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We
are the World
After
pontificating about overseas outsourcing,
Bacon’s
Rebellion is giving it a try. Already, I’m getting
sentimental. Global trade is beautiful, man, it’s
really beautiful!
When
Mugure Mugo first contacted me about a month ago, I had
no idea that I soon would be conducting business over
the Internet with someone halfway around the world. Bacon’s Rebellion had an editorial focus of little interest to
anyone beyond the confines of the Old Dominion. All my
readers and customers were right here in
Virginia, and
so were all the Web designers, programmers and
miscellaneous experts I’d ever need to operate an
electronic publication. Sure, I’d write
about the challenges of
conducting business in a
globally integrated economy (see “Nowhere
to Run,”) but I had no intention of doing
anything rash like actually conducting business with
someone outside the United States.
Fortunately,
Mugure did manage to find me. The 32-year-old Kenyan
entrepreneur had been scouring the Web in search of
customers for her business, PrecissPatrol. Her team of
“web content specialists,” she suggested, could help
me maintain the massive directory of Web resources I’d
compiled for Bacon’s Rebellion. Or perhaps she could
assist with some other labor-intensive Web research.
Well,
it just so happened that I did need help. My “in
house” research staff was falling apart on me. One of
my two researchers, eldest daughter Sara, was heading
off to the University
of Virginia. The
other, teenager Ginny, soon would be preoccupied by
studies at St. Catherine’s. Neither had the time to
comb through the websites of hundreds of Virginia-based
companies in
a market research project that I needed to
get done.
No
problem, Mugure e-mailed me from
Nairobi. Her
employees were all college educated. They spoke and
wrote fluent English. And they were proficient with the
Internet. Not only could they handle the research, but
she would charge me only $7 an hour. That was less than
the $8 an hour I was paying my daughters, and less than half
the price I’d paid a temp firm last year for similar
work at Virginia Business, my former employer.
We
couldn’t shake hands over the Internet. I couldn’t
even look her in the eye. But Mugure inspired
confidence. Her command of written English was better
than that of most Americans. She quickly grasped what I
was looking for. And she stayed on top of things: She
did everything she said she would, and she did it when
she said she would. Despite the seven-hour time
difference between Richmond
and
Nairobi, our
extended work days overlapped by several hours. I
thought things would work. We had a deal.
(I
know what some of you are thinking. Yes, I
do get
e-mails on a weekly basis from the sons and nephews of
deposed African dictators with caches of treasure that
only I can help them uncover. In fact, I keep a
collection of their missives. So far, I’ve amassed
urgent pleas from the wife of Angolan warlord Jonas
Savimbi; one Andrew Onwo, auditor general of a South
African bank; a certain Andrew Kabiru, personal
assistant to deceased Congolese despot Laurent Kabila;
Hamed Abacha, son of a deceased Nigerian president; and
many more. But Mugure never alluded to any secret Swiss
bank accounts of former Kenyan presidents, so I was
fairly confident she wasn’t trying to snooker me!)
Since
then, Mugure and I have communicated almost every day as
she’d updated me on the progress of my job. Maybe
it’s the Virginian in me, but I don’t like doing
business with a stranger. Or maybe it’s the journalist
in me, and I’m just plain nosy. But I asked a lot of
questions about her business, her country and her
family, and she answered them forthrightly. The story
that emerged of entrepreneurial energy in a foreign
culture is one that I found fascinating.
Mugure
belongs to the Kikuyu ethnic group, which is native to
the Nairobi
area
and has embraced Western education and culture more
readily than most other East Africans. Her father was a
civil servant, and her mother taught school for 20 years
before starting a family business, a security firm.
Placing a high value on education, the family sent three
children to the United
States
to
earn their degrees. Mugure stayed close to home, earning
a Masters at the United
States
International
University
in
the capital
city.
After
graduating, she worked with a well-
established
trading firm for four years. Then the local economy took
a slide, the company laid off most of its middle
managers and she lost her job. At the same time, her
husband Edward was feeling the pinch in his
architectural practice. “It was a very difficult
time,” she says.
