RFP’s and NBA

It’s been a while since Big Omaha so my memory is fading, but I believe one of the presenters said that companies can identify themselves by figuring out what they won’t do. At Volano, we won’t respond to RFP’s any more.

RFP’s are like the NBA championships… rigged.

Of course the championship is going to go to 7 games – there’s just too much money involved for it not too. So it comes down to the last game and the foul stats pretty much say how the game was called and who was picked to win before the tip off.

We haven’t won an RFP, but that’s not the main reason we won’t respond. It’s not our target market – our sweet spot. Our clients are between 20 and 200 employees and are relatively flat organizations. We work with the top level execs and the people who perform the actual work. We bridge the gap between the management’s vision and the worker’s know-how. If your company is putting out an RFP, the environment is most likely not there for us to do that. The project at hand, with how we do things, won’t be successful.

We like to build relationships and become our client’s technical guru’s. We don’t want to just be another vendor that supplied a chunk of code that met the spec’s of an RFP and leave. We love dynamic organizations where the spec’s might change a handful of times before the project is over and help facilitate that process.

It is with those flatter, dynamic organizations where we’ll win every time – not win an RFP but win with a successful project and a happy client.