That is an excellent observation to make. If you are planning to start a business and come to the realization that you could outsource your principal value driver, then you probably should not go into business doing that thing.
What kinds of value drivers exist? Are there any examples of outsourcing value drivers, either potentially or actually? I'm not quite understanding the statement.
If I ran a digital agency, I could build websites, but I could also hire people to build websites, is that outsourcing my value driver?
I would say that some (not all) digital agencies add value not by coding a website up but by providing their service, for example:
- They can build better overall experiences (not just the website, but whole UX). Some agencies/ people do have success in outsourcing the technology, because they might do QA and leadership, which these off shore teams would not get right.
- They have deep expertise in some technology which you can't just hire someone for. I guess you can argue, everyone has a price and a company can just pay that rate, but if that employee is doing all the work, that employee would probably have a high rate and would be, themselves capturing the value, not the company. I think this point is almost just a repetition of the first example.
