Business System Consultation Center - Our Business System ColumnVol.3 2010.08.01 Takahashi Minoru

Ordering a system from an acquaintance leads to trouble

Thank you for your interest and continued support.
This is Takahashi from the Marketing Plan Research Laboratory.


When I talk about work with friends who run their own businesses, on rare occasions
“Maybe I’ll have you build a system for me.”
.


This is the ultimate reward for a systems developer—it’s genuinely gratifying—but
in the end, I almost always have to politely decline.


There are two reasons for this.
① It’s hard to give specific instructions to a friend (or it’s easy to just dump the whole project on them),
　　which can lead to a safe, unambitious system design
② It’s hard to set a fair price for a friend (making it difficult to charge appropriately),
　　which may result in a lower system quote


If the product were a packaged system (something available elsewhere), we’d be happy to sell it,
the systems we provide are custom or semi-custom products,
some designs may require intense discussion.
I personally believe that if a relationship is based solely on personal friendship without any business involvement,
and that is why I am declining your request.


Whenever this kind of conversation comes up,
I wrap things up by inviting them to subscribe to this column as a token of my apology.


That's all, Thank you for reading.

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