About 2 months ago, we were contacted by a commercial realestate broker in a tough situation. For several years, they had a programmer/network network administrator in charge of their systems, consulting them on all aspects of their IT. They were fed up with problems such as speed and reliablity, and the guy “only cared about their system when his was down”. Strangely, years ago, he’d made an arrangment with their former office mgr.to be able to host a few websites on their system in exchange for a few hours of support per month. This understanding was not in writing, nor was the boss aware of it until recently. Direct cost to the org. was very little, but many of the recomendations that had been made weren’t practical at all for the needs of the company. (he ran more than 30 adult websites, spammed through the night, and sold them hardware that was wildly out of scale for their needs)
They wanted to get him out of their system, but the relationship was so bad that he was withheld documentation and passwords. The company asked us to help, and we supplied a proposal that was accepted.
This included a maintance contract that would follow after the takeover (we budgeted for the ammount of time it would take to get sufficiently familiarized with the network considering the lack of info, which was included in the proposal).
We did the work to get them in a stable, documented position where they had control of the systems (passwords, websites, etc.)They kept postponing the contract signing, which was not a huge concern for us as our rate is the same for on-call or contract.
Now, they have recieved the invoices for the work done (only a little more than we proposed, although it was a great deal more involving that we’d hoped for). They would not sign the contract unless we postdated it to include the “takeover” expenses, which was ridiculous given that they were agreed upon upfront.
Now, they have decided to “shop around” because we did not accomodate the request.
I’m still waiting for payment, have not gained a client at this point, and have stopped service unless payment is up-to-date.
What did we do wrong?