2009.61 The Customers You Deserve
I admit we've been spoiled by long term relationships with top-level customers in their fields. Not only do they give us credibility and references, but they are people with whom we love to work. It's customary for companies like us to give holiday gifts to good clients and we do that with pleasure. We try to take them out to lunch when that seems appropriate. However, our best customers often give us great gifts, special lunches at their Château and a lot of intelectually challenging work.
The recession seems to bring out the worst in a few
A high-class head hunter agency suddenly called and said "Cut your price in half our we're out of here". We of course wished them well and did everything possible to make the transition work seamlessly. Again, this is a matter of comparing cheap hosting with service providers. There simply is no comparison.
Last summer, a customer called and said they needed to cut costs so they had taken a $140 a year hosting plan. They would be moving their site to a cheaper host. I spent several hours during my vacation moving elements of the site over to this new host and adapted the site so it did not depend on databases that they weren't capable of managing. Then, no word for the rest of the year. The woman had health problems and we didn't want to bother her with trivial things like hosting.
We did have to contact them in December, because their contract was expiring and we knew they weren't going to renew. Still no response so we let it slide free for almost two months. A few days ago, we called her and found out they had ordered a new site last month. But at that point, they should have probably thought about transferring the little details like DNS, domain names and mail over to the new hosting she'd contracted for in July. All of the details should have been taken care of before December 31st, and I'd have gladly helped. Free.
During a few contacts (suddenly they start calling now, after two months of silence and free hosting) the woman told me they had a $50,000 LOSS last year. Why am I not surprised?
I didn't want to saw the branch out from under her. (Well, I'd have enjoyed doing it, but as a service provider I wouldn't do that.) This is one of those people who will not listen and who thinks she knows more than you, so all my explanations fell on deaf ears.
Finally, I went into the interface of the cheap host, set up the web server stuff, went to our DNS interface and set that up, too. All of this added a few more hours to their already never to be paid bill, but this is who we are.
The only problem is, we switched it all over and gee, she hadn't added the second domain name to the cheap host. So the bottom line is, no matter what I would like to do to make this go down seamlessly, they will be without email until she hires someone to fix it.
Let's take a look at the result. So far in February:
- They saved about $300 in services from us. (We don't just host, we enter the extensive data tables for them from the PDF and scanned documents they send us. Recopying financial data by hand and checking it for coherence take hours. There are many tables.)
- They have no web site (the cheap site people aren't fast)
- No email server so no email
- No way to fix anything until they want to pay someone to do it
They show a net loss of $50k+, apparently from bad investments.
Balance sheet looking a little heavy? Here's the punchline:
