 All right, it is four o'clock. Thank you all for joining us today. Today buckle up because Josh Lazar is going to take us on the road trip. Take over Josh. Thanks so much. So what if I told you that everything you're sitting on right now, perhaps standing on, everything that you're wearing, everything that you're listening this on, the mouse that you use to click into this webinar, all the emails that you have clicked on and off of and maybe they're in the background right now. Everything you've used has been on a truck and the truck has probably been on a highway and that pothos plant that might be near you, you might have started that from a seed, you might have grown it yourself, you might have propagated from other plants but that original seed probably came from a truck on a highway. Now highways and trucks and roads, they can be used as a metaphor for a lot of things. Life is a highway, right? So what we're going to do today is we're going to take a road trip. I'm your tour guide, Josh Lazar. Where are we going? We're going from normal Illinois to Eureka, California. So let's get started in this road trip. You're taking a ride with me on this great tour bus and we're going to have a conversation together. Like many of the tour buses you've probably been on, there's a leader, someone standing up talking to you but it's not a one-way conversation. Usually you get some insight and information and you provide some to the tour guide as well and that's what we're going to do today. So let's get started. In the chat if you want to raise your hand in this webinar, let me know how would you get from normal Illinois to Eureka? Just give me whatever response you think would get you there. So for those of you who are going to be watching this later, I'm going to get some insight and information from when chats and conversations come in. I'll relay them to you just in case the chat isn't available in post. So we have a train. A train is a great way to do that. What else? How else? Make a plan. Make a plan. That's a good one. That's a good one. We're going to talk about that in a little bit. You want to make a plan. Give everyone a few more minutes to see how they would get from normal Illinois to Eureka. Telecommute, I like that. In a car with great gas mileage, that's wonderful too. So we have modes of transportation, right? Train. We have ideas like making a plan. We have other ideas like telecommute which is a good one. I do like that. And we have other modes of transportation like cars with great gas mileage, right? So if you want to get in between two places, you need something to get you there. Now you can absolutely walk. You have the ability to do this all on your own. But how likely is it that you're going to walk from normal to Eureka? The reality is I think most of us would say no. But you can use tools to get you there faster. And we talked about some of those tools, a train, a car. There's some other tools that you might use. Bicycle, motorcycle, plane, bus. And someone said they've run a marathon or five, but that might be too far of a trip. Well, we'll get to your marathon in a moment in our road trip. Don't you worry. But the idea here is all of these tools cost different amounts of money, but they will all get you there. That's the point. Vendors are like modes of transportation. They are tools to get you to a destination faster. Write that down. Vendors are tools to get you to a destination faster, whatever that destination might look like. Now, they do have different costs absolutely, but they also have different benefits. But no matter the vendor or the mode of transportation, each can get you to your technical or actual Eureka. So on our trip, you know where we're going, normal to Eureka. Now we've talked about a lot of tools that can get you there. You can unmute yourselves. You can follow up in the chat. We'll be doing this a couple of times. So we're already getting some great participation. And for those of you watching this later, I'll guide you through that process. What tool would you use or you choose to get you to Eureka? I'll get some in from sites live. If you're watching this later, maybe you pause this, write it down, see what others say. So what actual tool would you use now that we've talked about? So we've got something that is low cost, but good value email. Email could be a tool for not physically going there. That's awesome. So the reality is any of your choices could be right. You could get something low cost, but good value. You could have gotten there by telecommuting your email if you weren't physically getting there. And thank you for going outside of the box with some of those comments. If you are watching this post live webinar, feel free to throw your comments in the chat feature. Maybe we'll have a conversation later there, too. But the reality is just having a mode of transportation doesn't mean you're going to get to your given destination because in every way you might get from normal to Eureka, you might have a roadblock. We're talking about a train. Well, that train might be held up by Wiley Coyote chasing the road runner. That low cost, but good value maybe car might pop a tire. At 2,000 miles, probably something might go wrong. But you might have a literal roadblock, probably the anvil from Wiley Coyote. You might take a plane. And that plane might need to be de-iced. I don't hear. But listen, if you're actually following along and you've researched what normal to Eureka is and you know how many miles it is, and you realize BMI is the closest airport, God, just stick with me on the whole concept, please. But you're not running a marathon, as we talked about. And you're not probably walking. And honestly, you're probably not biking 20 centuries to Eureka. You don't have the full picture of your road trip. If you just have your motor transportation, being able to use the right motor transportation for the right project at the right time, that's the start of logistics. And we're talking about this in 2023 live. In the last year or so, we've had some conversations about supply chain and logistics and not having the right motor transportation for the right needs to the right consumers. But being able to have the right vendor for the right project at the right time, that's the start of vendor management. Right that down. Being able to use the right vendor for the right project at the right time, that is vendor management. Now, let's try a different scenario. We've changed our destination as sometimes things happen, right? We're no longer going 2000 miles to Eureka. We're