A wise old guy once told the story of a man going to a hardware store to buy a drill.
“I need a drill”, he told the salesperson.
“No you don’t, actually”, replied to salesperson.
After the customer had argued for a bit with the salesperson on how wrong she was, the salesperson waited patiently until he finished, and the she said, “Sir, you don’t want a drill. In fact, no one who comes into our store asking for a drill actually wants a drill. What you want, is a hole.”
Mic drop.
Ever feel that way? Sometimes it takes a different set of eyes to look at the problem and understand it for what it really is.
Too often we are focused on what we think is the solution, when actually we just need to ask a better question. “Do you want a drill, or do you want what the drill produces?”
Do you want an ID Card Printer, or do you want the ID Card?
There are two ways to get an ID Card:
- Buy the equipment to print it yourself, or
- Get someone else to do it.
We’ve discovered that most clients are constrained by budget. But sometimes, the budget that is limited is the capital budget, while the operational budget has a little more “flexibility”. Capital expenditures of $4000 for a suitable ID system may get hung up by managers who need to juggle the numbers, or by a purchasing department that needs 3 quotes via the RFQ process. However, most managers have sign off authority for low value purchases, and the cost to produce several hundred ID cards (which is what you want anyways…) is a fraction of the cost of a new system.
Also, do you have staff on hand that is experienced, trained and prepared to handle the operation of a photo ID system? Who maintains the printer? What happens when IT “upgrades” the PC to a new version of windows? If the operator of the system moves on, who trains the new person? In cases like that, why not outsource the printing and make the staff/maintenance/consumable issues someone else’s’ problem?
We want all our clients to work smarter, not harder. We enable them to do this by asking the right questions that pinpoint the actual requirement, and sometimes clients need to be prepared for an answer they didn’t expect. We are not just here to take you order, we are here to solve your problems.