Helping an Owner Stop Getting Burned by Vendors

0:00Unternehmer/Gast possibility of making sure that happens. Now, you can take a step forward and say, "I am willing to dedicate off hours to help these people get up to snuff and learn some of these things." But, at the same time you might say, "Maybe we should hire someone who's competent so that I can do my job better." >> Does that make sense? Yeah, for sure. >> Alex Buzzya, Hawaii. What's up, boss? >> Thanks so much for everything and your whole team. Fantastic. Really great seminar. So, just my question is about vetting out sub- contractors, IT companies, internet lead companies, paper click, all that.

0:34Alex So, I've had mixed results and I'm just wondering what your framework is. >> Yeah. So, um vendors, this is also something that's changed from my earlier days. In the beginning, I would be in so much pain that the first person on the phone who would promise me to be out of pain, I'd be like, "Here's my money, please." Like, "I believe you." Um unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case most of the time. And some of you guys are that vendor. Uh >> [laughter]

0:58>> So, yeah. Think about what Rohan's saying, right? Um but, the the the the process that we look at is number one is um if we could talk to 10 Like, we talk to one person, they can lie. If we talk to 20 people, it's difficult, too. And so, we see talking to vendors as an interview process and we set the stage up front in the in in the conversation saying, "Hey, uh I am looking for IT services. To be very clear, we're bidding out 10 different providers. And so, please give me your your your best pitch ever uh so that I can take this back to leadership and um make a decision that's informed." And so, when you hear 10 different pitches, what happens is you start to become more knowledgeable as a consumer. And so then, you know, the first pitch, you have no idea, everything's green. And then the second pitch, you know, there's 30% that overlaps. The By the seventh pitch, you've heard 90% of what everyone's going to say. And who becomes better becomes apparent after talking to so many people. And so, the difficulty with that is it just takes more time and it takes more work.

1:54Alex But, it's one one those short-term pain, long-term pain tradeoffs, which is it may take an extra 2 weeks in the beginning, but the amount of pain that you avoid by having a bad vendor for the next 6 months is huge. And then having to redo it again, which then costs double. Um, and so that is more or less the framework we do. We also tend to I would say more than not, we tend to go with one of the higher cost providers. And so I'm very much a believer in buy nicer, buy twice, especially when it comes to vendors.

2:19Um, the other piece is we look at their entire communication during the process. And so uh, I see that as a as a as a look into the future. So if they have really clear expectations being set, they're on top of the communication with me, they they make realistic expectations in terms of timelines, then I'm thinking, "Okay, this might be a good company in order to do business with." If the person's promising the world, but then they're not responding really quickly, they set crazy expectations, I'm more hesitant to believe them. Um, and I'll give you guys a little framework for those of you who are smaller in the room, actually really anybody in the room.

2:52>> [clears throat] >> Is that um, I've become more and more obsessed with proof. And the many different ways that we can uh, portray it to prospects. And so uh, I wrote obviously the first book about offers, but if I had to make a bet on a business, and one guy has zero proof, and he's got the craziest, best offer in the world. And this other guy has an offer that just says, "Pay me money and you might make more money back." But he's got 2,000 five-star reviews.

3:21I'm probably going to go with this guy. And so sometimes it's the big obvious thing, which is like you might not be that good at that thing. Or the vendor might not be good at that thing. Cuz if they see if they have they can't give you like five people you can talk to, or at least you don't have you can't see anything online, or you've seen no content, those are big kind of red flags. And so that's kind of the red flag, green flag approach that we look at for vendors. If you're business owner, and you're not growing as fast as you'd like, I'd like to give you a free gift. So my team and I put together the $100 scaling roadmap, which is basically 200 hours of us looking over all the portfolio companies we've had and what stages of growth they went through and more importantly where they got stuck and how they got past it. And so we broke it into these 10 stages and we made this little kind of quiz thing where if you put in your business information it'll tell you where you're at and the most important part for you what to do for each of functions of the business across product, marketing, sales, customer success, recruiting, IT, human resources and finance. And so no matter what you're struggling with someone else has already struggled with it and solved it. And so I'd like to give you this thing absolutely free. You can go to acquisition.com road map, plug in your business information and if you want us to actually help you deconstruct the business and you're trying to scale we'd love to help you out. On the thank you page you can book a call with my team and we will look at the business, see if we can help and if we can we'll invite you out to Vegas and we'll do this in person live.