No budget, no glory

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Singapore, 31^st July 2014

July has come and gone…Is it me or is time just zooming past?

How do you deal with clients who have no budget or better still have money (we know the mother company has plenty of cash in the coffers) but refuses to spent a decent and reasonable amount on lighting (and other things)? It is a recurrent issue and time and again we ask ourselves whether we should just quit the project or just soldier on in the hope that something positive awaits us at the end? Let me first say that we fully support and acknowledge the need to engineer our lighting designs to acceptable standards, quality and budget solutions. We consult, we recommend from our professional knowledge and experience. But as a consequence there is a point of “no return” where the available budget will no longer allow us to maintain adequate and acceptable quality and performance standards…then what?

In general these budget issues come hand in hand with fee collection problems…always! In this case it does not help that the project is a highly prestigious resort, known the world over, so it would definitely be a nice feather in the cap, which makes us think that they use that to the consultants detriment. We are not starved for projects so we could walk away, but the attraction of the project so far has kept us in. We have no successfully renegotiated a new contract with some assurances on the payments, so we have embarked on the work and are about to issue tender documents for stage 1, but wait…no payment received yet. We did receive a written confirmation that on submission of the tender documents the related amount could be invoiced…

But far more worrying is whether they will be willing to pay for the lighting as have specified it. Previous experience with them has shown that they have no understanding about what is reasonable and acceptable. There is a very high probability that they will ask us to value engineer it down to totally unrealistic budgets…then what? Hopefully this time around they will have learned…because without budget there will be no glory…for no-one!

Light watch 5-126: It’s all in the numbers!…