Good vendor, bad vendor (pt. 1)
In my IT career, I often saw a cold, indulgent attitude in a client’s employees, or even founders, towards a software vendor they had hired.
I’ve been on both sides of this relationship. So, I thought I would note why vendors often spark such an attitude.
To start with, why does employing a vendor or an agency fail?
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The most common thing is that a vendor did not have enough skin in the game. They were hired at the wrong stage of their life cycle. At that time, winning or keeping you as a client didn’t matter much to them. They are shovelling and sending invoices instead of making it work against all odds. In 1995, Steve Jobs summed up a similar problem with consultants. It applies to software vendors and, by large, to all b2b relationships.
But there is something even more important.
The vendors fail most painfully if you hired them to fix a lack of expertise that is supposed to be your key competitive edge. You need to grow and keep your core expertise internal. Hiring a vendor to solve a problem that can make your core offering stale is a mistake. You’re delegating the wrong task. If the vendor figures it out for you, you are in vendor lock. If the vendor fails (and in most cases they fail — it’s not what vendors are for!), you go out of business. Since such an ending is usually stretched out over time, it’s the vendor who is getting all the hate.
Does it mean the software vendors are generally a bad idea? Of course not. A vendor (the right one!) can only be hired for specific types of work that your business cannot manage alone. And when it’s done right, it is your core business that benefits the most from it. I will cover a few good examples in another post.
