How important is quality to you? Or how about excellence? I guess both could be left up to interpretation. But shouldn’t there at least be a standard for what quality should and excellence should look like? I know for myself and the businesses I run that there are rules and that quality and excellence are to never be compromised.

I recently had a vendor deliver a printed product and when I looked the product over I noticed that there were 2 very obvious quality issues. The main one being that on one of the pages there was a sentence that was actually cut off and you could not even read it. I asked the vendor what happened and his response was, “well, because this was a discounted product we do not spend the time to inspect everything.” My response was, “if you agreed to do a job at a discount, how does that equate to giving someone a product with errors?” I then said, “please don’t try to present me with something with an obvious mistake and then try to pass it off as you get what you pay for. You are the one who took the job on and did not indicate to me that we could or would be provided with something that could not be read.” Oh, and they still gave me an invoice.

Why is this even being discussed? If you are selling a product or service at a discounted price, please be sure to inform your customer exactly what they should expect in a final deliverable. Please be sure that you are not passing off obvious mistakes and errors as part of receiving a discount! If your discount is synonomous with mistakes and errors, then you have a problem with basic business ethics.

I believe in discounts but I believe that the deal is still done where the customer has the experience of getting more for less. Make it your every ambition to extend only the best of quality and excellence in everything that you put your hand to do.

Tim Pecoraro

Tagged in: Excellence, Quality, Standards, Value, Work, Work Ethic, Worth