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Too expensive for a poor contractor like me
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Yeah. This is what I was told recently at a networking event. “Too expensive for a poor contractor like me.” I reckon. I can be very expensive… and, on top of that… invisible. For someone managing a multibillion-dollar project, spending $500k, $1 million or $2 million to prevent problems can feel very expensive. Yeah. Until they have a $100–500 million problem. A problem that could have been prevented, or at least minimised, with the right strategies in place. Suddenly, that “expensive insurance” looks cheap. But you know… Help in a rush. Help when you’re covered in sh*t. It’s usually much more expensive. And smellier. Instead of spending $500k, $1 million or $2 million before the problem, prepare yourself to spend $5–15+ million afterwards on commercial support, lawyers, experts, arbitration and all the other people who become your new best friends when everything has gone wrong. Yeah… Expensive. An insurance broker once told me: “You can’t buy insurance when you need it.” So, expensive? Yes. Absolutely. The problem is that prevention has a terrible marketing department. If you're in consulting... you know that well. When it works, nothing happens. No crisis. No dispute. No emergency Board meeting when taking a holiday with the family in Fiji. No lawyers billing in six-minute increments. Just a project quietly doing what it was supposed to do. And because nothing happened, everyone assumes the prevention wasn’t needed. Like in Spain these weeks… cutting millions from fire prevention, only to spend hundreds of millions dealing with the consequences of reduced forest management… precisely when climate change should have made you invest more. But that particular stupidity is for another email. For the time being… You can save yourself a few dollars by getting access to me and a team that has done this before—and not badly, by the way. Click below to book a call. Preferably before you’re covered in sh*t.
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Vicente Valencia
Weekly insights on how to perform when it matters | High-stakes decisions. Real situations. No BS. | 👇JOIN +2k readers 👇
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