Sales reps and arrogant pricks tend to be a bit offputting. Maybe that was redundant and the classification is one in the same. Splitting hairs. The point is this, the law is the law and despite what you might think of that law, or how much you wish that law didn't exist, you still cannot break that law. Furthermore, it is unscrupulous to ask someone else to do it on your behalf. Is it easier? Well sure, but it doesn't make you look like a very upstanding person ...
We had a deal for a USCG outfit that was going through a prime contractor, then a sub, then us that has gone all kinds of wrong because every entity is trying to squeeze every last drop out of what they can get (see "value claiming" versus "value creation" in the parlance of the Ivy League b-schools). At the end of the day the sub was pissed at us for "retracting an offered discount", which was untrue ... they just felt it was. We had offered them a discount if they could come up with required document. They promised to do so ... provided an irrelevant letter ... then got pissed they didn't get the discount because they couldn't come up with the prerequisite.
To break this down to an easily digestable equation:
- You have a final exam coming up in history
- Your prof tells you if you score a 90% or greater on the exam you will get an A
- You walk into the exam 5 minutes early, turn someone else's Spanish exam into the prof's folder, then go to the beach and get drunk with your friends
- Show up to class the next week and get your "ZERO - F" test result, then start screaming at the prof that he lied to you about all that 90%-and-an-A-in-the-class talk.
- Aaaand scene ...
That's how today has gone. People are morons. At the end of all this discussion the COO from this company said to me, "Well we're working with another company much bigger than you and they're accepting this letter." Oh, well in that case, no problem! I mean, fuck - when has a big corporation ever fudged the rules 'cause they thought they could get away with it? What was I thinking?! Why should we, the government contracting specialists, have any freakin' idea about this? The big corporation is doing it and have they ever gotten in trouble?! Hubris is a business man's greatest gift! Just make the sell! Fuck the rules! I'll be in Argentina by the time anyone finds out! (That last bit is a true story for a different post) Maybe our contract officer would give us a pass for that! "Well, you see, we did understand the law, but then we saw them doing it soooo ... business immunity, I guess ..." What a dick.
Friday, December 18, 2009
Friday, January 30, 2009
While It Has Only Been 52 Weeks Since the Last Blog, It Feels Like 54
Some of you who read the first entries here might have thought, "Hey, three entries in a month, maybe this thing has some legs!" Well, I am here to inform you ... a year later ... that it might not ... Or might ... Maybe the Super Bowl brings out the blog in me ... Too many talking heads, so my talking hands get to work ...
Having re-read the blogs from last year I have realized something that I never thought would be true ... I miss Eli Manning. Maybe it was the outcome and the bubblegum catch by a guy who's watch isn't rated to his depth on the chart ... or maybe it's the Cardinals. I repeat, the Cardinals. Kurt Warner's Cardinals. The only two things I like about the Cardinals are these: they benched Matt Leinart and if (and once) they get pounded, the Rockies are off the hook for upstart that gets smoked in the Championship round. That's actually probably not too much of an issue - everyone already forgot the Rockies were even there ... they were just "National League Team X" that the mighty Sox beat up on. But I digress ... I like this Super Bowl less than last year, which makes me fear for next year. The Stanley Cup seems oddly relevant again ... Scratch that ...
In other news, 2008 turned out to be quite the disaster in many ways. BSI went from hitting $104 million in 2007 to losing 75% of the vendors that made up those sales in the first half of 2008 ... more or less. A victim of our own success. In grade school your teachers always ask/require that you show your work and there is a reason for it ... we streamlined processes and made everything super efficient (and lowered our effective commission) which in the end made it look like we weren't doing much in our vendors eyes. Maybe we should have been slacking and showing them how inefficient we could be? Turn around quotes and requests in days versus minutes? I was never good at showing my work, but is the process or the outcome the most important thing ... sometimes they are both needed for proper balance it would seem.
We actually had a good year in 2008 by the numbers, but 2009 could be scary - I keep telling everybody here we are just setting ourselves up for the comeback company of the year in 2010! The BSI pitch is pretty tough in a brutal recession ... points aren't let go of very easily, even if we could increase revenues enough to more than offset the point totals/dollars they have bouncing through their heads. That's the sale now - not that the government is important enough to care about (everything is now), but that we can do it better, faster, and cleaner than they can and the points are only an issue if we don't kick their sales in the butt ... and our track record speaks for itself. The other thing we have (and always have had) going for us is the relative strength of the government as a customer, especially in our niche - no one, regardless of which side of the political spectrum they fall into, is going to be against giving our troops and vets the heathcare they need ... wartime and Walter Reed have locked that up a bit ... we are still on CR, but the VA budget closely follows the DoD budget in terms of approval, so by February we should be on the upturn ... if we have a contract. Lots of balls in the air ...
