Mary Panttaja

It is almost 20 years to the month since Jim and I started the original joint business that became Panttaja Consulting Group, Inc. As we start into helping launch another new business it will be interesting to note the similarities and differences. So far:

• You still have to hire people, get medical insurance and workman’s compensation insurance. But it seems to be easier and cheaper to outsource the process than it was. In fact, it seems to be a no-brainer to have a Human Resources outsourcing provider, so setting up the corporate structure for having employees is pretty much a menu driven process. Not so much to figure out.
• You have to find space to house the business. Of course, this depends on whether you are building a “virtual” company or one you want to locate in space and time. (That is, get everyone together much of the time.) We can choose not to “co-locate” people because of all the technology at hand that brings us together virtually: conference calls, virtual meetings, email, instant messaging, video chat, etc. It looks like we will be going “physical” with this new company, so we need the whole facilities and furniture scene. Though I will admit that, having been through it several times before, it is less daunting than that first foray into renting an office.
• The challenge of establishing the technology to support a company has more options these days. You can outsource it all with hosting companies and a wide variety of software tools. If you are not a software development company, you don’t need to install much of any software (you usually need a browser), but you can get away without buying much. Some of the online software choices (like Salesforce) are subscription-based with a fee (it’s called “software as a service”), but others like Google Notebooks are free. You will find free solutions for most of the general tasks you want software for, though they may or may not meet specific requirements.
• Even in the software business, many development environments are free or relatively cheap. They do not require the substantial investments we had to make 20 years ago.

So things stay the same, and things change. And the less you are dependent on physically gathering people, the more you can radically outsource your whole operation.

This follows a theme in the blogosphere (world of blogs) these days, which is outsourcing your life. Some of it is very cool. But yesterday I found myself with one of the ultimate non-outsourced projects—harvesting food for the week from the garden, picking the cherry tomatoes, pear-apples, and strawberries one by one. And it was great. Sometimes you want your life just to be your life.