Monday, February 18, 2008

On Finding Competant Contractors

It has become apparent to me in recent months that finding good vendors is extremely difficult. People who should know exactly what they are doing, tend no to be so competent when pushed.

I could name examples, but it would only make matters worse. During my work as an entreprenuer, developer and investor I have found that most of the licensed professionals who I hire are mediocre at best and impressively incompetant at worse. I am sometimes at my breaking point when dealing with these guys.

The logical solution is to check references, follow up on details and dump bad vendors quickly. However, recognizing that they don't know what they are doing early is difficult. We are talking about a group of people who somehow continue to earn a living while performing their work very poorly. They know how to hide things. That is the one thing they are good at.

So I will trudge on often paying double for someone else to fix the mistakes of the first guy. In the future, I will try to less forgiving of failed promises early on. When a hired professional fails me, I will cut them before they destroy the entire project.

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