going 30 miles to Farmer City, Illinois. I really hope someone from here is from Illinois on this either live or in the future because it might be for a really fun conversation. You never know who's on the tour, right? So you're now going 30 miles from normal to Farmer City, Illinois. Let me know in the chat. You can speak up too. How would you get there? Okay, we've got some coming in. We have highway. That's possible. What other ways would you get from normal to Farmer City? Bus, excellent. And I hope you've paused the video too if you're watching this later to give your insights. Last good one. I'll take this carpool. That's a great one because it's not just about you. It's about the team. That's wonderful. Now, everything that our team on this tour is talking about right now is right. But here's the interesting part. We've all talked about the same tools, kind of purposeful, but the destination has changed. Could you use a plane? Could you use a train? Sure. I know it's almost like a marathon. It's almost like I kind of planned that out in the chat. It is 26.18 miles between the two cities. That could be for a purpose. But the reality is, thank you for helping the tour guide here, folks. The point is, there are places in this country where you would love to take a helicopter to go 28 miles because it will take you hours to get there if you don't have it, if you have another mode of transportation. But the reality is the difference between normal to Eureka and normal to Farmer City, you're using the same tools. Cars, buses, using the physical highway, roads, all these things are the same. Your destination might change in a moment's notice. What tool are you going to use? You might have someone in your organization tell you, last minute, hey, I applied for that grant, you need to figure out a way to fulfill it. I got the money. What's happened to me? Not as a tour guide, but in my previous role, when I was an IT director at a legal aid organization, I'm just a humble tour guide. But I've had the experience of here's money, fill the grant, but you didn't create the grant, so you need to figure out how to make this work. Vendor management is important because you may not know where you're going. That destination might change, but eventually something or someone is going to need to get you there. Write that down. Vendor management is important because you may not know where you're going, but eventually something or someone needs to get you there. All right, so we're going to have one last road trip conversation. It's a real life experience. It's a bit of a doozy. Take a second, maybe even close your eyes and hear and listen to what we're about to experience. It is your first time. I won't even go back. It's my first time out of the continental United States. You just got married. You're about to take a honeymoon. You're about to go on your first international flight. You're about to go on your first cruise more than a couple days of Bahamas. You fly up to Philadelphia, late night flight, kind of a red eye over to Barcelona, and at about 9 p.m. when you're supposed to leave, your plane breaks down and you hear that they have to fix a part in the plane. You've never been on a plane more than two hours. You're going over a big ocean. That's kind of scary and you sleep in the Philadelphia airport, but 190 out of 200 people in that plane are also going to the same cruise. So when you eventually get over to Barcelona, they hold the ship for you and they don't do that often because everyone on your plane is going to that ship. And as you board the ship, it literally leaves after you all clear customs. Just waiting for you. First time overseas. First time on a cruise ship. You go to France. Enjoy your time there. You see the sights. You drink some wine. You enjoy yourself. And then you get back on the ship. You go to dinner. You're in this wonderful glass enclosure at the back of the ship, eating dinner with maybe some new friends. And you look to your left and you're like, well, those houses look kind of close. And you don't think too much of it. And just a few minutes later, you feel a boom, boom, boom, boom. Everything kind of shifts in the dining room a little bit. But you've never been on cruise. You don't understand really what's going on, but it's just what it is. But you are excited because you're going to see one of the things you've been learning about for so long. You just want to do the picture where you have your hands up on it. You're going to see the Leaning Tower of Pisa tomorrow. So you go to sleep, you're excited, you wake up, you look out your window, you're waiting to see Italy, and you see the ocean. And you feel a little wiggly. Now, thankfully, change management is really good on a cruise ship. You have a little piece of paper there telling you, hey, we're going to skip this stop, but we're going to go to Chevidia Vecchia, which is the port where you get into Rome. We'll be there tomorrow. Here's some free money for the cruise. We'll refund you all of your excursions. You're good to go. You think nothing of it. You get into Chevidia Vecchia, and everything goes as normal. You go see all the sights and all the fun stuff that you've been learning as you had been because you've learned the Italian language for over a decade and you've been researching it. And you go to the Sistine Chapel. And before you get there, you turn around, you see the School of Athens and the Vatican and it awes you. You go back to the ship, you think everything's going to be wonderful. But when you get back in your own, you get another slip of paper or not leaving tomorrow. We'll give you a bus depositano or any of the other excursions you're doing. Well, let's know if you want to do that. Here's what really happened. That ship hit France literally. That ship hit France, and this was before the Concordia and all those things happened. Because going close to the edge of countries, I guess, was the thing for some ship captains. That ship never left Chevidia Vecchia. That ship had to be dry docked and lifted up because the captain bent a two ton propeller in half, like the fin on free willy. And I know a lot of that because I saw the divers trying to go in to fix it live so they can continue the cruise. So now you're sitting in your luggage. You're about an hour from the Rome airport. You now need to decide if you're going to get there to get to the chartered plane that's taking you back to the US. You have no help. I'll say little help. How about that? You don't have an iPhone because that hasn't been released yet. You