Ken,
Criteria # 1 seems most important for a boutique/small company. You, as I,
offer a personal service. It is not in our best interest to spend lots of
time doing what big firms do through there marketing departments. Likewise,
we cannot afford to spend lots of time bidding, as it takes up all our
resources while we are doing work that is not billable. I have found that
only about 15% of leads from management companies or design firms lead to
contracted work. About 85% of leads from CEO's or influential board members
leads to contracted work. If I do not have a personal contact with the
review committee, it is not worth submitting an RFP or RFQ. About 50% of
contacts with owners that contact me lead to work. I do like, and follow,
your concept that sometimes the activity is something you need to do as part
of continuing education, or just plain research which your spidey sense
knows you will need. Another philosophy you have that I agree with is,
other than invoicing, if you are not enjoying it, or feel the project will
be adversarial, don't do it...walk away. And more, the bidding, low price
world is by design an adversarial system. I prefer working with a team,
negotiating costs and sharing expenses; an open book.
One of the best values we can give our customers is the knowledge we gained
working in our trade for 15 to 20 years prior to developing the
consultant/manager service. That being said, I often feel as though I know
less, or have a grasp of a smaller piece of the pie, than I did yesterday.
Best,
Leland
Leland R. S. Torrence
Leland Torrence Enterprises and the Guild
17 Vernon Court, Woodbridge, CT 06525
Office: 203-397-8505
Fax: 203-389-7516
Mobile: 203-981-4004
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
www.LelandTorrenceEnterprises.com
-----Original Message-----
From: adaptive re-use is from the department of repetitive redundancy
division [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
Gabriel Orgrease
Sent: Saturday, December 08, 2007 11:01 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [BP] New Tool? OmniPage 16
When I returned home yesterday I found a set of drawings that had been
sent express by a CM for a townhouse project from a source that I have
no clue how they found me. The first thing that I do is open it up and
ask, "Why me?" I have no clue and have to wait until Monday to start an
inquiry. Though I got drawings one thing that they did not do is send me
any specs. Seems about par for the course. They also have way too little
time to put together a responsive bid. I don't know these folks and my
next question is, "Why should I care?" Along in there I also whisper,
"Do they have any idea what they are doing? Who the hell are these
people? Oh great, just what I need someone else pissed at me."
I set this up as when I receive an inquiry to respond to a potential
project I go through a list of criteria to determine my direction of
response: 1) is this project appropriate to resources and capabilities
that we can bring together with a modest exposure to risk? 2) what
amount of competition can we anticipate based on the information that we
have at hand? (Where I am at these days is if there are more than three
bidders total then I am not too interested and the other bidders had
better be ones that I respect.) and 3) how long is it going to take to
put this response together? I also throw in there that if they can get
someone else to do it then they probably don't really need me. It takes
an expenditure of time, energy and resources possibly best applied
elsewhere (playing World of Warcraft, petting the dog, eating) to put
together a response. When the response gets to us seemingly out of the
blue the first knee jerk response on my part is a desire to feed it into
the wood stove. Why anyone would think to send us something without a
forewarning or at least an inquiry as to if we are interested is beyond
me. Unfortunate though that the culture of the industry seems to be that
if some idiot sends out a package, even one not well done or all of the
required parts, that they already EXPECT a response. So we have a few
choices... to either not respond at all, to respond in the negative, to
spend the time to find out what we need to know in order to respond with
sensitivity, or to sit down today on Saturday morning and begin pumping
out an estimate that we have absolutely no clue what our chances are....
or if we even care.
That all said. My latest upgrade to OnmiPage 16 claims that you can take
photographs with your camera and have the OCR software transcribe
letters... like all the notes on the set of drawings... into text.
Considering that on a modest size set of drawings it can take at least
an hour to type in all of the activity items into a spreadsheet I am
intrigued enough to respond to this particular project simply to see if
the software actually works. Better yet maybe it will turn the long
General Notes stuff into text. Now, I understand why design
professionals do not want to issue electronic documents.... lest they
get changed in a fraudulent manner... but this transcribing of
information from electronic to paper to electronic is a waste of time. I
also am always put off when I get a set of drawings on paper that when I
open them up I realize that I need five copies to distribute to team
members... including the stone supplier in Canada. All I have is this
one set. Where the hell do you get a price quote for that kind of marble
carved before Wednesday? Do I run off to the copy place? I don't think so.
Thnx,
Ken
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