Outrageous outsourcing costs

Susan Phillips and I were having breakfast one recent morning at the Sea Porch Café overlooking the Gulf of Mexico when I mentioned that I write this column. “You have to help me,” she said.

“We’re thinking of upgrading our Web site, and we’re not sure what to do.” Phillips is the director of hotel sales at The Don CeSar Beach Resort and Spa, a historic 1928 resort near St. Petersburg, Fla. She seemed to be suffering from an acute case of sticker shock.

The Don’s upscale image had drawn at least one overpriced bid for the upgrade work. She didn’t know how to handle it. Forrester Research estimates that $2 billion could be spent this year on Internet-related projects like the Don’s, and as much as $10 billion by 2000. I got the feeling Phillips didn’t want to become another statistic by blowing her budget on Web design work.

The pitch to her department likely included the following sentence: “You really want to leave this kind of work to a professional.” Sound familiar? It does to me. It’s the same argument brick-and-mortar travel agents have used to scare their clients away from the Internet. It’s right up there with “You don’t want your kids to be online. You never know who’s out there.”

It’s someone who is in the know preying on our ignorance and then overcharging us for a service. How much business have online retailers lost to brick-and-mortar propaganda? It can’t be measured. How many hotel sales directors have paid ridiculous prices for a Web site? No one’s going to admit to it.

I don’t know what happened to the Don. I called a few weeks later to get an update, but Phillips and I never connected. I hope she solicited other bids for the design work or, better yet, brought the project in-house. I tried to explain to her that designing a Web site is getting easier and easier. “All an agency does, anyway, is hire a recent graduate who knows a little HTML. You could do the same,” I told her.

But for every Don CeSar, I fear there are a dozen or a hundred industry players that believe the horror stories and plunk down large sums of cash for a service they could have gotten at a fraction of the price. If they only understood that comprehensive outsourcing, at least on a relatively small scale, runs contrary to everything the Internet is about.

The Web empowers all of us, whether it’s a hotel president or a high school sophomore, to publish content at virtually no expense. A liberating concept, but a scary one for the advertising agencies, consulting firms and boutique Web designers who stand to lose business if their clients buy it.

I’m not suggesting that those companies don’t offer any value. Only that just as agents have to find a way of making themselves indispensable to the travel equation, these designers do, too. Instilling an irrational fear of the Internet in a client will backfire in the end. So will refusing to share the latest version of Web design tools FrontPage or Dreamweaver with the customer rather than maximize the number of billable hours.

Such self-preserving behavior is understandable but inexcusable.

Christopher Elliott is the author of Scammed: How to Save Your Money and Find Better Service in a World of Schemes, Swindles, and Shady Deals. Critics have called it “eye-opening” and “inspiring” — it’ll “grab your attention and won’t let go.” Order your copy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or iTunes.

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