The kiddos are doing well. Deuce is in potty training mode right now, which is interesting. I walked into his room the other day and he had his hand on his chin, deep in thought about something ... maybe what jammies to wear, which made me proud that he was taking the initiative ... but then I looked down and realized that, while he was deep in tought, he was also peeing all over his closet. So I instinctively say, "Deuce! What are you doing?" At which point he spins towards me, peeing all over the items that he had so far avoided. Note to self - don't talk to Deuce while he is peeing ... and get pants on the boy after bath time, POST HASTE!! He's a very inquisitive, talking machine at this point, so there are very few quiet moments in the day.
Reilly just got accepted to all day kindergarten for next year and is quite the little whiz kid - reads like crazy (rattling off the first two paragraphs of Steiglitz's "Making Globalization Work" as she sat in my lap), has a huge vocabulary - in recognition and usage, and is very much a mature 4-year-old. She and Kiki just got back from a trip to Texas - Reilly's first real trip without Annie or I, and they had a great time. They went to see Granny in College Station and when they got there Reilly said, "Kiki, I'm sorry but your mommy makes me nervous." Granny has a pretty bad black eye right now and it frightened her a bit, but after the first visit she had settled into knowing who Granny was and being pretty cool about it. She's getting all growns up!!
Annie is in school and things are going well. She just got involved in a committee that essentially is proposing to set up national standards and tests for interior designers and architects ... but the NKBA and AI group is kind of being ignored, so she is "fighting the man" on this one ... which is something that she enjoys - the politics of the profession, so to speak. It seems like we have all been pretty busy the last few weeks which isn't necessarily a bad thing ... so long as we get a chance to breathe her and there.
As for me, I'm just trying to figure out the hurry-up-and-wait process of getting BSI trending the right way again. We need a VA contract to sign vendors, but we have to have vendors to put on the contract. And right now we are kind of in the middle of the process with both sides of this equation, which is frustrating. I guess we get to see if those executive leadership and negotiation classes I have been taking at Wharton and Harvard are going to pay off, huh? I know a lot more now, but application in the real world is the value, not a bunch of Ivy League theories floating around in your head ... the whole "where the rubber meets the road" thing ... On the up side, we have been trying to get Stonewall going on a hobby so I sent my back-up camera body and lens down to him to start playing with to see if he wants to get back into it and so far he is enjoying it. Harold, he and I are all going to Sedona next weekend for a 3-day photo shoot of the landscape in the area, which should be a lot of fun. I just got my fisheye yesterday, so I'm ready to go play around with it a bit. Maybe becoming a bit of photo geek, but I'm alright with it. There are worse geeks I could be ... and my HC4L-status as "snowboard guy" keeps me out of the uber-geek spectrum anyway, right? Does just talking about this make me swing back into the uber-geek spectrum? Probably ...
Not a very "Monkey Island" type entry, but it is good to get back to this, albeit for just a few minutes, and let the air out. If the Cardinals win I will be back in here complaining next week. I can't deal with Kurt Warner's wife again ... I just can't. And he almost quit this year because the game is violent ... IT'S FOOTBALL! The physical violence of the game should not be such a shock that you are 50/50 on just up and quitting on the team and your teammates in the middle of a season, especially when you would be subjecting them to Matt Leinart! How does a team led by a guy who even thinks like this make it to the Super Bowl?
Having re-read the blogs from last year I have realized something that I never thought would be true ... I miss Eli Manning. Maybe it was the outcome and the bubblegum catch by a guy who's watch isn't rated to his depth on the chart ... or maybe it's the Cardinals. I repeat, the Cardinals. Kurt Warner's Cardinals. The only two things I like about the Cardinals are these: they benched Matt Leinart and if (and once) they get pounded, the Rockies are off the hook for upstart that gets smoked in the Championship round. That's actually probably not too much of an issue - everyone already forgot the Rockies were even there ... they were just "National League Team X" that the mighty Sox beat up on. But I digress ... I like this Super Bowl less than last year, which makes me fear for next year. The Stanley Cup seems oddly relevant again ... Scratch that ...
In other news, 2008 turned out to be quite the disaster in many ways. BSI went from hitting $104 million in 2007 to losing 75% of the vendors that made up those sales in the first half of 2008 ... more or less. A victim of our own success. In grade school your teachers always ask/require that you show your work and there is a reason for it ... we streamlined processes and made everything super efficient (and lowered our effective commission) which in the end made it look like we weren't doing much in our vendors eyes. Maybe we should have been slacking and showing them how inefficient we could be? Turn around quotes and requests in days versus minutes? I was never good at showing my work, but is the process or the outcome the most important thing ... sometimes they are both needed for proper balance it would seem.
