Usually in business the term outsourcing generally has a negative connotation.
But for Ricardo Garcia, outsourcing actually means adding more jobs at the Yonkers headquarters of his tech support company, Etectonics.
Garcia began his IT business venture shortly after graduating from New York University in 2002. His mother, Astrid, soon thereafter left her own import-export business to join her son”™s company as executive director and provided a capital injection to the venture. His brother, Alejandro, serves as director of business development for the company.
After experiencing steady growth, last year Garcia established a back office in Bogotá, Colombia.
Garcia, who is of Colombian descent, said the country is becoming an emerging market for business-support services.
The office enables his small- to mid-sized U.S. customers to outsource appropriate processes and thereby remain competitive with their larger counterparts.
But when Etectonics outsourced its own sales positions to the Colombian back office, the company generated enough business within two months to hire two more technicians in the U.S.
“In this competitive world, outsourcing is a must and we provide the means to level the playing field for small businesses,” said Garcia. “It saves us money, and we realized that turnover is a lot lower there. And it enabled us to hire more techs here in New York.”
A little over a year since establishing a presence in Colombia, Garcia said he is considering expanding further there.
“We definitely want to do more there,” he said. “There are excellent bilingual professionals there.”
And Garcia considers the Bogota office to be right next door to his own at 470 Nepperhan Ave. That”™s because a video link to that office is set up in the Yonkers headquarters.
“We have a screen that is basically a window to our office down there,” he said.
In fact, Garcia”™s idea to set up the company”™s back office in Bogota stemmed from a project the company is working on to link up schools worldwide through media conferencing.
Garcia, president of the Scarsdale High School Alumni Association, helped the top-flight school link up with other schools from around the world via a television monitor.
He is working with a company called ePals, the world”™s largest online educational network, to develop secure sites for connecting classrooms online.
More recently, Etectonics was named a finalist for the 2007 “Best Technological Practice Award” issued by the New York Enterprise for Small Businesses. The company should find out by September if its wins, Garcia said.
“It was really a great thing for us to be nominated,” he said.
Etectonics services 200 small-business clients in New York City and Westchester, plying the roads in a fleet of six brightly painted Volkswagen Bugs. It employs 14 persons: nine in New York, including the Garcia brothers, and five in Colombia.
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