Cut Out the Middle-Crook
In business many times when your trying to put a deal together you may find yourself working through an associates contact, meaning your working with somebody you know who in turns knows another person who could use your services or product or vice versa.
You see how confusing all that stuff sounds that I just explained, well when your working with a middleman it is more of a headache.
Now this is hard for me to explain, seeing how much of my business functions include basically brokering deals on behalf of large institutions, so essentially my whole deal making entrepreneur network is built around functioning as a middleman.
However the difference is that I’m honest (if I may say so myself) and I always treat consumers and companies right and represent my firms, investors and clients well when conducting business.
However once I found myself on the opposite end of a “middleman” deal and the whole thing hit the fan really quick and the deal fell through the floor. The deal took place in my commercial cleaning and field services firm, my business partner and I had just arranged everything for the business and things were looking up.
So then all the sudden my partner stumbles upon an associate that he knows, who happens to know a big executive at a horse corporation who had a location in our area that was going through conflictions with their current building service contractors. Great right, well maybe not.
My partner says, “well there is one little problem. My contact wants to work and negotiate the terms because he knows the guy personally and he feels that this executive won’t come to the table with us without him.”
So now I’m thinking that something smells fishy and I haven’t eaten at Captain D’s for ages so I know that it isn’t me! I know immediately that this deal is going to be complicated just because there is an outside individual involved who most likely has his own intentions that are most likely money driven.
Long story short we lost an $8000 per month contract all because we tried to work the deal through an unprofessional middleman.
To all my entrepreneur associates out there please learn from my stupid mistake. Try to avoid middlemen and if you’re working through a broker on a deal just make sure you check them out well to establish that they are who they say they are and they are capable of doing what they say they will do.
Try to avoid doing business with a middleman that you really don’t know very well, which was the case with me and my partner’s situation.
I had never seen or heard of this loser one day in my life, now I’m trying to work a $96,000 yearly contract with him, not one of my smartest moves as an entrepreneur I’ll admit! One more note, if a middleman doesn’t want to let you have direct contact with the other party, RUN like the wind!
A true professional doesn’t mind letting you contact the other party directly as long as they have written obligations from you that you won’t try to undercut them out of the deal. However if they still want to keep you away from the other party even if they are certain you can’t cut them out, then they most likely have some other agenda under the table and chances are you may be getting taken for a ride.
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