Too low!

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Jakarta 11^thOctober 2011

In Jakarta for the next 2 days… Attending design coordination meetings with the project team and taking the opportunity to meet some of our potential new clients while in town. We are in negotiations for some very nice new projects and nothing beats meeting face to face to make your pitch. It’s a shame that going from A to B in Jakarta takes such an horrendous amount of time. Those traffic jams drive me (litterally!) nuts making it really tough to do business here.

What spurs my blog entry today was a call from one of our potential new clients in Singapore who felt that our fee submission for a new project was too low! Generally we are commented for the fees being too high, so being told our fees were too loo was kind of a novelty. What had instigated their call was that they felt our manpower allocation (and thus the fees) was insufficient for the duration of the project. The tender bid had been a very tedious process with heaps of forms and schedules to be filled and one of them was the proposed allocation of manpower. Not knowing exactly how much manpower would be required per stage of work due to a rather rough design brief, we had taken an average hourly fee for the company (not individuals) and spread that over the
duration of the project. That resulted in a certain amount of man hours. However that is a matter of interpretation…you can have 10 manhours at $300/hr or 30 manhours at $100/hr. By not specifying the hourly rate,but just the manhours the impression was probably given of insufficient capacity planning and too low fees. This begs another question: Did I quote too low? Or others too high? I am confident that my fees for the duration of the project and the requested scope and involvement of work are adequate, not high, but competitive. Did I miss something? Today we manage to clarify some scope and reallocated some works accordingly which did push the fees a bit up, but not dramatically. The next few days will tell whether we made the right call as we are keen to get this job. With the economy impredicatble we want to secure as much work as possible!

In Light Watch today some skyline pics of Jakarta. Every city has its own specific skyline. Lighting plays a define role in depicting the buildings and landmarks in and around the city!