Let’s Talk About Outsourcing, And Why Shaming Small Business Owners Has to Stop

By Marlen Videz CEO, Only Escrow & Founder, Valore Office Solutions

Everyone loves to have an opinion about outsourcing. They say it with a certain look on their face, like you just admitted to something shameful. Like hiring internationally means you’ve turned your back on your community, your country, your conscience.

But I want to ask you something, and I want you to really sit with it. Have you ever tried to keep a small business alive in this economy? Not launch one. Not dream about one over coffee. Actually keep one alive, payroll to payroll, quarter to quarter, with no investor safety net and no bailout waiting in the wings?

The weight nobody talks about

I own an escrow company. It is precise work, trust dependent work, the kind where a single dropped detail can derail someone’s entire home purchase. I built it the way most small business owners build things that actually last: early mornings that bled into late nights, nights that sometimes meant sleeping under my desk, showering at a local gym because going home wasn’t an option.  I spent countless days not seeing my front door.  Not because someone asked me to.  Because the business needed me to.  And because walking away was never something I was willing to do.

The cost of running a small business in the United States has become something most people outside of it simply don’t understand. Rent climbs. Insurance climbs. Payroll taxes, benefits, workers’ comp,  it all climbs. And the margin you’re left with to actually run your business, to serve your clients, to grow, it shrinks.

What the workforce conversation isn’t saying

Here is something I’ve lived through more than once, and I know I’m not alone.  You find someone good. You invest in them: your time, your training, your trust. You bring them up through the ranks until they know your business the way very few people do. And then one day, the desk is empty. No two weeks notice. No handoff. No courtesy call. Just open files mid-process and a gap no one else can easily fill.  I’ve been there. More times than I care to count.

The harder version is the employee who joins, puts in a few months, files for medical leave, exhausts every available day, and then resigns, while you, the business owner, are legally prohibited from replacing them. You sit there, short-staffed, trying to serve clients who are counting on you, with both hands tied behind your back.  The system has plenty of protections. Just not many for the person signing the paychecks.

“If I was allowed to hire quality employees from Guatemala and train them from the ground up to become Escrow Officers, I would do it without a moment’s hesitation.”

What I found when I looked elsewhere

When I first started working with employees from Guatemala, I’ll be honest, I didn’t know exactly what to expect. What I found humbled me. I found people who showed up. Fully. Consistently. People who treated their work as something worth doing well, not something to tolerate until something better came along.  There was a humility and a hunger that I hadn’t seen in a long time, not because American workers lack those qualities, but because right now, in this labor market, those qualities are not always the ones showing up to work.

Escrow is not a forgiving industry. It is deadline driven and detail heavy, and the clients on the other end are often in the middle of the most significant financial transaction of their lives. You need people who are all the way in.

Why I built an outsourcing company

Let me be clear about something, because I think it gets misread.  I didn’t start an outsourcing company to help businesses cut corners. I did it because I watched too many small businesses, good businesses, businesses built by people like me collapse under the combined weight of rising costs and an unreliable labor pipeline.

Small businesses don’t make headlines when they close. There’s no press release, no congressional hearing. There’s just a locked door and an owner who gave everything they had and still ran out of runway. I refused to be that story. And I want to help others avoid it too.

The conversation we owe ourselves

Before anyone rushes to judgment about the business owner who hires internationally, I’d ask one honest question. Are the workers really out there? available, committed, ready to stay? Or has the labor market shifted in ways that small business owners are simply expected to absorb silently, without complaint and without alternatives?

The conversation around outsourcing needs to grow up. It needs to move past the politics and the easy outrage and get honest about what small business owners are actually facing.  Small businesses deserve solutions. Not shame.