You Win Some, You Lose Some and Then You Win

[brian john]

Last fall I bid a job for power monitoring 12 different locations simultaneously, for 30 days, downloading weekly. I own 10 monitors but many of them are needed regularly for work, so I decided to rent 1/2 of the required monitors.

The number was a fair number for a customer I have worked with for 30 years, around 38k. He calls me and chews me out accusing me of not knowing my job, trying to rip off a long time customer that typically hands me work no bid. He received another bid 1/2 my price. I try and explain my position and he continues on about how he will review all past bids and see how long I have been screwing him.

Well the 1/2 price he got was not what the engineers needed and now we are going back in to complete the project.

 

[ptonsparky]

The thought goes through my mind that the price just when up, when things like that happen to me, but I never do it.

 

[John120/240]

Last fall I bid a job for power monitoring 12 different locations simultaneously, for 30 days, downloading weekly. I own 10 monitors but many of them are needed regularly for work, so I decided to rent 1/2 of the required monitors.

The number was a fair number for a customer I have worked with for 30 years, around 38k. He calls me and chews me out accusing me of not knowing my job, trying to rip off a long time customer that typically hands me work no bid. He received another bid 1/2 my price. I try and explain my position and he continues on about how he will review all past bids and see how long I have been screwing him.

Well the 1/2 price he got was not what the engineers needed and now we are going back in to complete the project.
Last fall I bid a job for power monitoring 12 different locations simultaneously, for 30 days, downloading weekly. I own 10 monitors but many of them are needed regularly for work, so I decided to rent 1/2 of the required monitors.

The number was a fair number for a customer I have worked with for 30 years, around 30k. He calls me and chews me out accusing me of not knowing my job, trying to rip off a long time customer that typically hands me work no bid. He received another bid 1/2 my price. I try and explain my position and he continues on about how he will review all past bids and see how long I have been screwing him.

Well the 1/2 price he got was not what the engineers needed and now we are going back in to complete the project.

The customer got what he paid for from the other firm, but not what he needed which was your bid. I hope management at

this company is man enough to admit their mistakes.

 

[qcroanoke]

Last fall I bid a job for power monitoring 12 different locations simultaneously, for 30 days, downloading weekly. I own 10 monitors but many of them are needed regularly for work, so I decided to rent 1/2 of the required monitors.

The number was a fair number for a customer I have worked with for 30 years, around 38k. He calls me and chews me out accusing me of not knowing my job, trying to rip off a long time customer that typically hands me work no bid. He received another bid 1/2 my price. I try and explain my position and he continues on about how he will review all past bids and see how long I have been screwing him.

Well the 1/2 price he got was not what the engineers needed and now we are going back in to complete the project.

Sounds to me like your customer may have come back to you with (as my daddy used to say) "his hat in his hands"

He probably knows or you may have told him. I told you so!
If you can and you seem to be the type of person to do it, let it go.

 

[gadfly56]

Depending on his personality, you might start the chat something like "So, about that conversation we had last fall..."; and let him pick it up from there. Not as satisfying on one level as putting $38K in your pocket, but infinitely more so on another.

 

[Little Bill]

Last fall I bid a job for power monitoring 12 different locations simultaneously, for 30 days, downloading weekly. I own 10 monitors but many of them are needed regularly for work, so I decided to rent 1/2 of the required monitors.

The number was a fair number for a customer I have worked with for 30 years, around 38k. He calls me and chews me out accusing me of not knowing my job, trying to rip off a long time customer that typically hands me work no bid. He received another bid 1/2 my price. I try and explain my position and he continues on about how he will review all past bids and see how long I have been screwing him.

Well the 1/2 price he got was not what the engineers needed and now we are going back in to complete the project.
Last fall I bid a job for power monitoring 12 different locations simultaneously, for 30 days, downloading weekly. I own 10 monitors but many of them are needed regularly for work, so I decided to rent 1/2 of the required monitors.

The number was a fair number for a customer I have worked with for 30 years, around 30k. He calls me and chews me out accusing me of not knowing my job, trying to rip off a long time customer that typically hands me work no bid. He received another bid 1/2 my price. I try and explain my position and he continues on about how he will review all past bids and see how long I have been screwing him.

Well the 1/2 price he got was not what the engineers needed and now we are going back in to complete the project.

He had you so tore up you must have "cut-copied-pasted" twice!
Dejavu all over your thread!:lol:

 

[brian john]

He had you so tore up you must have "cut-copied-pasted" twice!
Dejavu all over your thread!:lol:

I was happy to say the least, but I was also professional and never mentioned this past issues.

 

[USMC1302]

And he obviously figured out you were not the leader of Team BOHICA on your past jobs either...

 

[petersonra]

unfortunately when bidding out stuff, customers often do not know what it is they really need so end up asking for bids on what they think they want rather than what they really need. sometimes that works in your favor, sometimes it does not.

 

[zog]

This happenes to me all the time. People find something 1/2 my price from a junk dealer then it isn't right, or won't work, or won't interface correctly. Best feeling is when that 1/2 price equipement gets sent here to fix and/or configure correctly.

You see this a lot with engineering studies, testing jobs, etc.. where a low bid looks great on paper until you see the results. But bottom feeders will always survive because many of thier customers don't know enough to know they are getting screwed.

 

[renosteinke]

It seems that the best thing I can have happen to me is to lose a job with a regular customer every once and awhile.

I don't take it personal. Sometimes there are bureaucratic reasons that require someone else be used, if only to show that there's nothing crooked going on.

