The Entrepreneurial Mind

Business Tennessee magazine has an interesting article on outsourcing by small businesses. One of the people interviewed is Belmont junior Andy Tabar, whose web development company Bizooki uses developers in India.

Andy Tabar runs a fledgling IT company, Bizooki, out of Nashville. Starting out with simple Web design, he's grown into developing software, but not without some help from afar. Tabar outsources programming to India, where the burgeoning IT industry has created plenty of companies eager to take on Bizooki's projects. Tabar was reluctant at first to trust strangers with important work. "I'd always heard horror stories about it," Tabar says, "but the trick is having a good relationship with the people you're outsourcing to." Tabar also suggests starting small with minor projects that can't be catastrophically ruined if you made the wrong choice. If the relationship works out, you can move on to bigger operations. Outsourcing frees up time and energy for Tabar, letting him focus on other aspects of his business rather than getting bogged down into micromanaging a project. "It helps having people working for you even while you're sleeping, so that I can wake up every morning and things are ready to go," Tabar says. With room to grow in other directions, outsourcing lets a growing business like Bizooki open up new jobs in other departments, and Tabar plans to grow his local employee base next year.