at reviews left by their previous clients. So before you reach out to any company, make sure you completed a thorough research and selected the most suitable candidate to do the job for you. 

Tip #2 - Define your goals and needs 

It is not a secret that businesses choose offshoring for a range of different reasons. And it is utterly important for business owners to define their needs and goals clearly before they invest in project development and team hiring. Based on our experience, we can say that companies choose to offshore when: 

  • they need to find new sales and revenue sources;
  • they want to optimize their business strategy and cut costs;
  • they have to address a bunch of risks related to recession. 

Speaking about the first case, most businesses already have a lot of existing customers, but still cannot achieve realistic growth rates. So offshoring teams like ours help them to use all possible digital channels to generate new sales and more revenue. We build business intelligence tools, productivity solutions, platforms for clients and employees, and many more. 

One of our success cases is LEO – a holistic construction management platform. Before that platform was built our client experienced a lot of productivity issues and cannot process and take more orders. 

So the sales were stuck, and a new digital tool helped to organize all processes in a wise way so that the new and old remaining employees of the company can effectively process orders and track everything in no time. As a result, the number of sales and client revenue grew tremendously. 

One more goal that many companies pursue is to automate processes to the fullest and therefore unload employees and cut costs. Such tools as ERP, CRM, management systems, or else can help to achieve the set goals. 

We build such solutions regularly and can help you with suggesting the right tech stack, modules and feature sets, the most suitable offshoring team composition and more. 

Offshoring helps many business owners to smoothly transition from using ready-made solutions of third-party vendors to implementing custom apps that adapt to their particular business processes. 

There are many risks related to ready-made apps. For example, vendors can discontinue support of some features, increase the pricing, or introduce critical changes that will not be of use to your company. And there is nothing that can be done about it. That is why it is crucial to build your own solutions to avoid additional issues and paychecks in times of recession. 

On top of that, offshoring is better in terms of further scaling. If you need to scale your team and try to hire US specialists, you will face a lot of additional expenses. Plus the procedure is quite time consuming, while with the offshoring it takes weeks instead of months. 

Also it is easier to integrate offshoring specialists into in-house teams because they all have their own well-organized practices of transition period. So you will lose neither your precious time, nor money. 

Once you’ve defined your needs and goals, it is time to think about your development budget that also is considered a huge decision making factor. 

Tip #3 - Define your budget upfront 

As we’ve mentioned earlier, some businesses resort to offshoring to lower costs. And to do this effectively it is highly recommended to define the budget you are ready to spend on your project. To do this you need to take into account total cost of ownership, hourly rates of hired developers, operational costs and possible additional expenses. 

A team like Altamira can help you estimate your project properly and include all possible risks that can occur during the development. Our business analyst writes detailed specifications and creates estimation documents where all the factors influencing the project and vendor’s work price are included. 

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Additional information

If you are wondering how companies estimate projects and how you can prepare for the app estimation process, you can check out two other blog posts covering these topics. They will help you to understand your budget better and avoid many financial risks. 

Tip #4 - Take care of communication and performance

Communication means a lot, especially when you have a remote team and need to control all processes and get timely progress updates. On top of that, you need to set clear performance and success metrics for your offshoring partner to avoid any misunderstandings and ruined expectations. 

Based on our experience, we can say that it is a great practice to use a specific framework for project governance, effective communication, reporting, and performance tracking. For example, our project managers arrange different kinds of calls with clients to provide weekly, daily and monthly updates. They also write and send all kinds of reports that help clients to track progress and budget. 

Regularity of updates and clear metrics that demonstrate speed, quality, and cost of work help to build transparent and trustful relationships between clients and offshoring vendors. 

FAQ

What business giants resorted to offshoring during recession? 

There are many influential businesses that entrust development of their custom solutions to offshoring vendors. Among such companies you can see Netflix, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, Skype and many more. Most of them have contracts with the full teams, and some of them hire separate specialists to augment their teams. 

How long does it take to build a custom business solution from scratch? 

Everything depends on the complexity of the desired app. For example, Altamira can complete market research in a few weeks and deliver a functional MVP in 100 days. As to the complex solutions, it can take us 4-6 months to deliver them, or sometimes even years if continuous improvements and feature set expansion are required. 

What offshoring specialists can be hired? 

Most companies offer not only the services of their developers and QA engineers but also the services of business analysts, DevOps, software architects, designers, marketing specialists, project managers, and even CTOs on demand. So whatever team composition you might need, offshoring vendors can organize it for you. 

To conclude

In 2022 we observe increased demand in outsourced services and significant shift from in-house development to offshoring. Offshoring became the most effective strategy that empowers businesses and their digital transformation. 

Thanks to offshoring it is easier to build high-quality solutions fast, achieve tremendous revenue growth and overall growth of your business in the near future. 

So if you already have a software idea on your mind and keep putting it aside because of the economic recession, it is time to stop doing that. 

By choosing offshoring you can turn your idea into a top-notch business project, cut costs while building it and end up getting a digital helper that will last you for years and keep optimizing your processes.

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