Aspiring web entrepreneurs face another battle, namely, doing the undifferentiated yet all-important “heavy lifting” … Each area is a career unto itself, doing poorly in an area will cause the entrepreneur to fail, and yet doing a competent job at each one is simply the price of admission… developers routinely spend 70% of their time doing this back end work. At Amazon we call this ensemble of challenges ‘muck’.

If you deprive yourself of outsourcing and your competitors do not, you’re putting yourself out of business.

These results suggest that service outsourcing not only would not induce a fall in aggregate employment, but also has the potential to make firms/sectors sufficiently more efficient, leading to enough job creation in the same sectors to offset the lost jobs due to outsourcing.

Make sure your back room is their front room. In other words, don’t you do guard services at your plant. Get someone who specializes in guard services to do them for you. Get rid of in-house printing, in-house conference services, any business that isn’t at the core of your focus.

In a world of outsourcing, no organization should have second-class support groups. They should outsource those functions to someone else who makes their living doing this…Stop trying to be all things. Anytime you find anyone referring to any group as a “support function”, think hard about whether that’s a function you can outsource.

A brilliant example of this is Coca-Cola. The company produces the syrup that makes its hugely popular soft drink ‒ but outsources (via franchises) the bottling of the product. In this way, the main company retains control of the part that makes it unique, passing on the work that practically any other company could do.