So,
Mugure decided to create her own job. Selling her car,
she raised $4,000 and started a company, E-Business
Solutions. It was an audacious move, considering that
she had to hire a tutor to instruct her in website
design in the evening while she rounded up work during
the day. But her husband gave her office space, a
telephone line and a PC, so she kept overhead low. As
she signed up new clients, mostly local Kenyan
companies, she grew incrementally, hiring free-lance
help before taking on full-time
employees.
Last
November, Mugure attended a workshop sponsored by the International
Trade
Center. It
was there that she learned of a growing phenomenon in
international trade: the outsourcing of back-office
support operations to developing countries. In April,
she launched PrecissPatrol to provide Internet research
services. She targeted two markets: Internet filter
developers who needed a way to keep up with harmful and
time-wasting content on the Web, and developers of
special-focus Web content.
The business quickly took off. PrecissPatrol now
supports five full-time employees, each with diplomas in
Information Technology and each equipped with a
high-speed, multimedia computer. The company has
relocated to an office just five minutes from Nairobi’s
central business district.
Doing
business in Kenya
offers intriguing contrasts with the U.S.
In East
Africa,
maintaining Internet connectivity is one of the
business’ biggest costs. On the other hand, labor is
so inexpensive that, rather than buy a new car, Mugure
and her husband have opted to hire a driver so they can
readily share their old vehicle. Despite paying wages
that are low by American standards, PrecissPatrol is no
clerical sweatshop. Mugure limits her employees to
nine-hour days so they can maintain their concentration
and do quality work. (Mugure, on the other hand,
frequently works past
7:30 p.m., as I can vouch from my e-mail exchanges with her.)
Although
Kenya
has
one of the highest fertility rates in the world, Mugure
has not yet had any children. She describes herself as a
Christian whose faith guides her day-to-day life, and
she insists that she and Edward plan to start a family
soon. But for now, she appears dedicated to building the
enterprise. Every penny she makes, she plows back into
the business.
To
her knowledge, PrecissPatrol is the first company of its
kind in Kenya
–
and she hopes it will serve as a new model for
development in sub-Saraha Africa. She
faces stiff competition from India, where a fast-growing IT industry has built a
reputation for excellent service and has forged strong
business ties in the
U.S.
But
that’s not stopping her. Mugure has launched what she
hopes will become a service portal -- www.outsourcetokenya.biz
– that will help Kenya
follow the same development path. “My hope,” she
says, “is that the success of PrecissPatrol will
inspire other professionals to market their services
abroad, as has been the case in India.”
Occasionally,
I have qualms about outsourcing my business overseas.
One of my consuming interests in Bacon’s
Rebellion is rural economic development. I’m
acutely aware that thousands of my fellow Virginians in
places like Martinsville, where I once lived, are out of work. Shouldn’t I
be looking for some way to outsource my business to
Southside or
Southwest
Virginia? By
feeding business to Virginians in distressed areas,
couldn’t I contribute in a small way to creating a
stronger, more vibrant Commonwealth?
But
the qualms don’t last long. I doubt I could find a
Virginian with a college education willing to work for
$7 an hour. And, the fact is, in the early stage of
building my own business, I can’t afford to pay any
more. Besides, it was Mugure
who found me, not someone from Danville
or
Abingdon. If she hadn’t shown the initiative in
identifying my website, I probably wouldn’t have found
anyone to do
my market research. Now, thanks to PrecissPatrol, I have
developed a list of more than 100 highly qualified
prospects for a new marketing service that I plan to
roll out shortly. If the new initiative is a success,
I’ll have Mugure to thank in part.
To
my mind, outsourcing to Kenya
doesn’t take away jobs from Americans. Mugure’s Web
research will help jump-start sales for at least one
fledgling business, Bacon’s Rebellion, and help
preserve at least one job -- mine. Eventually, as
Bacon’s Rebellion grows, I will hire Virginians to work for me. Forging partnerships with
Kenyans to handle the routine work allows Virginians the
luxury of concentrating on the creative, value-added
tasks.
Meanwhile,
I’m delighted that I can contribute in some small
measure to the success of a business enterprise on
another continent. Developing countries like Kenya
need
entrepreneurs like Mugure to generate foreign exchange
and raise their standards of living. Global trade is
beautiful. By disseminating fresh ideas through Bacon’s Rebellion, I hope to help build a better
Virginia. By
outsourcing to Kenya,
I’m helping build
a better world.
-- Sept. 9, 2002
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