This post is a guest article from Forsyth’s Director Shad Forsyth. See what else he has to say on his LinkedIn.
Every salesperson has a lizard brain. Mine included.
It wants the order. It hears a budget number and starts looking for a way to make something fit inside it. It treats a signed PO as the finish line, because for a long time in this industry, that was the way.
I’ve spent eleven years trying to work against that instinct. There’s plenty of reasons why.
The square peg problem
Sometimes a project comes to us with a specification that isn’t right for the application. Not wrong in a subtle way. Wrong in a way that will cause daily friction for the people who have to use it.
The easy move is to quote it. The spec is the spec, the customer asked, and it’s not my building. I know plenty of salespeople who’ll go ahead and quote it.
The better (and harder) move is to call and explain why I think the solution will not work, knowing that the conversation might cost me the sale to whoever is willing to just fill the order.
I keep choosing the harder one, and not because I enjoy difficult phone calls.
When you force a square peg into a round hole in a hospital, the consequences aren’t contained. A cart that doesn’t fit the corridor gets left somewhere it blocks something else. A storage layout that ignores how a room works produces workarounds, and workarounds cost time. Time in a clinical setting is not an abstraction.
Somebody always pays
This is the part I find hardest to let go of.
When equipment gets bought badly, the cost doesn’t vanish into thin air. It gets passed on.
It moves onto the staff, who absorb it in extra steps and extra frustration across thousands of shifts. It moves onto patients, who get slightly less attention than they would have otherwise, in ways nobody can measure and everybody can feel. And it moves onto taxpayers, who fund the replacement purchase in three years instead of ten.
Someone always pays. Usually it’s not the person who made the decision.
The deal we’d walk away from
We have worked with organizations where the entire relationship is transactional by design. Months of expertise offered freely, detailed design consultation, real problem solving, and then the whole package goes out to the lowest bidder.
I understand the logic. Procurement is under pressure and a low number is defensible on paper.
But I’ve made a decision about how we work, and we will stick to it. If the only question on the table is who is cheapest, we are probably not the right company. I would rather say that out loud early than pretend otherwise and deliver something I don’t believe in.
I don’t say that as a complaint about the industry. It simply describes what we are actually for.
What we are actually for
We are for the project that still feels easy a year after it opens.
We are for the charge nurse who never has to think about the cart, because the cart simply works. We are for the materials team that is not fighting their own supply room. We are for a public dollar that bought ten good years instead of three mediocre ones.
If that is what you are trying to build, we would genuinely like to help. If it is not, we will tell you honestly and part on good terms.
Both of those are fine outcomes. Quietly delivering something I know is wrong is not.
