Greg Weatherdon

I have worked with hundreds of entrepreneurs helping them to shape their businesses into their vision. One problem that I frequently come across is the quality or I should say, the lack thereof of some 3rd party service providers e.g. bookkeeping, IT specialists, etc.
For the record, I’m all about outsourcing non-core or mission critical activities to individuals who specialize in a given area. But time and again I find that many of these providers never consider the best interests of their clients.
Most of my entrepreneurial ventures have been as a service provider and one of my key mandates was to always be searching for ways to reduce our costs to our clients. That may sound treasonous, but in fact it helped to grow our profits and our roster of clients, most of whom were divisions of global packaged goods companies.
“Clients are always looking for cost reductions…suppliers are always looking to increase their billings”
The premise was simple. Clients are always looking for cost reductions on the goods and services they buy, so my thought was to pre-empt that thinking. Without boring you with the details, we provided telemarketing and communication services to the packaged goods industry, servicing their small or orphaned accounts.
Our normal program recommendation was to execute 3-4 telemarketing sales programs a year. The targeted accounts would range between 3,000-5,000 retailers. By the end of the second program we had accumulated sufficient information to go back to the client looking to adjust our original agreement-downwards!
Of course, this is not the norm. Most suppliers always look for ways to increase their billings by recommending the program be expanded. Our approach on the other hand, was very disarming to clients but was based on solid business premises.
Our typical recommendation after the second wave, was to reduce the number of calls by around 20%. Because at this point we usually had enough data to determine which accounts simpl...