To continue on the club theme, I would like to let you all know of another business group that I’ve played a meaningful role in for many years. Just today I was re-elected to a seventh consecutive two-year term as chairman of the Slow Learners’ Club, Asian Chapter.
Well, ok, not really — but it feels like I should have been. Today my wonderful project suffered a significant setback because of my own unwise decision to limit my search for a web development vendor to only one candidate, before actually signing the contract for making the project. Sure, I talked to other companies about building the site during the initial part of the search stage, but once I got a few preliminary quotes, I rapidly zeroed in on one vendor. And today that vendor completely dropped the ball. And my team got penalised on the play.
I chose this vendor because of their professionally managed development process and their competitive pricing for building the basic structure of the site. Also, their portfolio of past projects included a couple of similar projects, so their chances for building my site successfully looked promising.
The difficulty that we had, which utimately led to my cancelling our cooperation today was in getting a comprehensive quote for building the entire site. The vendor early on stated their preference to break down the building of the site into a few stages (which seems reasonable enough), and their initial quote included building the basic functionality of the site (at a very competitive rate) and leaving elements such as a bilingual back-end interface, user feedback system and online payment system to later stages which would be quoted after the first stage was complete.
Trying to get a comprehensive proposal and contract out of these guys eventually stretched over the Christmas period and well into January.
Fortunately, while I am a slow learner, I have learned a few things since I spent my winters pounding on the doors of deadbeat customers who couldn’t seem to scrape together the $2.10/week for my deliveries of the Minneapolis Tribune back in 1978. Before signing the agreement (and making a downpayment) for the site development, I asked for a comprehensive quote for the whole project. But was told this was impossible. So, based on the rates and time required for phase 1 of the project, I made my own estimate for phases 2-4 of the project and showed it to the vendor. Then came the fun part.
After seeing my figures, the vendor came back with their own estimate for the project (which suddenly became much more estimable) on Tuesday, that was considerably higher than mine. Fine. So last Wednesday we met to discuss ways that we might get the price into my budget and move the project forward. At the conclusion of the meeting, the vendor agreed to provide me with a new estimate in the hope that we could get a deal signed.
On Thursday, I received the new estimate. For a price 20% higher than what they had offered in the meeting on Wednesday. Without my having changed any requirements.
You would think that after 43 years orbiting the sun, that I would have learned to spot the lunatics.
Now after a weekend of sitting in the corner with my dunce cap on I am back to following a proper process and getting competing, comprehensive quotes before pursuing any negotiations with vendors. Will count the month of negotiations with the wrong development vendor as just another installment on the tuition for my business education.
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