Industry spoilers tend to leave a trail of pissed off competitors and former clients in their wake. They tend to be shiny, smiley companies that overcharge and under deliver on everything they do. They are the ones who have excellent snake oil salesmen at the helm and some political or family based relationships in their target industry. These spoiler type companies tend to find quite a few sucker clients, those businesses who are naive enough to say yes to a company without doing due diligence, then blindly hand over a fat cheque.
What usually happens is that the schmooze job becomes a botched client job, wasting both time and money. Pretty much like a hooker who didn’t take her trick all the way to a happy ending. The client is then left unsatisfied, thinking that the service or product just doesn’t work and doesn’t want to risk the fix by trusting any other company to execute a do over. What follows too, is that every player in the industry is now seen as suspect. Sounds familiar?
This kinda reminds me of when I had a website development startup in Jamaica called Maverick Media in the late nineties and early 2000. There was a known spoiler who got contracts worth millions from a small but enviable client base. They screwed over the clients which in turn stunted the growth of the industry for almost 2 years. That spoiler company evolved into something else and the rest of the industry was left cleaning up its mess – the perception that simple websites must always cost millions; a litany of crappy websites that needed to be redesigned and corporate executives who needed to be bitch slapped first, then reeducated and cajoled.
So in your daily roll of doing business. Are you adding to or messing with the reputation of your industry? Are you going to be a spoiler or a genuine success story?