I know the customer, what he needs, the quirks of the building, etc. The new guy doesn't. End result: guy loses money, customer unhappy, and I get called in to finish things up.

 

[petersonra]

This happenes to me all the time. People find something 1/2 my price from a junk dealer then it isn't right, or won't work, or won't interface correctly. Best feeling is when that 1/2 price equipement gets sent here to fix and/or configure correctly.

You see this a lot with engineering studies, testing jobs, etc.. where a low bid looks great on paper until you see the results. But bottom feeders will always survive because many of thier customers don't know enough to know they are getting screwed.

It is not even that the other venders are necessarily bad guys or "bottom feeders" whatever that may mean. A lot of times we get RFQs that are written by people who clearly do not know what they really need but are forced to bid it out. We try to help them by pointing out what they might have missed but that is a tough thing to pull off with some customers.

We kind of have to assume that what they asked for is what they really want sometimes.

It is not unusual for us to bid on jobs where we are absolutely certain that what we bid is not what the customer really needs but when we try and bring that up the response we get is that we must bid to the spec. So we do.

If it is far enough off we will decline to bid.

 

[ptonsparky]

It is not even that the other venders are necessarily bad guys or "bottom feeders" whatever that may mean. A lot of times we get RFQs that are written by people who clearly do not know what they really need but are forced to bid it out. We try to help them by pointing out what they might have missed but that is a tough thing to pull off with some customers.

We kind of have to assume that what they asked for is what they really want sometimes.

It is not unusual for us to bid on jobs where we are absolutely certain that what we bid is not what the customer really needs but when we try and bring that up the response we get is that we must bid to the spec. So we do.

If it is far enough off we will decline to bid.

A couple years ago a customer came in for a quote on a 400 Amp 480v 3R disconnect. A few days later he came in & I gave him the quote saying "This is what you asked for, but it isn't what you need." $60,000 later he had what he needed.

 

[Little Bill]

Last fall I bid a job for power monitoring 12 different locations simultaneously, for 30 days, downloading weekly. I own 10 monitors but many of them are needed regularly for work, so I decided to rent 1/2 of the required monitors.

The number was a fair number for a customer I have worked with for 30 years, around 38k. He calls me and chews me out accusing me of not knowing my job, trying to rip off a long time customer that typically hands me work no bid. He received another bid 1/2 my price. I try and explain my position and he continues on about how he will review all past bids and see how long I have been screwing him.

Well the 1/2 price he got was not what the engineers needed and now we are going back in to complete the project.
Last fall I bid a job for power monitoring 12 different locations simultaneously, for 30 days, downloading weekly. I own 10 monitors but many of them are needed regularly for work, so I decided to rent 1/2 of the required monitors.

The number was a fair number for a customer I have worked with for 30 years, around 30k. He calls me and chews me out accusing me of not knowing my job, trying to rip off a long time customer that typically hands me work no bid. He received another bid 1/2 my price. I try and explain my position and he continues on about how he will review all past bids and see how long I have been screwing him.

Well the 1/2 price he got was not what the engineers needed and now we are going back in to complete the project.

He had you so tore up you must have "cut-copied-pasted" twice!
Dejavu all over your thread!:lol:

I was happy to say the least, but I was also professional and never mentioned this past issues.

No Brian, my reply was just giving you a hard time for the "repeated" sections in red above.
I figured you typed this out in a Word format or something and pasted it in. I do this sometimes. Thus the "cut-copy-pasted" reference. I was joking you that you were tore up from the customers treatment of you.

 

[brian john]

No Brian, my reply was just giving you a hard time for the "repeated" sections in red above.
I figured you typed this out in a Word format or something and pasted it in. I do this sometimes. Thus the "cut-copy-pasted" reference. I was joking you that you were tore up from the customers treatment of you.

Bill I understood your post. The double post in my original post, lets blame that on our newly installed PIA windows 8.:happysad:

 

[Little Bill]

Bill I understood your post. The double post in my original post, lets blame that on our newly installed PIA windows 8.:happysad:

I'm not hearing much good about Windows 8!

 

[brian john]

I'm not hearing much good about Windows 8!

Every previous version of windows did 99.9% of what I needed all this new version has done is slow me down temporarily and add frustration to my day. Then I yell to our mastermind of everything new and she points out the new way. How she learns all this so quickly I am at a lose to explain but thank goodness someone does.


I am sure it is more the user than anything MS has done?

 

[ramsy]

But bottom feeders will always survive ..customers don't know they are getting screwed.

Some customers want the gun-hoe rookie that underestimates a bid, and will force completion as signed.

Some tenants want it fixed without involving the slum lord, especially where code won't be enforced.

Some put it on craigslist, offering their project as a free internship to the school of hard knocks, or perhaps on-the-Job training for the community of college grads still living with their parents.

For every craigslist troll that folds, runs their vehicle into the ground, or gets buried, plenty more bottom feeders will take their place.

Without a village to expose the village idiot, there's no learning by example, regardless of how much tuition the unemployable pay for useless lessons.

 

[jumper]

He had you so tore up you must have "cut-copied-pasted" twice!
Dejavu all over your thread!:lol:

No Brian, my reply was just giving you a hard time for the "repeated" sections in red above.
I figured you typed this out in a Word format or something and pasted it in. I do this sometimes. Thus the "cut-copy-pasted" reference. I was joking you that you were tore up from the customers treatment of you.

Bill, you need to check your glasses-you are seeing double.:angel:

 

[renosteinke]

I thought the repetition in the original post was an artistic way of saying "here we go again!"