Note: This is a fairly long article, but well worth the read. We recommend you take the time to review this article before beginning your selection process.

One of the most common methods of choosing a design professional is to select one out of the yellow pages.

While Frederick T. Seher & Associates, Professional Land Surveyors advertises in the Yellow Pages, this is by far the riskiest and least effective means of obtaining any professional service; the yellow pages alone will not give the client any means of establishing a firm's qualifications or past history. Additionally, there are typically too many firms presented to make it reasonable to call them all and request a bid and qualifications. Our goal in the yellow pages is to get you to our website where you can learn more about our company, services and qualifications. We recommend that you look for others that make the same information available to you as you begin your search for a consultant.

Some clients merely prepare a one- or two- page description of what they think they need and ask firms to submit bids without a technical proposal. These clients assume that, since all those submitting bids are licensed professionals, they all will all produce acceptable results. The resulting surveys will all meet State mandated minimum technical requirements, but different consults will not all produce the same end product. Also, some types of work require specialized experience that not all firms can be assumed to have. Frederick T. Seher & Associates, Professional Land Surveyors will not be well suited for every project either, that is why we present our background and qualifications for you here to review before contacting us.

A bid system is fraught with problems. While far from exhaustive, the following list outlines the major problems with a bid only system:

1.               Bidding eliminates in-depth client/consultant discussion before the proposed scope of service is developed. The typical problem with a straight bid vs. a qualification/fee proposal process is that firm representatives are not encouraged to point out hidden flaws or innovative approaches because doing so could cause them to lose a competitive advantage. As a result the firms are not bidding on the same thing and the results can be misleading. If a client has overlooked some task or the consultant assumes that the client doesn't want something, the bidder can lower his fee and enhance his firm's competitive position while covering his assumptions in the contract language. Bidders may not ask questions about such issues, because doing so could alert their competitors to the oversight and cost them the edge in completing the work cheaply. This aspect of bidding encourages professional firms to work against their clients from the outset of a project. QBS encourages the opposite behavior: with QBS, firms gain advantage by demonstrating competence, attention to detail and the ability to provide sound guidance.

2.               Bidding de-emphasizes personal qualities and client/consultant relationships. Bidding rewards the firm offering the best combination of technical merit (based on the technical proposal) and fee. Face-to-face or phone discussions are seldom used and have little or no influence on the outcome.

3.               Bids proposals are each based on a scope of service developed unilaterally by a client with input from the consultant, or unilaterally by a consultant without input from the client. Each such scope unavoidably must incorporate a variety of assumptions about the client's or consultant's goals, needs, preferences and risk tolerances, among other vital concerns. Assumptions give rise to misunderstandings and unrealistic expectations, problems that can quickly lead to deteriorated relationships, delays, change orders, cost over-runs and disputes.

4.               Bidding can encourage the most qualified firms to offer a cheap service. These firms assume that, when similar competitors are bidding, all will receive evaluators' maximum credit for past experience, current capabilities, and other elements of their technical proposals. As such, the only variable will be fee. The smaller the fee, the better; and the cheaper the proposed service, the smaller the proposed fee can be. Eventually, the most qualified and capable firms will decline opportunities to bid projects and will look for other work rather than provide a service for a fee not commensurate with their level of service.

5.               Some clients are particularly hard-nosed and insist that a given service be provided at no extra cost even if that service was not included in the bid. Situations such as these undermine relationships and can encourage weak-willed firms to take quality-eroding shortcuts in order to reduce their short-term losses. The problem is far more common when bidding is used, because bidding encourages firms to exclude as many services as they can to lower their bids. Bidding also tends to amplify the impact of the problem, because bidders often propose a comparatively cheap approach to begin with. Removing what little quality control cushion was contemplated at the outset can lead to serious pain for all parties later.

6.               Few clients (other than peer technical professionals) are really in a position to perform in-depth evaluations of technical proposals and their impact on life-cycle costs. In addition, even the most detailed technical proposals - including those developed through QBS - are subject to interpretation. They cannot possibly include everything, which is why trust is such an important ingredient in effective client-consultant relationships. Trust and bidding do not mix.

7.               Bidding discourages technical excellence because the cost of providing it can make a bid too high. Firms that consistently win projects by bidding often focus on performing their services quickly, because less time translates directly into more profit. Going "above and beyond" in order to please a client is pointless; it merely adds to costs without improving the firm's chances of obtaining the client's next project, because that project will be awarded by bid, too.

8.               Bidding encourages "you-get-what-you-pay-for" attitudes for non-technical services: responding to inquiries, providing unscheduled progress reports, dealing with unanticipated situations, and so on. Providing top-quality customer service is inconsistent with providing bargain basement prices, like trying to get Nordstrom quality service at Wal-Mart. While unfortunate, such attitudes are understandable: no matter how well a consultant serves a client that procures services by bid, the firm will receive that client's next assignment only if its bid is low... so why try?

We hope that this information has been helpful to you. There are many qualified firms in this area. We want you to find the consultant that meets your needs, even if it is not Frederick T. Seher & Associates, Professional Land Surveyors. If you have any comments or suggestions, please let us know.