Anthony Guerra, founder/editor, hsCIO.com
I had repeatedly heard stories about the extended wait times for the company’s software — wait times that were as true for existing customers desperate for upgrades as newly signed clients desperate for delivery. I thought to myself, “Man, that company must be in some serious trouble. There’s no way those customers and prospects are going to sit around and miss HITECH deadlines because their vendor can’t it together.” I thought that for a long time, that is until I interviewed the President and COO (soon to be CEO) of that company last week. Read the rest of this column at Information Week …
flpoggio says
Ah, the power of NO….
Think about it, people want most what they can’t /don’t have. So “NO” also is a great marketing strategy.
But there is no way that a revenue /growth /wall street driven company could adopt this approach. Their answer would be, if we are at capacity…hire more people, build more plants, etc. (of course financed by stock offerings). Then that becomes the revenue baseline for the next year or quarter, and you start all over again.
The hard part is whether you are a public or private company you need capital to grow even a little. If you can’t get it from customers in the form of profits and prepayments you have to get it from outsiders like VCs or Wall Street. So if you want to stay private you must learn to say no, and if you are public you want to say no, but really can’t. Once you entered into the competition of the capital markets you are at their mercy. Only way out is to ‘take it private’ – buy back all your common stock.
Now the other side of the coin…
I think it is great that companies like Meditech and Epic have positioned themselves to say no and make it work for them. As Howard said…he really doesn’t care if he losses a client by saying no. If revenue drops next quarter all he needs to do is to explain it to his board, not twenty nagging Wall Street analysts.
The problem for the customer is that since the vendor is not revenue driven there is little incentive to deliver needed capabilities in a ‘customer timely’ way. What I mean by ‘customer timely’ is a rapid response to help clients solve problems. I have personally been in many hospitals where the vendor (not just Meditech) have been down right lethargic in getting regulatory changes out and told clients they should use a manual work-around to address the need ‘till they get around to it. In one facility the business office staffing was 20% greater with people manually doing work arounds due to antiquated systems that could not meet numerous regulatory issues. When I spoke to the vendor about it they said – next release!
With a public company the client has more leverage, he/she can tell the next reference caller about the lethargy and that’ll kill the next sale…good-bye revenue! So which vendor do you think will listen /respond faster?