Yost Engineering, Inc. is proud to offer outstanding service and competitive pricing to our clients. We're equally excited with our small part in helping to revitalize and redefine business opportunities in Portsmouth, Ohio. Yost Engineering is located in a National Historic Registry building, constructed in 1890 as part of the area's shoe manufacturing history. YEI undertook the full restoration and renovation of the beautiful brick structure in the historic Boneyfiddle District.

Like other small, non-metropolitan and rural cities, Portsmouth has had a history of dramatic change since its founding in 1814. Its many faces include a flourishing river trading port in the 1800's, a large international shoe industry at the turn of the 20th century, to a variety of traditional domestic manufacturing activities through the 1970's. As manufacturing operations slowly disappeared from much of the landscape in Ohio, Portsmouth's economy suffered a prolonged and agonizing decline.

Portsmouth is slowly adapting to new business models and a non-manufacturing economic model. Along the way, old buildings are being renovated, new construction is filling in for buildings too deteriorated to be saved, all new schools have been constructed, and new retail, restaurant and entertainment venues have opened.

YEI is proud to be a part of this transformation. We also benefit from the area's lower cost of living, which allows us to invest more in R&D and product development, as well as pass along higher quality and value to our clients.

For More Information about Portsmouth, we invite you to visit:

• Appalachian Ohio.com
• Portsmouth Area Chamber of Commerce
• City of Portsmouth

Rural Outsourcing

YEI appreciates that outsourcing can be an important strategic decision for many companies, for many reasons. The benefits of outsourcing to rural America are many:

• lower operational costs
• high quality
• no language barriers
• no time zone disconnect
• no negative customer feelings
• support domestic job creation and retention

More about Outsourcing to Rural America

• Outsourcing, Rural America's Next Big Opportunity by Dale King...."there is a new game afoot in the rural communities. Our communities are now wired for communication and information...leveraging the rural advantage in the global economy - lower costs, mainstream skills, and the renowned rural work ethic."
• NPR Morning Edition, February 14, 2005 · In the last decade, an increasing number of American companies have been radically cutting costs by sending manufacturing and customer service jobs overseas, where labor costs can be dramatically lower. Now there's an attempt to bring outsourcing jobs back to smaller cities and towns. NPR's Howard Berkes recently visited the Arkansas town of Magnolia - home to about 10,000 people, near the southwest corner of the state - where some say there aren't enough jobs in local timber, oil, farming and manufacturing industries to keep local kids at home. "In a global marketplace, those commodities operate with ever thinner margins," says Mark Drabenstott of the Center for the Study of Rural America. "So the real challenge for most rural areas is (getting) from a commodity economy to a knowledge-driven economy."
• Wired News, November 27, 2005 · Rural Sourcing claims to provide information technology services at 30 percent to 50 percent below most U.S. consulting firms by tapping into the increasing number of IT professionals in rural America, where overhead and wages are lower than in metropolitan areas. While this is no match for outsourcing rates in India, clients benefit from local accents and similar time zones - not to mention the absence of stigma sometimes attached to farming jobs out to foreign countries. Peak Learning, an e-learning company based in San Luis Obispo, California, recently hired Rural Sourcing after considering IT service providers in Central California, which proved too expensive, and overseas companies, which were too inconvenient - and didn't jibe with the executives' principles. "The biggest benefit is knowing that we're giving jobs to American workers, versus a foreign country," said operations manager Tina Schultz.
• Workforce Management May 18, 2009: India on the Outs? "The global downturn, coupled with political concerns in the U.S. about domestic job losses, has caused companies to reconsider outsourcing to the subcontinent or managing their own workforces there. Some have found that bringing work back onshore makes better business sense..."