So I get asked a lot in meetings with potential clients – “Why Plus Factory”? After all, there are many other vendors in the world for agencies to go to, both US based (onshore) and outside the US (offshore). Their are benefits for using either one.

With onshore vendors, you know that there is someone who presumedly will speak the native language, have experience within the digital ad world, and most importantly will be available in person or on phone to help you on your projects. But you are going to pay US rates for a US person or resource. Obviously it gets cheaper when you go outside major cities like New York or LA for talent (think upstate NY or Utah).

With offshore vendors, you are really talking about price. Like a very cheap bottom base hourly rate. In today’s economy every major Client must think of their cost savings, and offshoring their digital work is always seen as a viable solution. And you can go anywhere in the world – Costa Rica, South America, Eastern Europe, India, Vietnam and of course China. But there is a price to this offshoring business.

First off, language is usually a huge barrier. Most offshore workers will not be bilingual and speak nor read English. 2nd is the issue of time-zones, are they going to be around to finish or tweak your work for your Client review or deliverable? And then there is that all too-familiar issue of quality control. As my Mother always told me, you pay for what you get. The reason you get a low hourly rate, is that the quality of work is a low rate as well. The secret for most offshore groups is that they sweeten you with the low hourly rate, but make it up with rounds of revisions and padded local Project Manager time. You need a local Project Manager to oversee your work, they say. But then you notice those rounds of reviews and padded Project Manager hours start to add up.

So how does this get back to “Why Plus Factory?”. Well thats because one of our secret sauces is our company make-up. We are an onshore/offshore model. A true hybrid. We package our services/solutions with a US based team made of US designers, Flash developers, web developers, Project Managers and Tech Directors that will then oversee our offshore production office. That means you get the best of both worlds – US based talent and resources to help you manage, produce and deliver your projects with the low cost savings of work produced oversees. But the key is, our US staff does actual work for our Clients as well.

So for instance, while work is done overnight by our China office, we will continue to develop, tweak, produce work for you during the day with our US staff. The most tech intense work is always produced by our US staff, so we make sure that everything works. Most offshore groups will just hand over files, and assume you can get it all integrated – to us, thats just half the work (Yeah – try that with Facebook apps). We not only produce the work, but we help you with the ‘last mile’ of integration. Would it be a ad server dashboard tool, working with a 3rd party platform or loading files onto a Client hosted server, we don’t call it a day till our Clients are 100% satisfied.

That’s one of our secret sauces we use for our competitive advantage. Taste good, no?

So next time you think of Plus Factory and wonder why you should try us, think of our ‘secret sauce’.

So today I’m going to talk a bit about our business and what we do. We are technically an digital outsourcing agency that does the main work offshore (in our China office). While the term ‘offshore’ is something people understand very easily, Plus Factory is really an onshore/offshore model. Our US team is as important to our operations as the offshore team, but that is something to discuss in another post in the future.

Digital outsourcing is very common in the advertising/marketing world. Most agencies do not have the capabilities to build and launch complex online campaigns and websites, so they bring in these outsourced ‘specialists’ to execute on their ideas. A famous case would be Crispin Porter & Bogusky. While they have won numerous “Interactive Agency of the Year” awards, and won awards for their interactive work…they actually practice the art of hiring top notch digital vendors to build the programs they take credit and awards for. There are many great digital vendors in the US, like Big Spaceship, The Barbarian Group, HUGE INC to name a few. Now when you start getting into offshore outsourcing, its a different ballgame.

When Clients look to into offshoring their digital work, the number one reason is price. They are looking for an cost-effective way to produce the work. That is the universal truth. Now when you get past this statement, then we deal with two types of  Clients, one who still are looking for US quality work with the low price and the other who really wants a great hourly rate. Now this latter Client of course still needs the work to be acceptable and on par with US standards but price is the underlying criteria for them.

This is the Client I would like to go into more detail with and talk about the ‘Offshore Equation’. This Client will push the hourly rate from you, and like some sort of an bargain-basement retail hunter, will tell you how they can get better deals for the same level of work. This Client takes the hourly rate as the true worth of the offshore vendor and the value they bring. This is the absolute biggest fallacy that we face as a business and brings up the term I call the ‘Offshore Equation’. 

The false equation that Clients would believe for offshoring is thus: hourly rate = value

The true equation that we believe in is: hourly rate x efficiency = value

You can’t simply look at the hourly rate but also at the efficiency of the vendor. A perfect example is say Vendor A charges $25/hr while Vendor B charges $50/hr. Now if Vendor A takes 3 x as many hours to complete the work compared to Vendor B, then you are paying more for Vendor A to complete the work, even though Vendor A has an lower hourly rate.

One of our core strengths as an outsource vendor is to offer competitive prices (ie our savings doing the work offshore is your savings), while still delivering incredible, dynamic, US quality work, in fast turnaround times. This is on top of the leadership and management that works with our Clients and oversee the work.

The ‘Offshore Equation’ is the hidden truth that many Clients do not realize when they look to engage with an outsource ‘offshore’ group. Sometimes Clients learn this the hard way and have a bad relationship on a project and the Vendor. All we can do, as we continue to offer our knowledge, solutions and services is to educate our Clients on this true ‘Offshore Equation’.