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I wish some of my clients understood that. One just ruined all the goodwill they built up with me over the past year (which got them countless free hours, crun
by crdb 10y ago
I wish some of my clients understood that.
One just ruined all the goodwill they built up with me over the past year (which got them countless free hours, crunch time at short notice, etc.) by stiffing my company of about a grand - literally a few hours' work - on some badly structured justification, the real reason being he felt his colleague was not negotiating hard enough with me and he "showed him".
Now I'm going to stick to the contract hours and probably prioritise other work over theirs; I also changed the payment terms to be upfront to avoid stiffing, and if they want extra hours, guess what, their sticker price went up from their discounted price for longstanding cooperative clients to "market rate". I guess the thousand bucks is visible and the value they lost isn't, so he probably thinks he was very successful.
It bewilders me that someone can be in business for years and not understand that cooperation is a better strategy, but there are a lot out there. I've found the short term cost of cooperating with defectors worth it in the long run, though.
- vosper 10y agoIt sucks about the goodwill being lost, and I'm sure it feels bad to have been stiffed by your client, but it sounds like you're going to make more money out of him now than before. And at the same time he thinks he's had a victory. In some ways this a win-win. Take your team out for a nice dinner on the extra profit and don't feel too bad about it :)
- dnautics 10y agoIsn't what you're doing the ipd equivalent of "retaliate"?
- crdb 10y agoI guess so. Retaliation is the best strategy in iterative PD, no? (I'm rusty on this stuff). Nash equilibrium in a regular PD would be DD, but it assumes that the other side will defect. I think from experience that the payoff grid is different in business in that instead of CC resulting in a lower payoff for C than for D in CD, it's a much higher payoff; and the D in CD is not getting much more than in DD (maybe 20% more).
- hkhall 10y agoYou are thinking of tit for tat, right? I remember reading about generous T4T where in ~10% of the cases they were generous [CITATION NEEDED] it performed better that pure retaliation. Now there is a new paper in Nature[1] that I just stumbled onto in trying to answer your question. It seems like extortion is at least competitive with a generous strategy, though I need to give it a closer read. [1] http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2016/160412/ncomms11125/full/ncomms11125.html http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2016/160412/ncomms11125/full/nc...
- tnorthcutt 10y agoJust curious: if they stiffed you, why are they still a client?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]