WE CAN CREATE CHANGES BY REALIZING WE DO MAKE A DIFERENCE.

WE CAN CREATE CHANGES BY REALIZING WE DO MAKE A DIFERENCE.

Since sales are the “life blood” of any company, we subscribed to a company that finds various government leads for specific products, namely printing.

Several weeks ago, I downloaded a bid request for bar-code labels for Broward County, Florida. Our estimating department went through the extensive process of furnishing a price for the two separate items which included die charges, programming, etc.
I turned the prices over to Ruth so she could read all 24 pages of the quotation request and fill in the necessary information required. As she was reading the contract section, she saw that they would only accept bids from vendors who held a business license within Broward County, Florida, and put it back on my desk.

Since this sounded like a very strange and somewhat prejudicial rule or specification, I contacted the person in charge of purchasing these labels. During the course of our conversation, I mentioned the time we had spent working on this bid and why did they put it out for bid if it was a useless exercise? He asked me what I was planning on bidding. It turned out our price was less than half of what they had been previously paying. At that point, he asked me to please submit our pricing in writing, and he would do a price comparison to turn over to his management.

A week later, I e-mailed him again to see who got the contract and for what price. He informed me that the contract had not been awarded yet, since there was now an internal investigation in process. A week later, he informed me that the quotation would be going to an unrestricted market (national market) the following morning with a new bid closing date. He e-mailed me copy of the bid the following morning and at that point I sent in a formal quotation with our pricing.

At the time of this writing, the bid has not closed the due date. I don’t know if we will get the order or not. The main thing I want to emphasize is that we can and we will make a difference as long as we don’t cower whenever we face an obstacle. Our industry is extremely competitive as it is, without having to face these extra restrictions that just don’t make any sense. I am sure the County Managers weren’t even aware that they were over-paying on these items, and who knows how many more there are. I think we opened up a “can of worms” for this group.