I once did an an analysis of competing vendors for a multi-million dollar bid. I wrote up a 20 page report for my bosses ordering the bidders, and rationalizing the reasons for their rankings. I used 8 criteria, and for each vendor, I scored them not only as pass/fail, but where they stood relative to the other vendors, as well as listing positive features why we might consider them, and drawbacks why we shouldn't.
I wasn't the only evaluator. The bid had multiple criteria, so just because I recommended a vendor didn't mean it would be picked. As my boss put it, none of us could say yes to the bid, but any one of use could say no. I could love a vendor and say it had the best software, but if the safety team or legal team said no, that was it. And if the safety team said a different vendor was the best, if I said it couldn't solve the business problem, that would also be a no.
After the decision was made, many of the losing vendors were interested in my analysis, so, with my management's permission, I gave them all tailored subsets of it where I evaluated their specific bid.
Most were thankful. One even flew some guys up from California to spend a day with me (at a very pricey Italian place) asking "what could we have done to win". But one vendor, a big name in the industry, was outraged that they lost the bid, even though they had placed second. They said the company was an idiot for not choosing them, that I personally was incompetent, that they had 85% of the market (and they did) for a reason, that we'd regret not picking them, etc., etc.
They didn't have the slightest idea in "your stupid contractor's moronic analysis", and that I could put my 8 recommendations where the sun didn't shine.
A year later, they had lost several existing customers, were at 15% of the market, and sinking fast. And their bids to reestablish market presence were crashing hard.
So, they hired a big name consultancy group (like Gartner Group, but specific to the industry), who spent about two months doing a deep data into the market, their offering, the competition, the changing legal landscape, etc. When they submitted their results to the board, it was an 80 page analysis in a leather binder, filled with lots of colourful pie charts on glossy paper; it was really professional looking. Of course, for the $60,000 they were charging for the analysis, it damned well should.
Someone snuck a copy out for me to see. Sure enough, they made a number of recommendations to regain market share. They made 8 recommendations, in fact. And they mapped one to one to the same recommendations I'd made a year earlier.
To be clear, I'm not saying that they copied me, or anything like that. They didn't. And to be fair, they went into much more detail than I had, with more data backing it up. But we did the same analysis, and came to the same conclusions.
The difference was, mine were typed up on 8 pages of computer printout, and were free. Theirs were in a glossy, leather bound volume with colour pictures, and cost $60K.
As the saying goes, "advice is what you pay for it".
A lot of companies do this, with zero integrity, open-palmed like evangelical pastors, the most obvious examples are Apple, Balenciaga, Rolex - selling what their competitors sell for a 1,000-fold markup, because their customers just want the most expensive objet du jour, to impress their associates.
I once did an an analysis of competing vendors for a multi-million dollar bid. I wrote up a 20 page report for my bosses ordering the bidders, and rationalizing the reasons for their rankings. I used 8 criteria, and for each vendor, I scored them not only as pass/fail, but where they stood relative to the other vendors, as well as listing positive features why we might consider them, and drawbacks why we shouldn't.
I wasn't the only evaluator. The bid had multiple criteria, so just because I recommended a vendor didn't mean it would be picked. As my boss put it, none of us could say yes to the bid, but any one of use could say no. I could love a vendor and say it had the best software, but if the safety team or legal team said no, that was it. And if the safety team said a different vendor was the best, if I said it couldn't solve the business problem, that would also be a no.
After the decision was made, many of the losing vendors were interested in my analysis, so, with my management's permission, I gave them all tailored subsets of it where I evaluated their specific bid.
Most were thankful. One even flew some guys up from California to spend a day with me (at a very pricey Italian place) asking "what could we have done to win". But one vendor, a big name in the industry, was outraged that they lost the bid, even though they had placed second. They said the company was an idiot for not choosing them, that I personally was incompetent, that they had 85% of the market (and they did) for a reason, that we'd regret not picking them, etc., etc.
They didn't have the slightest idea in "your stupid contractor's moronic analysis", and that I could put my 8 recommendations where the sun didn't shine.
A year later, they had lost several existing customers, were at 15% of the market, and sinking fast. And their bids to reestablish market presence were crashing hard.
So, they hired a big name consultancy group (like Gartner Group, but specific to the industry), who spent about two months doing a deep data into the market, their offering, the competition, the changing legal landscape, etc. When they submitted their results to the board, it was an 80 page analysis in a leather binder, filled with lots of colourful pie charts on glossy paper; it was really professional looking. Of course, for the $60,000 they were charging for the analysis, it damned well should.
Someone snuck a copy out for me to see. Sure enough, they made a number of recommendations to regain market share. They made 8 recommendations, in fact. And they mapped one to one to the same recommendations I'd made a year earlier.
To be clear, I'm not saying that they copied me, or anything like that. They didn't. And to be fair, they went into much more detail than I had, with more data backing it up. But we did the same analysis, and came to the same conclusions.
The difference was, mine were typed up on 8 pages of computer printout, and were free. Theirs were in a glossy, leather bound volume with colour pictures, and cost $60K.
As the saying goes, "advice is what you pay for it".
A lot of companies do this, with zero integrity, open-palmed like evangelical pastors, the most obvious examples are Apple, Balenciaga, Rolex - selling what their competitors sell for a 1,000-fold markup, because their customers just want the most expensive objet du jour, to impress their associates.