We actually had a good year in 2008 by the numbers, but 2009 could be scary - I keep telling everybody here we are just setting ourselves up for the comeback company of the year in 2010! The BSI pitch is pretty tough in a brutal recession ... points aren't let go of very easily, even if we could increase revenues enough to more than offset the point totals/dollars they have bouncing through their heads. That's the sale now - not that the government is important enough to care about (everything is now), but that we can do it better, faster, and cleaner than they can and the points are only an issue if we don't kick their sales in the butt ... and our track record speaks for itself. The other thing we have (and always have had) going for us is the relative strength of the government as a customer, especially in our niche - no one, regardless of which side of the political spectrum they fall into, is going to be against giving our troops and vets the heathcare they need ... wartime and Walter Reed have locked that up a bit ... we are still on CR, but the VA budget closely follows the DoD budget in terms of approval, so by February we should be on the upturn ... if we have a contract. Lots of balls in the air ...
The kiddos are doing well. Deuce is in potty training mode right now, which is interesting. I walked into his room the other day and he had his hand on his chin, deep in thought about something ... maybe what jammies to wear, which made me proud that he was taking the initiative ... but then I looked down and realized that, while he was deep in tought, he was also peeing all over his closet. So I instinctively say, "Deuce! What are you doing?" At which point he spins towards me, peeing all over the items that he had so far avoided. Note to self - don't talk to Deuce while he is peeing ... and get pants on the boy after bath time, POST HASTE!! He's a very inquisitive, talking machine at this point, so there are very few quiet moments in the day.
Reilly just got accepted to all day kindergarten for next year and is quite the little whiz kid - reads like crazy (rattling off the first two paragraphs of Steiglitz's "Making Globalization Work" as she sat in my lap), has a huge vocabulary - in recognition and usage, and is very much a mature 4-year-old. She and Kiki just got back from a trip to Texas - Reilly's first real trip without Annie or I, and they had a great time. They went to see Granny in College Station and when they got there Reilly said, "Kiki, I'm sorry but your mommy makes me nervous." Granny has a pretty bad black eye right now and it frightened her a bit, but after the first visit she had settled into knowing who Granny was and being pretty cool about it. She's getting all growns up!!
Annie is in school and things are going well. She just got involved in a committee that essentially is proposing to set up national standards and tests for interior designers and architects ... but the NKBA and AI group is kind of being ignored, so she is "fighting the man" on this one ... which is something that she enjoys - the politics of the profession, so to speak. It seems like we have all been pretty busy the last few weeks which isn't necessarily a bad thing ... so long as we get a chance to breathe her and there.
As for me, I'm just trying to figure out the hurry-up-and-wait process of getting BSI trending the right way again. We need a VA contract to sign vendors, but we have to have vendors to put on the contract. And right now we are kind of in the middle of the process with both sides of this equation, which is frustrating. I guess we get to see if those executive leadership and negotiation classes I have been taking at Wharton and Harvard are going to pay off, huh? I know a lot more now, but application in the real world is the value, not a bunch of Ivy League theories floating around in your head ... the whole "where the rubber meets the road" thing ... On the up side, we have been trying to get Stonewall going on a hobby so I sent my back-up camera body and lens down to him to start playing with to see if he wants to get back into it and so far he is enjoying it. Harold, he and I are all going to Sedona next weekend for a 3-day photo shoot of the landscape in the area, which should be a lot of fun. I just got my fisheye yesterday, so I'm ready to go play around with it a bit. Maybe becoming a bit of photo geek, but I'm alright with it. There are worse geeks I could be ... and my HC4L-status as "snowboard guy" keeps me out of the uber-geek spectrum anyway, right? Does just talking about this make me swing back into the uber-geek spectrum? Probably ...
Not a very "Monkey Island" type entry, but it is good to get back to this, albeit for just a few minutes, and let the air out. If the Cardinals win I will be back in here complaining next week. I can't deal with Kurt Warner's wife again ... I just can't. And he almost quit this year because the game is violent ... IT'S FOOTBALL! The physical violence of the game should not be such a shock that you are 50/50 on just up and quitting on the team and your teammates in the middle of a season, especially when you would be subjecting them to Matt Leinart! How does a team led by a guy who even thinks like this make it to the Super Bowl?
Friday, January 25, 2008
Eli Manning and Other Rants
Eli Manning in the Super Bowl? Really? I guess it could have been worse, and now this frees me of any inner turmoil about who to root for - history is the only way when the Giants are on the other side ...
