Introduction

One of the hardest things to do when building your company is finding the right talent that will help you build your dream. In general, you need a team and finding the right people that can help you grow your business is very challenging. Furthermore, your team needs to work well together and one way to do that is using a collection of industrial best practices. However, that may not be enough because some details are always inadvertently left out, especially in distributed work force scenarios.  Once you have your dream team, retaining top talent can also be a major challenge, whether it is a full-time employee or you are using alternative full-time employment options. This has two major problems: 1) You need to start the recruitment process all over and 2) Your investment, both time and money, are lost, given to their next employer.

I have faced these challenges in large and small companies, as well as public institutions in the US and in Europe. Each environment has its own internal challenges, but when it comes to hiring contractors through agencies or other firms, the external challenges have always been the same with traditional outsourcing models, YOU are on your own to figure things out. This is especially true after you start your project. No one is there to help you on-board your new team members and make sure nothing is lost in translation. Our hybrid approach is a helping hand that makes sure there is great team communication and execution. We combine Silicon Valley based team members to augment the Serbian team members. Furthermore, we offer Executive Leadership Coaching to optimize the leadership team, addressing your businesses execution needs.

There is a spectrum of outsourcing solutions which come with a wide range of associated costs. However, thanks to Open Source Software development and COVID-19, some of these challenges have been mitigated. First, distributed development is more normal now than it was even 5 years ago. Even people living in the same geography spend less time in the office and more time online and using distributed software development tools and environments. This has changed the Software Development Lifecycle to enable software development to happen at a global scale. We take advantage of these tools and best practices to accelerate the development of your projects.

Hiring a full-time employee or in-house contractor in the US can be very time consuming and expensive. Thus, companies have used outsourcing to solve these challenges. We provide outsourcing of top talent located in other geographies, fast and economically. There are two main types of outsourcing used in the US, which share some similarities and differences. These models refer to talent provided by other companies that reside offsite. These companies “hire” and “fire” as needed, simplifying your HR responsibilities. Similarly, salary and benefits become an external process as well. Talent is usually sourced from different geographies introducing language and cultural barriers that can impact project performance and outcomes, costing you more in time and money. Finally, because you are tapping into the global workforce, timezone alignment can be difficult to navigate as well.

 As a result, there are two main categories of outsourcing from a US perspective: Nearshore and Offshore. Nearshoring provides talent coming from Central and South America. Timezone alignment is less of an issue because these countries share the same or very near time zones as the continental US. However, given the different native languages, a barrier still exist and things can get lost in translation. Furthermore, there are cultural differences that can lead to defining and implementing something in a much different way than you may expect and this leads to more development time with more details provided in the specification than you may have anticipated. Finally, Nearshoring tends to be more cost effective than in-house employees and contracts and more expensive compared to our next outsourcing option: Offshoring.

As the word Offshoring implies, talent from these companies is located far away in Asia, Europe, and India. The time zone differences can be extreme and difficult to manage with 1 or 2 hours per day overlapping with your remote team(s) or team member(s). While this can focus the communication, it is not a substitute for no direct communication, especially at the start of a project. Offshoring is more economical compared to Nearshoring, but time zone alignment is a challenge. Furthermore, in places like Asia, and eastern Europe, talent retention can be a significant issue because the labor environment is skewed to reward rapid job transitions over long-term job retention. The result is that you may have to retrain a new contractor 3-6 months after they have joined your team, slowing down your project and costing you more money.

New Approach: Smoothshoring™

After experiencing all of these pain points and more, we came to the realization that we could do better. We could make outsourcing a smooth process and instead of making the choice between Nearshoring and Offshoring, we could provide Smoothshoring™. Smoothshoring™ combines the best traits of Nearshoring and Offshoring, creating a smooth outsourcing experience that has all the benefits and none of the headaches. Smoothshoring™ combines the time zone alignment of Nearshoring while approaching the  cost effectiveness of Offshoring by utilizing bi-lingual US-based technical and program management to remove the language and cultural barriers that cause things to be lost in translation. This is the helping hand that missing from traditional outsourcing models. Our hybrid approach provides offshore top tech talent to realize your software development goals ranging from UX/UI and website design and development to mobile (iOS and Android) and cloud application development services and support, with a local interface. Building on our decades of experience as clients and service providers, we have added the US-based teams to help you navigate the global talent market. Furthermore, we not only optimize your engineering efforts, but we also supercharge your leadership team with Executive Leadership Coaching to unlock their potential and remove any limitations to your success. Executive Leadership Coaching is an integral part of Smoothshoring™ that helps your leadership team with internal and outsourcing executive management.   By making great decisions, improving communications and building your dream development team, your business will be on the road to success. This holistic approach addresses technical and leadership execution challenges. Thus, we add top technical talent and coaching to remove organizational friction and create a smooth path to success.

Engagement models

We offer IT services and executive leadership coaching solutions tailored to meet your needs. There are four main services categories that can be customized to meet your business needs. If you just need a few engineers to complete your team and help your project move forward, we offer Staff Augmentation which finds the right people to add to your team. These new team members are managed by your project manager and/or team lead. We illustrate Staff Augmentation in the animation below. We can scale up and down the team members as your needs evolve.

Staff augmentation

There are times when you have the management in place, but lack a team to execute on your vision. In this scenario, we can provide an entire Software Development Team that is managed by your project manager and/or team lead to execute on your project vision. We illustrate the Software Development Team model in the animation below. We know that project requirements change over time and we are able to scale up and down the team to meet your needs. You may need more than one team and we can handle that too.

Software development teams

There are other times when you have the vision, but no resources to realize that vision. In these cases, we can provide everything from project management and design to full software implementations targeting mobile platforms, the web, the cloud and on-premise. This is what we can do, Full-Service Outsourcing, because we do it all. We use industry-standard best practices to go from concept to prototype to product. The animation below depicts how Full-Service Outsourcing can work with you.

Full-service outsourcing

Finally, our business is only as good as your leadership. The business, like any good machine, must work in harmony to complete its tasks. If there is misalignment, improper communication or other problems, like a machine, our business will not function properly and most efficiently and in the worst cases, things can break and the whole business can fail.  Executive Leadership Coaching helps to align your business by making sure your leadership team is firing on all cylinders.We demonstrate in the illustration how an Executive Leadership Coach can help your leadership team or focus on individual leaders in your organization.

Executive leadership coaching

We believe that organizations must possess the 7 C’s to be successful:  Clarity, Conception, Coherence, Culture, Communication, Collaboration, Cohesion. Each attribute positively reinforces the business to create and maintain a healthy organization that operates as one.

Welcome to Smoothshoring™

Let us help you, help yourself to success. We care about the success of your technical and executive leadership. We can add critical roles to your existing team, fast, provide complete Full-Service Outsourcing solutions, or something in between. We want you on the fast path to our next product or solution. Glatco can help supercharge your engineering and executive teams with tailored solutions to meet your needs with the combination of our US-based and Serbian-based team. That is Smoothshoring™!

Onshore + Offshore + Executive Coaching = Smoothshoring™