Have you ever watched someone in business who just brags and brags about how great they are, how much money they make, how they've got their client wrapped around their little fingers and the client is a cash cow and wouldn't know a good job if they saw one? And you wish the client would figure it out, would figure out you could do a much better job, but life rarely works out like that? We've been dealing with a guy who fits the above description, who has a corner on a market that's directly related to what we do. We would have liked to have taken some business away from him, but it looked as if he had that market pretty well sewed up. However, he has a nasty habit of not finishing jobs in a timely way, not doing the jobs right to start with, and dragging around paying people even though it is clear (from the way he lives / purchases he makes) that he has plenty of money.
We just did a job for him for which all of the above applies. And lo and behold, his client called us today to ask Carl a few questions about the quality of something the guy was doing, and it turned out that what the guy was doing was completely wrong. Wrong enough to ruin the entire job and require everything to be ripped out and re-done. We had done concrete work (a sub-contract part of the bigger job) and the client didn't realize that we also did all the work that this other guy's been doing. And the client said, "Wow. I wish I had gotten you to do this job for us." Because he was very happy with the part we had done. And he went on to say, "I want you to bid the next stuff we do -- maybe we can work you year-round, the way we've been working __[other guy]" and Carl gave him a lot of information about us (good EMR record -- that's your insurance rating, long-term safety record, great references, etc.)
I don't know for certain if we'll get all of that guy's work, but we'll get some of it, which is very lucrative. Karma's amazing, isn't it.
Posted by toni at June 18, 2004 12:31 PM