Pricing the tradeoff of being fast, with his eyes open

Once Tellus could turn around a detailed, well reasoned estimate in two days instead of the standard three weeks, a new risk showed up. A client could take that thinking and hand it to someone else to beat. I kept delivering the fast, detailed estimate anyway, accepting that some clients would use it against me, instead of slowing down to protect against that risk. If a competitor takes three weeks and you deliver something detailed and well reasoned in two days, the conversation starts on your terms. The clients who'd strip mine a fast estimate and shop it around were not the clients worth protecting the slow process for anyway. Speed became a credibility weapon that won me deals the slow competitors never got a shot at, and I run that same tradeoff through Kanopi now, delivering estimates in minutes instead of weeks. Every advantage has a cost. My answer to the cost of being fast wasn't to slow down, it was to decide the clients who'd exploit it weren't the clients I wanted. I made a values call about which relationships were worth protecting and let that decide the tradeoff instead of trying to engineer around it.