Back in the Saddle

As heard coming from my eight year old last night at dinner time: "Mom, You might want to sleep in the spare room tonight. . . Dad's having lots of beans!" Ha, my reputation precedes me.


Alright, it's time for me to come out of hiding once again.

It was interesting taking a week off from the blog. Funny how long that can seem. Maybe it's like dog years or something.



This next part you can file away under "Dirty-rotten, cheap-bastard".

About a week and a half ago we got a call from a potential client for one of our decorative concrete coatings. Actually that's not entirely true. The client himself was too damned important to call, so he had his assistant contact us. Not too unusual when the project is for a company, but this was for his personal residence.

After a few phone calls and a couple of emails back and forth, my brother Mark was able to set a meeting with Mr Important to go over color selection. He looked at the various samples and was waffling between two different ones. He asked if he could keep them and show his wife so they could compare notes and come up with a final selection. "No problem" Mark told him.

BTW- At this point in the process a bid proposal with our pricing had already been submitted and approved by Mr Important.

Two days later, the secretary of Mr Important called Mark and asked for the address where she could send the color samples back to. She also said her boss had just got a cheaper bid for the work so he would not need our services after all.

Now for the good part. A day later I received a phone call from a contractor asking about one of our colors. He first wanted to know where we bought our color chips for the floors. I gave him the name of the manufacturer and told him they would sell the chips to him. He then wanted to know if he could buy seventy-five pounds of our "London Fog" color chip. I told him we weren't distributors so I didn't have any type of pricing for just the chips. I said I would look into it and get back to him.

As soon as I hung up the phone I started thinking, "hmmm, I'll bet you this is the guy who undercut our bid and is going to do the job for Mr Important.

The next day I called him back and asked, "Are you by any chance, using this chip for the Total Mechanical job?"

With a bit of hesitation, he replied, "Uh, as a matter of fact I am."

I then informed him that I was the contractor that was originally supposed to do that job and I had no interest in supplying my competitor with my own proprietary color blend so he could do the job I had already been awarded previously.

Talk about balls of steel!

Mr Important wanted his floor done for rock bottom price, but liked our color samples so he had the new contractor call and try to get our color blend. He also must have thought by having the guy call me instead of Mark I wouldn't put two and two together. Guess what? He was WRONG.

Now he's going to get a cheap floor and won't be getting the color he wants.

What an ass!


I'll be getting by to catch up with you all soon.