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Every so often a piece of spam (or pseudo-spam) catches my eye while my finger is hovering over the delete key. I don’t know whether it is AI that manages to tailor the message to me, or whether someone somewhere is manually working on these in batches for different target audiences, but once in a while they manage to hit on something. This time it was a ‘lead generation’ business saying they could land me a £25k ‘green infrastructure strategy’ project with a named client if I wanted it.

Now I assume they’ve scraped this ‘opportunity’ off a tender listing site and sent it to hundreds if not thousands of environmental consultancies. If I rose to the bait, I expect the ‘opportunity’ would magically evaporate, only to be switched for a pitch for paid services. But even if it was genuine, I’d still hit the ‘junk mail’ button.

Why?

Because I like to build business on trust. Tendering only tells you how good consultancies (or their outsourced bid writers) are at bid writing – it tells you nothing about whether you can trust the other partner. Most frustratingly tendering gives no opportunity to challenge the underlying assumptions in the project – after all, if the potential client is 100% sure of what they want, why don’t they do it themselves? You can’t take the client through a diagnosis to find out what they really need. And, as I’ve found to my cost, responding to a tender with “here’s a much better way to do it” results in nil points in the evaluation!

Occasionally I will respond to a tender: I have one live at the minute. It is for a sector into which I’d like to get a foot in the door and writing the bid helped me crystallise and test my ideas, so it was worth a punt. However, all my other live and prospective projects are based on relationships, not tenders.

Middle-men always make building trust difficult. I’ve twice had to rescue a project when the relationship between the middleman and the client has gone south, but I’ve also had several just go quiet forever and I haven’t had an opportunity to reach over their heads. I’ll never know whether I was just the bait in a ‘bait and switch.’

I’m often asked to be a middleman myself. I’ll get an invite on LinkedIn and on accepting get asked “would any of your clients be interested in our product/service?” Now, why on earth would I risk the valuable trusted relationship between me and my clients on behalf of a complete stranger? The amount of due diligence I’d have to do up front before trusting that product/service would make the whole thing prohibitively risky from my point of view. I wonder if they ever get any positive responses?

One last anecdote – about ten days ago, I got an e-mail offering me the plaudits of “most influential person in Supply Chain Sustainability” for ‘just’ $1599. A few days later, this had dropped to $1199 and then a third e-mail arrived over the weekend offering just the package for $699. Now to me it is deeply unethical to buy such an award, but I also assume that it’s a scam and if I did cough up the cash, I’d get nothing and they’d assume I would be too embarrassed to pursue it. But it does make me wonder how many ‘award winning’ individuals won their award by buying it.

The bottom line is: to do business, both sides need to trust each other, and so much of the noise of modern business ignores this basic principle.