You might recall the historical legend of the greek Trojan Horse but if you don’t let me give you the bullet points:
Odyssey devises a strategy to build a gigantic wooden horse with a trap door in its belly.
Hoards of Greek soldiers hide within the horse and the monolithic structure is wheeled into the city of Troy
Once inside the city walls, the soldiers slip out and destroy the city, pillaging the people and taking over Athens.
Said more succinctly, the Trojan Horse looked like a gift to the kingdom and only later was the source of true disaster. As we all know, “there is no free lunch,” so then why do so many businesses choose to welcome in a gift that will ultimately lead them to bad situations? You will either pay for it upfront or you will pay the price later.
Let’s evaluate service businesses and the nature of quality service. You pay for what you get and if you are a reputable firm selling legal advice or pool repair services, there is bad, good, better and BEST. In most service businesses you’re paying for the quality of the labor, minds and materials and generally speaking the more expensive the cost, the better and more comprehensive the quality overall you will receive.
We see this in the EV charging business with installation. While we have plenty of prospective clients who pit our bid against competitors, it’s rarely apples to apples or taking into account total cost of ownership (TCO) of the service. Some of our competitors will low ball the bid, provide a lower cost product, sandbag the installation and then leave a medley of asterisks at the bottom that don’t account for areas outside of their control (i.e. “have fun to figure out your own IT situation for these smart devices” or “warranty? Oh yeah…1 year at best!”) - only later ballooning their costs. These bids operate under the belief that once you’re on the inside, you’ve got them captivated to make a change order. These customers that take these offers often come back to us years later saying “We should have done it right the first time.” Whether they’re motivated to juice their service contracts or just keep their electricians busy, these competing bidders know that they’ll get their margin later.
The ‘change order’ is the nagging mosquito of the service industry. Like Troy welcomed in the Trojan horse, so too does a landlord welcome in a low cost provider of services and labor. Only later do they find out that the change orders start to roll in as those ‘nuances’ weren’t accounted for at time of bid. It’s the oldest trick in the book if you’re a service provider as the Trojan Horse’s trap door will drop the change orders on your desk and you’ll find yourself wishing you would have chosen the more expensive but reputable firm at the onset to perform the work.
When I think about our business and the value we create for our clients, I sleep well at night knowing that we’re a premium solution and that we wrap our product with best in class technology (our leading differentiator), premium project management, a dedicated customer experience team, a certification process for all of our installers and a guarantee of 100% uptime - a comprehensive offering that’s needed to install and run a reliable charging network. While others may claim similarly at a much more discounted price, the truth ultimately plays out in the actions, not words, as reputations stratify and other’s trap doors are exposed.