WHERE Matters Too
By Wayne Hippo
May 18, 2020
I’m a big fan of business guru Simon Sinek. I started following him shortly after seeing his May 2010 Ted Talk: “How Great Leaders Inspire Action”. It was this theory that gave rise to Sinek’s mantra of “Start With Why”.
The main premise of Sinek’s theory is that people don’t buy “What” you do, they buy “Why” you do it.
Inspiration comes from why you do business, not what you do in business.
And that is 100% true. But….
It’s Not Just Why
Sometimes other things matter, too. In our case at PS Solutions “WHERE” we do business is a direct result of “WHY” we do business.
Americans over the years have seen industry after industry slow down then shut down after the jobs were sent offshore as a result of supposedly cheaper (often inferior) labor.
It’s unfortunately too easy to rattle off the lost industries like Textiles, Furniture, Manufacturing. The list goes on and on. We lose jobs, our economy suffers. We wind up importing cheaper versions of the same goods and our trade deficit worsens. We now are dealing with inferior products and our quality of life suffers.
In the latest crisis involving Covid-19, we have been hampered in obtaining many household products now made overseas (toilet paper, paper towels, hand sanitizer, etc.). We’re also dealing with problems with some medicines which are now manufactured in Asia not being sufficiently available.
Can we risk losing technology too?
The same is happening in Software Development and Technology. As important as this industry is to modern life, America has been tolerating the outsourcing of that work oversees for far too long. Software runs our banks, our transportation, our healthcare, essentially all aspects of our society are controlled by computer code.
Is that something we want to trust to some faceless offshore foreign entity?
We founded PS Solutions on the premise that this must stop. Software development is too important, it is too critical to our well-being to ever risk sending it offshore. We only write software code in the USA. The software we create is developed by our employees here in our development centers. We have never outsourced a single line of code and we never will.
It’s is our “WHY” at PS Solutions.
Sometimes the “WHY” is about the “WHERE”
Yes, it is our “WHY”, but it also shows the importance of “WHERE”. Do you know where your business software is being written? Where is it tested? Where is it stored? What country’s laws apply? What is their court system like? Do you believe it’s cheaper and safer in the long run to have financial, health care, or security software written offshore?
We work hard to keep costs under control and locate in areas of the country not traditionally thought of as “technology centers”. We find top software development talent who enjoy the safety and security (and lower cost of living) found in small-town America.
It takes a lot of hard work and a lot of creativity to put this extra layer on what we do, but it helps us fulfill our “WHY” when we pay attention to our “WHERE”.
We hope it’s important enough that everyone starts asking “WHERE?”.
Wayne Hippo is an owner and Managing Partner of PS Solutions, a software development and consulting firm with offices in Altoona, PA, Pittsburgh, PA, and Wilmington, NC.
You can reach Wayne at whippo@pssolutions.net
