I’ve put my heart and soul into a spectacular proposal and still lost the job. It sucks. But it happens a lot less to me now than it did a few years ago. For one thing, I pre-screen my prospects. I tell them right off the bat that I’m extremely pricey… and extremely good. If they’re looking for the cheapest, then I’m not their man.

I have a clear picture of who my perfect client is, and more importantly, who is not my perfect client. I communicate this up front and it seems to be well received, even by the prospects that move on to other vendors. I’ve spared them the time and energy it takes to explain their project to another bidder.

2- “Small is just as much work as big”

No argument here. You’re absolutely right. Same holds true in my business.

I’ll even take it a step further… the ones that pay premium prices are much less trouble and require much less “hand holding” than the ones that pinch a penny. I have a theory about why that is… but it doesn’t really matter. Ask any astute entrepreneur and they’ll likely tell you the same thing.

However, in this case, I told them ahead of time what the problem was. If they were hunting for a $50,000 job then they should have been more up front about their minimum job size so I wouldn’t have wasted my time.

3- “Small never leads to big”

I wouldn’t say never… but a business owner or freelancer shouldn’t EXPECT a small job to turn into a large one. If you do, you’ll go crazy watching the better, more lucrative jobs go to the big boys or their current vendor while you fight for scraps.

Which leads me back to knowing your business, knowing who you don’t want as a client, what jobs you don’t want, and having the guts to lay your cards on the table.

The comment you made about time passing and the clients forgetting about you describes a situation that I think any good business owner can control… although most do not. Client acquisition is one of the most expensive aspects of business. These days, with email and websites, there is no reason not to stay in front of your clients at least once a month. If a client forgets about me… it’s my fault.

Some business models are built around losing money on the first transaction and some are built around only a single transaction. Obviously the former requires intense and effective follow up. On the other hand, most small businesses can “get by” with just one up front transaction with a new client and then forget about them… and so they do just that. There is an enormous amount of untapped revenue in the client databases of businesses all over the world.

But let’s pretend that you’re right… they decided I wasn’t worth the time. If they were smart, they’d have some contacts in their rolodex that would LOVE to do that job. They could easily set up a “bird dog” referral system with one of those hungry handymen and charge a finder’s fee for passing my information along.

I think it’s entirely possible that they could have made $100 or $200 for their time and my problem would have been solved.

When I’m at fault, I’m very willing to take the blame, but I can’t see what I should take the blame for in this scenario… not that you’re saying I should. If they had a minimum size project, shame on them for not saying so.

Answer:’For the plumber to turn up.’

So that’s from the customer side, as you report.

From our side we ended up getting very cynical about customers. Although the sum you mention does sound substantial and doesn’t explain their behaviour here’s the cynical view of what customers are like:

1) They call you out for a quote but don’t take it any further, even though you bust a gut getting out there, pricing up a thousand different materials, guesstimating labour costs, then cutting everything down to the bone. You do your best sales pitch and spend several hours on it and it comes to nothing.

Later you find out that Cowboy Jack has charged twice as much, thrown in a quick quote, got the job and made a complete bodge of it.

So you go on intuition and the ones you don’t think are going to get anywhere you throw in a random, outrageous price at them knowing that they won’t get back to you.

Or perhaps in the case of these guys they simply didn’t bother getting back (I’m not saying you were going to be a ‘bad’ customer, I’m saying how the builders’ mind-set works and what they base their decisions on.)

2) Smaller jobs are as much work as large jobs,but with a tiny profit margin. $5000 sounds a lot, but maybe in their business that counts as a small job?

3) Smaller jobs almost never lead to large jobs. The people who can only afford small jobs can never afford large jobs. Unless they live in a very posh area.

In something like building or plumbing, by the time the customer needs you again many years have passed, and they will have forgotten or lost all your details so doing a small job in the hope of a large job is more or less pointless. You need to concentrate only on the bigger jobs in order to survive.

Furthermore, customers will willingly employ you to do a rubbish job for peanuts and then employ a completely different firm for the larger and more profitable job that follows it. Why? Image? The larger firm has bigger adverts? Even though you do an excellent job?

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I suspect that the guys who came round weren’t coming round to give you a quote so much as to eye you over and see whether or not from their point of view it was worthwhile doing the job. Obviously they’re not going to say that to your face but are going to be polite about it all.