Is your best contract still your best contract?
Dan Teare
There's a particular kind of confidence that comes from winning a good contract. Everyone signed off, feeling it was a fair deal for both sides, but over time, without anyone noticing, the contract that had been good slowly became not so good after all. A contract that's still fine, while being slightly less good for you than it was at the beginning.
What actually changes, and why
It usually happens through a dozen small, reasonable decisions.
A client asks for "just a bit more" somewhere; someone says yes because saying no to something small feels petty, and that small yes becomes the new normal three months later, without ever being written down anywhere.
None of these small decisions are mistakes; it just happens. But the issue is that no one notices them adding up because ultimately, it's no one's job to notice!
In a business running several contracts at once, attention has to go somewhere, and it tends to gravitate toward the 'biggest' issues or the largest contracts. The contract that seems to be ticking along fine is usually the one that goes under the radar and gets forgotten about. But unfortunately, just because it looks fine doesn't necessarily mean it is!
The bit that's easy to miss
It's easy to fairly quickly see what your total revenue looks like this month. But it's harder to know off the top of your head whether this specific contract is delivering what it did when it was won.
This isn't exactly about not knowing things, but it is how businesses with several contracts tend to think. (In one combined total, rather than contract by contract.) So the overall picture can look perfectly healthy, even while one contract underneath it has been slowly losing value for a while.
A few questions worth two minutes, not a full audit
You don't need a big review to get something useful; just pick one or two contracts you haven't looked at closely for a while, and ask a few simple questions.
- When did you last check whether the hours you're actually delivering match the hours you originally agreed to?
- Has anyone added an extra task, an extra pass, or an extra visit that was never formally agreed to or priced?
- If you priced this contract today, based on what you're really delivering, would it still win the tender it won the first time?
- Who would actually know the answer to that, right now, without searching through several spreadsheets?
If that last question made you pause, that's the point, because the answer isn't easy to find. And there is a need for change if there is a question you can't answer about your own contract in under a minute.
Why does this keep happening
This keeps happening because checking it properly takes time and effort. Someone has to sit down and compare what was quoted against what's actually being delivered, site by site, and that takes time (and money) that nobody planned for. So it doesn't get done until a renewal comes up or someone reviews the figures and finally asks the question. But in reality, all you needed was real-time visibility.
Facility Apps UK gives you a real-time, site-by-site view of hours, tasks, and delivery, checked against what was originally agreed. So the question "is this contract still what we think it is?" has an answer you can find quickly, instead of one buried.
Ultimately, less admin is spent hunting for the answer, and more control over contracts that look fine, but might not be.
Worth a look before your next renewal, if nothing else.
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