“What Craig is Doing”

Since returning from my trip to India, I’ve reconnected with a number of friends, and I routinely get the “So,… what are you doing now?” question. After fielding it a number of times over this past weekend, I thought I should do a better job of getting the word out to my friends. I’ve been out of Microsoft for over two years, and after working for an outsourcing firm on contract for a year, I split off and decided I could do a better job of it myself. I had been working with the one company that had approached me, and I wasn’t tremendously happy with their work, so I decided to go to India myself, find the best companies possible, and work with them instead. This let me cherry pick the best, as well as spread the number of services I could offer to my US clients. Now that I’m back, I’ve partnered with three firms (working on the 4th). The first is a market research firm, called ValueNotes, who is like an outsourced version of Forrester or Gartner, and does custom research reports in a number of industries. Competitive research and customer intelligence are specifically what I deal with, and any size company that needs to know more about their customers or competitors is a potential client. The other two companies are in the more familiar IT sector. Synerzip does software development for funded companies, and Verisoft specializes in doing software testing. Both of these companies focus on creating teams and long term relationships. I chose these three companies because I trusted their management, and found that their hiring practices were sound. There were a multitude of other factors involved, but those two things went a long way to solving a lot of the issues most people complain about when it comes to outsourcing. So now that I’m back, and I’m working on the client side of things, which is reaching out to companies who want to utilize resources overseas, and need to find a provider they can trust. I’m happy to talk to anyone who needs to know more about outsourcing. I’ve made a number of contacts in India, in a number of industries where outsourcing now takes place (including software, market research, legal services, publishing, telemarketing, etc) and I’m happy to talk to friends of friends who need to know more about the landscape there. How can I help people you know? To make it simple: If you hear someone talk about needing more resources, or about outsourcing… point them my way. I’m happy to help out in whatever way I can. You can reach me at craig (at) dossantospartners.com, and my company website is www.dossantospartners.com