Every week in Toronto’s Globe & Mail newspaper (which I love!) there’s a column that depicts a particular business issue for a small business. I love to read them and think about what I’d do in their shoes and if I think I have a decent idea, I write about them in this blog as Small Business Case Studies.

Today’s challenge is called Collaborating with a far-flung team and details a small company owner, Alexey Saltykov, based in Toronto with a co-owner in Germany. They have 2 contractors in Russia and one in Montreal and a business advisor in Australia. The obvious challenge is communications across vast time zones but it’s also very much about the effectiveness of the collaboration when its never face to face. They already use communication tools like Skype and Basecampto and the various experts addressing this challenge in the article suggest a number of other tech based communication alternatives.

I re-read this article a couple of times because no big idea was coming to me. But then I zeroed in on a key quote by the owner:

“I want to be able to stand up around the white board, chat together and discuss the problem. Nothing allows us to be as productive as people who are in one room.”

That’s the problem. Whatever he does, whatever technical solution he deploys, it’ll never be the same as physically being in the same room. We all know this to be true. The nuances of physically being in the same room, talking about an issue are palatable and impossible to replace “online”.

This is a big issue for Mr. Saltykov. He does have a few directions he can go in but I’m afraid none of them are slam dunks:

1. Optimize the technical communications options. This just means that he makes marginal improvements to the collaboration. But its still not face to face.
2. Supplement the improved tech based communication with more frequent trips to Europe for face to face meetings. Problem here is the costs to do so. As a new business I strongly suspect he doesn’t have the cash to do this.
3. Local source his contractors. This is a partial solution as he could eliminate the Montreal and Russia folk and replace with locals. But there’s a reason he’s working with these folks to start with (cost, expertise, product knowledge, etc.) so let’s acknowledge that finding and training locals would be a big move …but its an option.
4. Owners consolidate somewhere plus #3. The last option I came up with would be for the owners to base the company either in Toronto or in Germany (or an agreeable other location) and then local source all their help. So one of the owners has to move but all the key figures are in one location (the business advisor in Australia can still advise from afar).

I don’t have a recommendation about what option they should pursue. The issues are profound.

However, I do recommend they explore elements of each option. They owe it to themselves to at least consider some drastic actions. By doing so, they may uncover how far they are willing to go to make the business soar. And maybe the dialogue will point them in a brand new direction that isn’t even on the radar screen now. To them I wish only good luck.

What would you do in similar circumstances?

Thanks for reading my blog and please visit again.

Vincent out

Tags: collaboration, communications, local source, Skype, video-conferencing

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 18th, 2012 at 1:20 pm and is filed under Small Business, Small Business Case Studies. 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.