redfalcon6

I'm in process of completing an acquisition of a 30 year old manufacturing business. 9 employees. Machine tools, some of which are CNC, some aren't. A bit over $1M in revenue. (Single product type, but each product is customized for the end user. Sorry for anonymity but not done with purchase yet.)

This business has not been brought into modern age. Manual hand drawn designs for the products (which again, are done differently for each customer). Old school hand recording of timesheets. No HR system. Accounting on quickbooks. CRM is a paper file system. No sales staff to speak of (just answer phones.) 7 step manufacturing process is done by moving hand written order forms along the production line for each step.

What would your priorities be as you took this over to apply all the best of breed productivity tools, SAAS tools, hacks, etc to bring this business into the modern age?

I recently purchased a small website design firm and am looking to outsource the backend development to a partner so we can focus on client management, sales and marketing.

I've been trying to assemble my own virtual team from elance / odesk / freelancer but the results have been pretty poor and I don't want to be in the HR business.

The typical project will be very straightforward small business site designs -- 3-5 pages, with contact forms. Straight up HTML and CSS designs - so very simple. I also have a few magento clients and requests for SEO.

I'm looking specifically for a long term partnership where we can create a very clean project management system and clean handoffs for site-design and one-off maintenance requests for my clients.

I am looking for a TEAM not an individual. Ideally a shop with 30+ folks so they have some scale and responsiveness.

Ideally this would be in Latin America for timezone alignment, but open to CEE as well. India not as ideal but very open to hearing your experiences.

Anybody have experience with these kind of shops?

Thanks in advance!!!