One of the most important tasks I have at Flatsourcing is making sure that each month I take the time to speak briefly with our clients. Maintaining an open line of communication, as well as identifying issues before they become problems is the principal goal of these call. Secondary goals include getting to understand our clients longer term business goals, understanding their current challenges, and simply developing stronger personal relationships with everyone we work with.

A challenging part of the process for me has always been ensuring that I am doing an appropriate job of communicating our clients message to the team members who are responsible for executing the work on a day to day basis. It’s one thing to simply restate the information that is passed along, but to do it properly it takes a bit more.

How do you convey the concern you hear in the voice of a client about the launch of their application in a Basecamp post?

How do you help a developer who spends hours working on the smallest detail of one feature out of hundreds understand the overall business reality of a company halfway around the globe?

In the past, this has been achieved by taking copious amounts of notes and then spending the time needed to parse through the notes and create a new post that logically presents the information from the call. This has always been a less than efficient process, but up until recently I simply hadn’t spent the time to think about what might be a better way to handle it. The challenge of connecting our clients business to our developers who are handling the granular tasks that are the building blocks of that business is entirely in communication. Thanks to finally coming across the wonderfully simple Audi Hijack Pro via recommendation, I am now recording all of these client conversations. This allows me to post the audio file of the actual discussion, along with a simple summary of the conversation and any other supporting documentation to provide our team with a much fuller and richer picture of each client and their needs. Beyond that, it also cuts the time needed to communicate this information down tremendously allowing us all to spend less time meeting, typing, or transcribing, and more time working on improving our services and your products.

Want to know more about our process and how Flatsourcing can help your business? Just drop us a line and setup a time to speak with us directly.

Hi everybody,

We finally have a v1 of video ready! Less talk more action, so check it out yourself!

Seems pretty cute!

As all of our clients know, Flatsourcing is a 50/50 partnership between the U.S. side and the Russian side. With one office in New Orleans, the other in Kazan, and clients spread across the globe, we understand how important open communication is. We strive to find opportunities to take our online communication offline at least once or twice a year so that we continue to strengthen the bonds we have built over the last 4 years.

On February 22nd, Chris and I hopped a flight to Miami for Future of Web Apps 2010 and to meet up with our colleague Alex Mamaev. After an inspiring day of presentations on topics that ranged from deeply technical to highly entrepreneurial (for more check out Chris’s take on some of the presentations), we headed back to New Orleans with Alex. In the almost two weeks Alex was here in New Orleans with us, we were able to dive deeper into some of the structural issues of Flatsourcing and better understand as managers our current opportunities and challenges.

That’s to be expected and was incredibly useful, but what’s even more invigorating about these times we get to spend together is the chance to get to know each other on a more personal level. As was the case during our trip to Kazan last May, getting to see the day to day of each others work environment and lives outside the office builds an even stronger bond between all of us. The opportunity to see the office environment we have here at Launchpad New Orleans, meet the people we work around each day, as well as our friends and families gives Alex an insight into the US side of the Flatsourcing operation that is critical to our long term success.

One of the topics we closed out with was scheduling the next visit Chris and I will make to our office in Kazan for late-summer or early-fall of 2010. Last year we were lucky enough to have two of our current clients join us for the trip and we would like to extend that invitation again this year. If you’re interested in meeting the team that makes up Flatsourcing and see what makes us special, let me know and we’ll keep you up-to-date on the planning.

On a side note, Alex is also a terrific photographer, so be sure to check out his photo stream from the trip.

New Orleans City Park by Alex Mamaev