I get several calls each year from mystery companies in India offering bargain basement prices on programming. The calls usually start out a little something like this:

“Yes, Mr. Perry. We saw your website and we are interested in offering our programming services to you. We are cheap, cheap, cheap and can enable you to take on larger projects at minimal cost. Did I mention that we were cheap?”

And my response usually goes a little something like this:

“Um, no thanks.”
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There are a lot of reasons why I have absolutely zero interest in dealing with these companies and let me stress that these are my personal feelings. What others do with their money and time is strictly up to them. If you can save a few bucks this way then bravo for you.

• First and foremost; I don’t need them.
  I’ve got an absolutely awesome local programmer that I work with. Everything that I hand to him comes back 120% better than what I outlined. He’s quick and he’s right around the corner so we can meet face to face and brainstorm over projects. It’s been a mutually beneficial relationship that we’ve cultivated over the past year. Plus, I just like working with the guy.
• Second: It’d be pretty hypocritical of me to throw money in their direction.
  I’m a local business. Nearly all of my clients are local businesses. Times are tight right now and somehow, I’d feel like I was selling out and not truly supporting the local area if I farmed out my programming to a company that is half a world away.
• Third: I absolutely hate getting support calls routed to India.
  Any of you that have dealt with tech support and/or customer service calls like this know exactly what I mean. It’s bad enough having to straighten out health insurance enrollment with linguistic challenges. I can’t imagine having to explain how a database needs to be interacted with while jumping the same hurdles.

There’s a common thread through all of this. Social media and electronic communication are all great, but the ability to look someone in the eye and do business is still a important thing, especially to local businesses. I know my contribution to the local economy is small, but I feel that it’s important to put my money where my mouth is.

So, if you’re browsing over my site from some call center in India, please don’t call. I don’t particularly enjoy telling people no, but I promise you that you’re not going to be making a sale here.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 6th, 2008 at 2:22 pm and is filed under Wilmington NC, design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.