The Cost of Being Cheap is Expensive
Last week, I mentioned how my partner and I cost ourselves greatly by trying to be cheap.
We contacted Melissa, who handles all our promotional products and for whom I do email copywriting, to make us 750 postcards.
She told us the price, and my partner and I agreed we could try to save some money. So we told her to make the postcards, but we’ll ship them out.
Big damn mistake.
The postcards came out beautiful.
One problem, though.
Upon digging further into getting them sent out, there would be all these obstacles.
“Did you get all the necessary paperwork,” the lady behind the USPS counter asked while shuffling some papers.
“What paperwork,” my partner and I were now extremely confused.
She goes on to explain that we have to go to another building, get the proper documentation, and then come back with those documents for them to mail everything out finally.
Fun…
It continues:
“It’s $310 a year for a permit,” the man on the phone said to my partner.
“What?” My partner replied.
“Yeah, to send out flyers like that, your business has to have a permit. It’s $310 annually. But first, you have to apply.”
You getting the hint here?
Our biggest problem now was that we had marketing material that was doing no good sitting in our hands when it was supposed to be ringing our phone line in the prospect's hands.
With our hat in hand, we returned to Melissa to get these out.
“Yeah, I can help you with this. Just bring them back to my house. I’ll get them out on Monday and send you a bill for my time.”
A bill to the tune of $427 to mail them out for us. That’s after we paid her $528 to make them.
What did she initially quote to do it all for us at the jump? Around $758 or so.
That’s right. The cost of us being cheap was almost $200 more.
What did I learn?
Make decisions when you have all the facts. We decided without actually delving deeper into the facts and details of the situation. Our choice was purely motivated by emotions and our ties to money.
Anyway, it's a good thing I am a quick learner.