Protecting Intellectual Capital
When working with the public and potential clients, we face some critical challenges related to loss of our time and resources when people come to us who are not exactly serious about going forward. We find that sometimes under the guise of wanting more information but not directly hiring us (yet), we walk a fine line in giving away too much time and research to answer questions and generate proposals. When your proposals are customized to each prospective client, it takes a lot of resources to research and meet their needs. What we run into are those proposed clients who will keep requesting more and more and more information before making a decision. The dilemma is where to draw the line. Some people in their quest for information are either intentionally or unintentionally picking your brain and wasting your time. They are not likely to work with you, but will insist on meeting with you anyway and set you off in pursuit to answers to those questions. They will also ask for more of...