They Chose Us Because We Have Passion…

I was in a meeting recently where I witnessed a demonstration of a very well developed internal social network for a fairly sizable, though not very well known company. This particular tool was (almost) completely custom coded by the developer and web design shop for their client. While I sat through the meeting, I wondered “why did they build this from the ground up? isn’t there an off the shelf package to do this?” Which, being one of outsiders, I asked “so, why did you build this from the ground up? isn’t there an off the shelf package to do this and didn’t the client ask for an evaluation of best-of-breed software before giving you the go ahead to do this?” In response, they replied something like, “yeah, sort of, they had these requirements and we told them we could build it and they loved our passion so they bought into it….and so on.” In reality, I got the impression that very little due diligence was done on that front. However, that’s not actually a bad thing.

When you look at the comparison of where the client company was coming from, this custom developed solution was far less expensive than what they had been doing to accomplish the same objective, so in their eyes, it was a tremendous savings. It wasn’t about off the shelf vs. custom developed (to which I’d further digress it the customization vs. configuration argument and whether or not either company has some NIH issues, but we’ll not go there today) but rather about a vast improvement for less than they were spending now. So, maybe it wasn’t the hard cost benefit analysis that sold them…then what was it?

What all of us in the meeting were astonished at was the response from the lead presenter when asked the question “so, why did the go with you, a relatively small shop and not a name brand company that does development work full time? (this was a small web-dev shop at the core)” to which they replied “Because of our passion.”. They repeated that phrase even though a few of us asked the same question a few different ways.

While we were all fairly quick to dismiss that, believing rather in the complexity of the decision process and the “right place – right time” that the fortunate web-dev company had going for them, perhaps it is about passion in some small or even some very large way.

Maybe it is about passion. In fact, when I look at my own wins, and the wins of client companies and peers that are, at least in some small way, considered thought leaders in their field (remember, you can define how large/small/who’s in the field), there’s actually very little competition and the passion for the subject, as evidenced by your thought leading point of view and the work you’ve done in the space speaks for itself, maybe it’s the whole “passion equation” that got you to the dance with the prom queen in the first place.

Now, I’m not saying that having passion for something is the only thing, or that it’s a great “strategy” to build your company on, but at the end of the day, would you rather work with the company that loves what it’s doing and revels in solving the challenges you face and emanates that love for the “game” or would you rather work with the calculating cost-benefit analysis type that brings no emotion to the game?

I’m just sayin’ here, but I’ll tell you, my money goes with the passionate revelers any day of the week!