The longer I run small businesses, the more sceptical I become of this sentiment. I wrote a cathartic rant here at first, about all the different ways external services have let down my businesses over a period of many years and how often our in-house systems have been the only thing that kept us going in those situations. But instead of letting rip and naming names in rather undignified fashion, I have decided to settle for just posting the conclusion.
I want to agree with the principle that you build what is essential to your business and you buy in the rest. As both an entrepreneur and a developer, I want to focus on the unique, value-adding parts of whatever my business is doing. I want to let someone else handle the mechanical stuff and the formalities, and I have no problem with paying a fair price for that.
But that whole argument is predicated on the idea that outsourcing will get an overall better result than building in-house, so that in some way it saves time and/or money that you can better invest elsewhere. So many services we've used have changed or discontinued functionality and forced us to relearn or reintegrate just to avoid going backwards, so many services we've used have pushed their prices up in real terms while adding little of extra value to us, so many services only ever reach 75% of what we'd like from them and the missing 25% of functionality hurts more and more, so many services we've used just don't work so often that you wonder how they manage to stay in business at all, that I now find it hard to trust or expect good results from any external service at all.
Sometimes you have no choice about outsourcing. No small business has the resources to do some things, particularly in heavily regulated areas like payments and tax, or in large-scale infrastructure like operating a data centre, unless that is part of the purpose of the business. So you choose the least of evils and hope for the best.
But today, as someone just starting to set up another business, I am looking for services that handle everything in a particular area where for practical reasons we can't do it in-house. I want to specify what we need, and have it done and the results delivered. I don't want to care about anything in between. I don't want to be distracted by any related legal and regulatory compliance matters. I just want the job done, properly and legally, for a reasonable price. I have little interest in working with anyone offering less than that, unless I have absolutely no choice.
Maybe this means I actually do agree with the original principle after all, and I've just learned from experience that an extreme interpretation of it is the way to go.