As part of the mix of services I provide to clients, sometimes I write RFPs and evaluate the responses in order to select the top couple of potential vendors. It’s not all that different from what I used to do in a previous life. Hardly a day went by that some new company asked for a meeting in order to pitch the latest and greatest piece of technology or a service that was going to increase my group’s revenues dramatically. Then and now, the conversation turns to the business model: how are the two organizations to work together, where does money change hands, and what accountability do we have to one another?
It was usually during that part of the discussion that there was a “tell”, as poker players call it – the thing that gives away how good a hand you’re playing. For me, this tell was always about how much skin the company had in the game, and to this day I think it’s an important factor in evaluating partnerships. Continue reading
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