We all know that quality takes time and costs money. But at the same time, we're all looking for a bargain.
We've all read horror stories about bridges collapsing when a flood carries a pier away; roofs caving in under a very heavy, wet snowfall; or sky bridges collapsing to the ground floor in a building atrium. All too often, the reason ultimately turns out to involve a lowball design or construction bid, or both.
But hey, money is tight. Right?
We're still working our way out of a deep recession and the economy hasn't yet fully recovered. And clients, whether public agencies or private companies, would all rather hire the architect or engineer whose price to design the project is $83,000 rather than the median bid of $99,000, or the contractor who says he can build the facility for $775,000 when the next higher bid is $950,000.
And call me crazy, but shouldn't these very significant differences in design and construction costs raise some red flags for an owner? Shouldn't these differences in bid prices make an owner ask the high bidder why he thinks he is worth that much more than other bidders? Shouldn't the owner be asking the contractor why he can build the project for almost 20% less than the next bidder?
Quality ALWAYS costs more!
The reason quality always costs more money is that it always takes more time—time an engineer or architect will need to pay attention to the details and complete his or her work, or time a construction manager or superintendent will be onsite while a building or other facility is constructed.
Or time a marketer will spend researching the proposed project in the owner's Web site, speaking to the people who regularly visit that client and attended the pre-proposal meeting, finding out what the client's main concerns ("hot buttons") are in general and for that specific project.
NEWS FLASH: High-quality proposals take time as well.
When an A/E/C firm's marketing staff are "overcommitted"—when a senior technical person "writes a check" that the marketing staff will have to "cash" without checking to see if there are "funds" (hours) available—the upshot is generally that quality suffers. There is no way around this.
If an A/E/C marketer is working 60 or more hours a week on two proposals and you want to add a third proposal to their workload, they must take hours away from one or both of their existing commitments. Despite your intentions, you actually turn two potential winners into three guaranteed losers.
A West Coast environmental consulting firm had a rule—if the RFP and the completed Go/No Go evaluation form were not in the Marketing Department two full weeks before the due date, that RFP was an automatic No Go!
They recognized that quality takes time in proposals as well as in design and construction projects, and were willing to act on that knowledge. I wish more firms were like that, but too many A/E/C firms are still operating in the "ready, fire, aim" mode and wanting to submit inferior and non-responsive proposals just to "put their name in front of a client," regardless of the negative perception an inferior and non-responsive proposal will create.