This blog is written by people at Business360, a business services company, and the content reflects the issues we face and grapple with daily.

Our work centers on delivering a range of business services – research, analysis, interviews, thought leadership and more – either on an ad hoc basis or an ongoing arrangement. One distinguishing feature is that we rely on a global network of freelancers, all working from home. These are highly educated, qualified and experienced professionals that for one reason or another choose to work outside of the traditional corporate environment, although almost all our people have many years of experience working at high levels in it. Business360 has been around since 1999 and our team is very cohesive – many of the professionals that started with us are still with us today.

In 2000 we developed a site, ClickNwork, especially to attract and manage people working remotely. ClickNwork has over 100,000 signed up, representing a deep resource of talented individuals that wish to telework. There are many sites that give access to freelancers (elance, craigslist, getafreelancer etc) but these are gateways to people who can do the work (hopefully). Our approach has been to offer the management, training and Q&A, which makes the process much easier for clients.

We’ve seen many changes in the decade we’ve been around. In the late 1990’s we could have had funding (we think) but decided to bootstrap our operation (we didn’t call it that as we didn’t know the term; we just saw it as getting by). As the dotcom bubble burst and start-ups were starved of cash it was nothing new to us!

The rise of India as a service provider gave us a lot of price competition. Generally, we don’t mind where the work is completed (our business model is based on using people wherever they are), but we do find that many forms of research, writing and analysis are best done close to home and in recent years we’ve welcomed the repatriation of some work from India, back to the US or UK. (It’s not that we’re against doing work overseas – we have teams of people in low-cost countries and use them a lot – it’s just a case of horses for courses.)

We’ve also seen the proliferation of terms – outsourcing, offshoring, insourcing, nearshoring, homesourcing, crowdsourcing etc – and have taken part in elements of the debate through surveys, white papers and speeches.

This blog is a place where we talk about what we see and say what we think. We hope you find it useful and contribute to the comments.