Engaging with Contractors #1

 Hey guys, it's Rachel Cobb here, and today I'm gonna speak with you about some best practices and how to engage vendors and suppliers. I often get phone calls from onsite staff that they tell me they're told to call me. They don't really know what I do, what my company does, or what the problem is that they need me to look at.

They just ask me to come out and take a look at whatever they're about to show me. Uh, those of you that have more technical knowledge. You would have more details to be able to provide a scope of work or provide more details for even a material supplier of what you're looking for. But a lot of the do's and don'ts that I would like to highly recommend is don't just randomly call out anybody that you find in the phone book.

You should definitely know your properties, policies and procedures on what is required to be an approved, um, supplier partner with you guys. Uh, there's usually a lot of insurance requirements and vendor packets that have to be sent out and submitted. So you could end up just wasting a lot of your time chasing down partners that you think you'll be able to work with, and they don't even have the right insurance.

And now you have to start back at square one. So first off, make sure that you know your policies and procedures for what requirements are needed. So whether they have to be in an net vendor, vendor, cafe, or one of the many portals that are out there, that the person or the company that you're talking to will have those requirements.

So you don't have to start from square one. So that is number one important thing for you to consider and know before you start engaging, uh, any suppliers or vendors that you wanna have on site to do any potential work for you.