The title of this post is from a proposal I received for one of my outsourcing projects at the moment. I’m using elance.com to get a few things done and the process is intriguing. I have my new coach Tom to thank for pushing me to consider outsourcing. I’m finding it interesting on a number of levels. When you get proposals from people all over the world wanting your business, it can make you feel important and powerful – but it also challenges your own biases. Things like language. Should it bother me if someone bidding for build a brochure for me writes poor English in their proposal? I’ll be providing all of the text for the brochure anyway, so logically – no. But yet I still find myself gravitating to the bids with the better command of English.

The project I am awarding this morning is for the creation of the development of a two-page promotional brochure for TPN’s corporate consulting business. In 24 hours, I received 13 bids on the project, from places like Buenos Aires, Sverdlovskaja, West Bengal, Maharashtra… and New York. Some of the proposals are written in excellent English and some struggled.

The bidder from Sverdlovskaja (Russia) actually included some examples of his previous work, including one brochure which used a golden spiral (which I’m quite fond of) in the design, and it’s amazing how much that impacted on my decision to go with the firm. What impacted most, though, was his list of positive feedback from people who have worked with him in the past and his price, which was in the median of the bids I received.

Now I’m working on a project to build a marketing database to send the brochures to. The plan is to have 4 – 5 outsourced projects being worked on while I’m moving over the next week. Today is D-Day minus 5.

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My other thought for today is how biased THE AUSTRALIAN continues to be towards the Right.  Over brekky at a local Yarraville cafe this morning I glanced through the first couple of sections of the paper and it AMAZED me how many of the stories had a pro-Right bias. They were all about how bad Saddam was, what a good decision invading Iraq was, how dodgy the recommendations in Prof. Garnaut’s draft report on carbon trading are, how dodgy the new ALP government is, etc. These weren’t all “opinion” pieces, btw. Even the selection of stories the paper covers and gives prominence to shows a strong Right bias. Why am I surprised? I guess that with the current trend away from the Right in Australia, the USA and the UK, I kind of expected Murdoch to tell his minions to move with the times. It seems he has other plans.