...Ask me about kickbacks
For the last two days I've been working on a proposal document for a government thing. Basically the province has a competition every three years for ad agencies, it allows you to get on their roster. That means that for the next three years only those agencies on that roster can get work from ANY department or ministry of the government.
It's a longshot; I mean there are 193 agencies competing, but worth it if we win. the smallest category of job the give out is 'up to $25,000'. even a few of those would be nice. This is part of a new approach or comittment I'm taking lately. It has two parts, one is that i don't want to deal with people for whom $1000 is a lot of money, i want to deal with clients for whom $10,000 is NOT a lot. Secondly I want to deal with the kind of clients who stick around, or come back with more and more work. that's been harder to do of course, and will continue to be. But if i can start suckling the teat of government largesse, things might feel a bit different.
My whole thing with dealing with larger clients is not merely about greed. Oh sure desire for more money is part of it, but really it's about the amount of work i get to do as a ratio to how much time i spend dealing with the attendant bullshit of being self employed. The amount of time spent getting a $10,000 - $50,000 is really only about 2 or 3 times more than the time and energy spent getting a $1000 job. As well my rate of failure is about double for the larger jobs. Sounds bad, but if you do the math it's a shitload better. i"m getting a return of 10 to 50 times more for only about 2 to 4 tiimes the effort. Graph that out and you see the value.
This is all in an effort to finally get my business out of the 'technically bankrupt but he doesn't know it yet' category and into something more like 'providing a good living and occaisionally able to take holidays' level.
So wish me luck as I bid for my place at the trough.
Oh and the title of the post comes from the recent scandal with the federal government and their ad agencies. The short version is that the Liberal party spent a couple hundred million dollars on a sponsorship program that was mostly a way for them to funnel money to ad agencies that were well connected to the party (did their election ads for ex.) Given that the Liberals are now in power provicially and i'm about to win government work i want to get t-shirts printed saying:
"I'm a Liberal Government-connected ad agency, ask me about kick-backs."
