Its easy to get leads, everyone is looking for a deal… even when they are not in the position to get into one and when hey are looking for a sucker. So there are plenty of deals around, of course you have to be in a certain position and network to hear about them.
The previous management had about +8 agreements with clients who didn’t pay. My previous boss, got a broker and strangely left the broker to do all the vetting and tried to reduce the commission.
In hindsight, its cheaper to pay for performance – like giving the broker a commission if a deal lands. Of course, before even entertaining a deal the broker gives data – a lot of data. The data comes in the form of market research (position, competitors, any news regarding the company and industry, the product in detail, names of all the people in the company, and if possible their histories. Naturally a deal which can be vetted has a lot of information, which usually a good sign, and this can lead to both broker’s and our own efforts being rewarded.
I’ve seen a lot of proposals of brokers that are Pay to Play, you shell out about $20-40,000 before they can scrap anything up. (i still have it on file) thats bullshit. If you give a broker a commission, thats practically profit sharing but i’m taking on all the risk because clients can have a number of things happen to them and at this stage of the relationship/deal who knows what they may do.
Vetting is hard, bat it can be made systematic. Thats why i wanted to make a Analyst Process and Checklist. Proposal vetting has a lot of disadvantages to the Vetter – basically its the very nature of burden of proof – the proposal is a claim and rarely does the proposer provide the burden of proof.
I’m the guy who makes cheat sheets, open notes and these written processes that no one reads. I put in a Gdocs folder with access to the team but people don’t seem to check it out or comment about them if they are accurate or can use improvement 🙁
One interesting that has resulted to running placement agency is knowing the demographics of the population more intimately. Already i can say what is possible by the manpower requirement. At least that solves one aspect of my vetting.
At around this stage, and having this information – my strategic lectures are saying don’t do the predictable or standard deal. Look for an unlikely client or niche to go into. easy to say and hard to do; you need multiple industry knowledge and a lot of information in the current events in those industries.
Anyway, wish me luck in my projects. There are a lot of deals to vett in the future.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.