Was it just me or did Edwards look like Milhouse to Obama and Hillary's Bart and Nelson? This year, that might be enough to work ... check his purchasing history for any Fall Out Boy outfits ... But then again that might mean that he plays Veep to Obama or Clinton's Radioactive Man ... and Mickey Rooney loses again ...
Not much going on this week, but I'm sure it won't last ...
Was it just me or did Edwards look like Milhouse to Obama and Hillary's Bart and Nelson? This year, that might be enough to work ... check his purchasing history for any Fall Out Boy outfits ... But then again that might mean that he plays Veep to Obama or Clinton's Radioactive Man ... and Mickey Rooney loses again ...
Not much going on this week, but I'm sure it won't last ...
Friday, January 18, 2008
A Tale of Two Bowls
As NY heads to Green Bay and the Bolts head to Foxborough we keep hearing stories about Favre versus Brady and what a great match up that would be, which it would ... if it happens. That might be the greatest match up between Super Bowl QBs ever. On the other hand, if things go the visiting teams' way in each of those cities we could have a terrible match up between the two whining QBs that were traded for one another on draft day not too long ago.
I can't think of many games I would like to watch less than the Giants v. the Chargers, Eli's crying about playing in SD from years past to Rivers' yelling aimlessly at fans in Indy present. Awful. As exciting to watch as the first match up would be, the latter would outweigh it on the other end of the scale, the "this is the most miserable Super Bowl since the Trent Dilfer affair" side of things. Sweet mother. At least we will get to see some old-time, slobber-knocker football in both games, with highs for those days projected in the teens and game time temps being lower still. Last week's Pack/Hawks game was about as good as it gets with the snow ... "The HD Game" as Simmons on ESPN.com is calling it. Is it the game or how pretty the snow looks in HD? Go Pack and Go Pats. Seeing Favre end the undefeated run by the Pats would be a fantastic ending to the year ...
I can't think of many games I would like to watch less than the Giants v. the Chargers, Eli's crying about playing in SD from years past to Rivers' yelling aimlessly at fans in Indy present. Awful. As exciting to watch as the first match up would be, the latter would outweigh it on the other end of the scale, the "this is the most miserable Super Bowl since the Trent Dilfer affair" side of things. Sweet mother. At least we will get to see some old-time, slobber-knocker football in both games, with highs for those days projected in the teens and game time temps being lower still. Last week's Pack/Hawks game was about as good as it gets with the snow ... "The HD Game" as Simmons on ESPN.com is calling it. Is it the game or how pretty the snow looks in HD? Go Pack and Go Pats. Seeing Favre end the undefeated run by the Pats would be a fantastic ending to the year ...
Thursday, January 17, 2008
The Best Movie Name Ever
Nothing says terrible like "Escape from Monkey Island". If there was ever a movie name that screamed B (or C or D) rate film, it's this one. But B-rate isn't necessarily a bad thing. It doesn't portend to be anything more than a bit of fun shlock, with some mild swearing, poor special effects, and a bit of gratuitous nudity. The director isn't lying awake the night before Oscar nominations praying to hear his name called. Not at all. He is probably sitting in a bar, unaware there are even nominations being made, drinking pitchers of Pabst Blue Ribbon and wondering how he can get the mildly attractive but utterly talentless leading lady from EfMI to return for the sequel, "Escape from Monkey Island: The Lost Diaries of Curious George", all in the vain attempt to hook up with her and be able to afford another month's worth of pitchers of PBR.
That's not who I am, having found my talented and gorgeous wife, and being able afford a month's worth of twelve packs of Bud Light. However, that's what this blog aspires to be, a Monkey Island for the masses. Or maybe a place to write frivolous little tidbits and anecdotes that will be read by nearly no one. But that's what it wants to be ... and needs to be if I have a shot of keeping this up. As always, I thank/blame J. Michael Robertson's blog ( http://jmichaelrobertson.blogspot.com/) for inspiring this insipid, trite attempt of mine. A great professor does not necessarily a good student make.
That's not who I am, having found my talented and gorgeous wife, and being able afford a month's worth of twelve packs of Bud Light. However, that's what this blog aspires to be, a Monkey Island for the masses. Or maybe a place to write frivolous little tidbits and anecdotes that will be read by nearly no one. But that's what it wants to be ... and needs to be if I have a shot of keeping this up. As always, I thank/blame J. Michael Robertson's blog ( http://jmichaelrobertson.blogspot.com/) for inspiring this insipid, trite attempt of mine. A great professor does not necessarily a good student make.
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