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I get it, you probably wear a lot of hats. Business expenses are creeping up every year because no one can pay attention. You have new service offerings to implement, software upgrades to manage, performance reviews to do…
Even those with a plan might not know what is truly possible. Most businesses are using the same vendors now than they were 10 years ago. If it isn’t broke, after all…
I love long term partnerships and make no efforts to disrupt them, but part of a good partnership is ensuring they remain price competitive. Shouldn’t your long term relationship be rewarded with better pricing than your vendors are using to acquire new business?
Having a good strategy for your business expenses means you need a long term view of your contracts. If you have a software contract with a termination request date that is 30 days before the end of the contract, but it would take you 3 months to find a new vendor to replace them…that means you’re signing an extension whether you want to, or not.
I can’t count how many times someone’s given me a contract to review and asked me to review it…meanwhile it needed to be signed by the end of the week.
You can only imagine how many times I’ve been told, “there is no savings in that area, our rate is really competitive on this…” I’ve had clients tell me that their rates were better than what the government gets and that their rep was already worried he’d get fired because the rates were too low.
Guess how that story usually ends?
Your vendors will say anything to get you to avoid doing an RFP (Request for Proposal) because they think of it as a 4-letter word. It’s a certain risk that even they keep your business, they’ll lose profit margin. That’s IF they keep your business.