Christine Mason McCaull is one of several entrepreneurs Portfolio.com is following as part of the series The Great Global Business Adventure. All of the entrepreneurs will be blogging about their experiences.

Running a team can be a challenge. Running a virtual team? A bigger challenge. Now imagine running a virtual team with people all around the world, with all of the language and cultural barriers that can arise. Done right, it can be great; done wrong, it can be downright unworkable.

For the last several years, we’ve been working with development teams and outsourced service providers from all over the world—from our own backyard to India and the Philippines. It’s a global economy, even if your company (or maybe especially if your company) is only a handful of people.

Why do we outsource? We do it for cost reasons, we do it to be able to access “spot buys” of specific capabilities to build our business that we couldn’t otherwise afford, and we do it to create global peace (but that’s for another article). Also, we find a lot of rapport with our partners (and freelancers in general) in the inherent hustle and entrepreneurial attitude in their approach to work. They want it, they are hungry, and there is no sense of entitlement—just like the founders of startup companies anywhere on the planet.

Here are our suggestions for building a great working relationship with an offshore team. You may notice that many of these suggestions apply equally to building a local, in-person team.

Know what to outsource and what to think twice about.

There’s something that we internally call “the specification tax,” or the “requirements tax.” There are some things that can be very easily outsourced because there are well-documented international standards in place, or a task with an easily defined process.

Where there are no such standards, be very careful not to get seduced by low rates—the overhead and opportunity cost for managing revisions and changes will more than make up for the savings. More importantly, you may not ever be able to get it right. Please note that this is not about the skill of the offshore team, but about the ability to communicate.

What’s easy to outsource?

Technical, development, or process tasks that are easy to document. From a development standpoint, database creation and maintenance, open-source installation and configuration. For example, “install Magento e-commerce on our server”—that’s something that requires skill, but there is not a lot of variability in execution. Other repeat tasks, where a defined process can be put in place, such as link building or structured data management and data entry.

Conversely, it’s hard to specify some tasks at a level that will get it done right.

Here are some development tasks that are culture heavy: language/copywriting, brand, usability, and visual standards—even user interface. To get this to work, we really have to slow down and say, down to the button level, what we need. As Malcolm Gladwell pointed out in his book Blink, there are countless “thin sliced” observations and decisions included in any one judgment or thought, especially when the person has a lot of experience in a particular realm. That’s pretty hard to tease apart enough to communicate to someone without that lifetime perspective. The corollary to this: Always be more detailed and specific rather than less any time you’re working with outsourced providers. And use pictures!

Know what you’re getting into—global outsourcing isn’t for everyone.

Physical rapport, nonverbal communication, time-zone issues, and language all pose significant adjustments to the standard way of working. For example, the hardest thing for my business partner was firing up the computer for an 8 p.m. call with India, where they were just kicking off the workday. As he put it, “that’s critical family time, really valuable time with my wife, and the hardest part for me about outsourcing.”