{"id":4115,"date":"2009-07-25T07:00:43","date_gmt":"2009-07-25T11:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=4115"},"modified":"2009-07-25T06:47:36","modified_gmt":"2009-07-25T10:47:36","slug":"the-vendor-client-relationship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=4115","title":{"rendered":"The Vendor Client Relationship"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><table class='nomargin' cellspacing='0' width='100%' cellpadding='0' align='center' border='0'><tr><td><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/R2a8TRSgzZY\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen class=\"embed\"><\/iframe><br\/><small><a href='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=R2a8TRSgzZY'>Link (YouTube)<\/a><\/small><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve heard many of these excuses and pleas before, or variants on these themes, and I&#8217;ve never even been involved in the financial end of things.  This really is how people do business, and it&#8217;s sort of funny to see this same thinking applied to everyday situations.  I watch this and nod my head, <em>this is SO true.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Having said that, I actually think it&#8217;s not unreasonable to haggle a bit when you&#8217;re negotiating for goods or services that you&#8217;ll be using for years and that will run you in the millions of dollars.  As a vendor, you can&#8217;t just slap a $999,998.98 pricetag on something and call it a day. Well, you <em>can<\/em> but you&#8217;ll be losing money on one side or the other if you just stick to that price.  Some companies will be huge and rolling in cash, and your product is peanuts to them.  To them, buying your stuff is the equivalent of a beer run.  They just don&#8217;t want a lot of hassle, and you can pad the everlovin&#8217; crap out of your invoices and they&#8217;ll never care.  On the other hand, a mid-size company might only be able to buy your thing if you come down a bit.  If you start high and let them haggle you down, you&#8217;ll get as much as possible from both types of clients.  <\/p>\n<p>But the price isn&#8217;t the <em>really<\/em> volatile part of the equation in my experience.  As someone who has done some contract work, the place they really bleed you dry is in the implementation.  It&#8217;s no good feeling smug when you get the customer to pay $10k for $5k worth of programming, only to have them squeeze $20k worth of work out of you with endless changes, refinements, and new features masquerading as &#8220;bug fixes&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>A skit about that would have the customer agree to pay $100 for their steak dinner ahead of time, but then nickle and dime the restaurant by asking for endless small little freebies and favors during the meal. (And sort of passive-aggressively  holding the entire check ransom each time you balk at their demands.) By the time they leave they&#8217;ve had a steak dinner, three bottles of wine, two desserts, and they&#8217;ve left with the silverware, a chair, and the waitress.  You started out so happy you were going to sell them $9 worth of meat and labor for $100, and now you&#8217;re wondering if you can escape this deal while you still have a restaurant.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s worth a great deal to me to be as far from the financial end of the business as possible.  <em>Let me write the code and for the love of ANSI don&#8217;t tell me anything about the money, it will only drive me mad.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Link (YouTube) I&#8217;ve heard many of these excuses and pleas before, or variants on these themes, and I&#8217;ve never even been involved in the financial end of things. This really is how people do business, and it&#8217;s sort of funny to see this same thinking applied to everyday situations. I watch this and nod my [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dream-cast"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4115"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4115\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}