Haggling hard makes sense when you’re buying a product you know inside and out. Long-established quality criteria allow you to distinguish the original from the fake, and to make the supplier deliver to you not 80, but all 100 percent. The easiest case is commodities like gold, rubber, or coffee. Things are more complicated with services, but even here you can put key parameters in the SLA (service level agreement) - troubleshooting time, response rate, etc. In essence, in the cases discussed, you want a fixed value in the spirit of “no less than”. All of this means that you can either buy a similar service or product in many places, or even make it in-house yourself.
But what if you extremely need a service that’s hard to describe. For example, you have an ambitious task that few people before you have tackled. Or your business suffers from a series of chronic problems that show a mysterious stubbornness despite any attempts you make to deal with them. Or your entire industry has been hit by a tsunami of tremendous change, and no one - not you or your competitors - knows what to do, and it’s urgent. Of course, there are a lot of suppliers of this and that on the market. But when you first conquer Annapurna 1 (8,091m), what you need is not a recommendation for a sleeping bag and a burner, but personalized advice on how you personally, given your vulnerabilities and resources, can get to the top most safely and quickly. Or, when after several false starts, you need to re-launch a fading brand and you turn to a creative agency whose ingenious solutions are legendary in the marketplace.
Is it wise in such a case to squeeze out the provider of an indispensable service in the tradition of the Wild West? You don’t fully understand the situation you’re in, or who can help you. The poisonous grin of the unknown awaits you in the darkness. Therefore, you don’t need a demotivated contractor by your side, but a concentrated guide who will give you a hand, a map, or a lifeline in time. The question that should really occupy you is, “How can I bring our interests as close together as possible?”
Sincerely yours,
-Alexander
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As a business therapist, I help tech founders quickly solve dilemmas at the intersection of business and personality, and boost company value as a result.
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