Obfuscating work for freelancers

I'm working on starting a small consultancy where I'm the head honcho for managing ideas, tasks, projects, clients, and workers. I want to use ultra cheap random Internet freelancers as much as possible and focus my energy on deconstructing all work into efficient procedures of tasks that can be completed as close as possible to the specification by commodity freelancers. But I'm concerned that because I will never meet these freelancers and definitely cannot trust them, I will need to break all the work to be done into seemingly unrelated micro tasks as much as possible to obfuscate good ideas and to protect against any possibility for backstabbing.

How much do most people worry about this? Of course it varies widely depending on the kind of organization you have, but for hiring loads of random ultra cheap freelancers, can anyone speak from experience about how and why they have obfuscated their work in this way?

Hiring a bunch of ultra cheap freelancers and obfuscating the tasks they're working on will guarantee failure. You need to make the tasks as clear and as simple as possible. Most likely they can't go around you directly to the customer anyway.

On the flip side, you must protect your customers' data, business practices, etc. If they have you sign an NDA, you better get the freelancers to sign something similar. In many cases that's not going to be useful for enforcement other than as a reminder.

The dishonest ones will try to reuse the ideas - and potentially even the code - with other customers. There's no foolproof way to prevent that.

Also, you should review your own agreements with your customers to make sure you can share whatever information, plans, etc with non-employees or outside your organization for just that reason.

As time goes by you are probably going to re-use the best of your freelancers, and thus you're likely to build long-term relationships with them. They earn an income thanks to you, so they'd be silly to go behind your back and poach your client. Furthermore, the one asset that you posses that they don't have is a relationship with the client. So in a nutshell, I wouldn't worry about obfuscating your work.

Having said that, if one of your freelancers attempts to back-stab you by poaching your client, and your client accepts their offer, you probably don't want that client to begin with. Or perhaps you were over-charging your client, in which case it serves you right. Welcome to business.

Ultimately, obfuscating work to the point that you eliminate this risk is going to be the biggest waste of your time. You're better off trusting your freelancers and using all of your time to solidify your relationships with your clients. They'll in turn reward you with their loyalty.

If they are just developing the systems, then try and separate the data from the system as much as you possibly can. Never let them work directly with production data. If it's a website to manage clients or whatever, then create a staging server with test clients and details.

But: Using very cheap online freelancers is never a good foundation to build your business on. It may seem like an awesome idea now, but 3 years down the line when you need to started expanding your site and moving it forward, you'll curse the decision you made. There's a reason they are so cheap.