have a map. You have your idea of 10 years of Italian language. Andiamo tutti. We're going. How do you get to the airport? How would you get to that flight? Let me know in the chat. Let's talk about it. And if you want to speak up and unmute yourself, we can talk about that. How would you get to a flight? The tour guide would love to hear your insights. Taxi. That's a great one. Taxi is a way to get there. Yes. I should premise that you're kind of young and don't have a lot of money, but that's okay. Let me give some insights to you. Here's a great story about hitchhiking. Then we'll get to our regularly planned tour. There was a group on that table when we hit France that were probably current US military and understood many different languages. Italian was part of their goal. They were learning it. So they decided to take a rental car and drive to where we were supposed to go to, which was Venice. Still haven't been there yet either. And go do the things they were going to do, Venice and fly out. That's where we were supposed to fly out of that region. It would have been interesting on a lark to just drive with two other ex-military around Italy and hanging out. I kind of wish that I would have done that in the past, but hitchhiking actually was a potential possible option. But the reality is any answer is good here because you need more than a mode of transportation when you're in a situation where you are unfamiliar. You don't know what's going on. You need a guide. You might need a map. A little bit of Italian didn't hurt either. So back then, this is about 2007, my resources were a palm free. I love my palm free, but that's besides the point. A little bit of Italian background because I didn't really have an easy translator accessible to me. Actual physical maps and asking for help. Because for us, it was walking ourselves to the train station that was right in Chavidia Vecchia trying to figure out how to get a one-way ticket. That was all in Italian to Rome. Then from Rome, we had to get a taxi. So you're right, Mark. Thank you. I had to get a taxi to get to the airport. And then at the airport, it was a little bit easier once we were there. Because we knew at that point there was a plane ready for us sometime around the time we got there, we weren't late. For your road trip, for your vendor management road trip, you have resources when you hit the road. Now, here are the resources that we got from the initial conversation that we had in our pre-questionnaire. We'll talk about some of the questions from that too. A lot of people have talked about just doing a regular web search. You can go on to DuckDuckGo or Bing or Google or whatever your preferred web search engine is and type in what you need. You also need to know what you need first, right? So sometimes you talk to others and you have some word of mouth conversations. Word of mouth is actually one of more popular ways to get an understanding of both vendors and how they work and how you can fit them into what you need to do, your map of what's going on in your organization. Now, Alice in Tap is also a resource that has access to information both about vendors and just our industry as a whole in the legal service industry. But you may not have known that and there's a couple of places where vendor management is there too. And this is the last thing and this is something of which you are the first people to learn about because I want to make sure we can debut it here. It's available. It's a resource and it's going to be built upon month after month to try to do everything we can as an organization to make sure you have the access to all the vendors and all the information about LSE grants and TIG grants and TIPs and all that stuff. It's called nonprofittechguide.com or nptg.net for short. Take a look at it when you have time. So sometimes even the tour guide needs co-pilot and co-pilots are something that's kind of happening a lot these days. So I need a co-pilot too. See, oh, there's my co-pilot. Excellent. All right. So I need a co-pilot. I need to help. I need guides sometimes. Let's see what my co-pilot is going to help me with here. Hey, co-pilot, you look like me. What is that? You tell me. Yeah, it's probably right. Do you think they'll think you're live? I'm 100 percent sure that the audience will, Josh. Okay. Good, good, good, good, good. So how am I supposed to do this presentation and close it? But what? Why are you so... I can't... I can lip read. I see what you're saying. I think I get it, but what? Okay, okay. Why are you talking like that? You recorded this with your kid asleep in the next room, Josh. Of course you would do it. Hey, your background just changed. What's that? It's interesting. I had to get my answers from somewhere, Josh. I borrowed some from my cousin, Gerald Perry, trainer. We call them GPT for short. Take a look. Looks like what we're about to do, but I thought you were my personal co-pilot. Maybe I'm just your attorney to Eureka. Really? Really? I only have myself to blame, so wonderful. So I hope I did a good job at guiding you through this vendor management road trip, and I know we have more time. We're going to just make sure you got some of the base insights we talked about in the beginning, and then we might take another journey into your questions and see what we get feedback from the people on the bus. Sound good? I'm sure you're nodding your head back there. So we are going to have a quick quiz. This is not going to be an online quiz. If you are watching this after the live presentation, I'm going to give a question. You pause it, maybe you write it down, figure out if you got it right, and go from there. All right. So for those of you live, let's just do this in the chat. You can voice speak up in the comments afterwards. Could you tell me what vendor management is? For those live and those at home, I can give you a hint. I've asked you to write it down. Vendor management, as a reminder, is knowing the right vendor for the right project at the right time. Thank you. I got one in the chat. Awesome. It was right as I was doing it. Awesome. I appreciate it. Thank you. All right. So why is vendor management important? Great. Thank you, Pat. Maybe I didn't get everyone enough time to type. That's on me. Right. Tools to get you to your destination faster using the right mode of transportation for the right needs. That's also why it's important. Another reason why it's important, because eventually, some grant, some grantor, someone in your organization, is going to give you something unexpected. You're going to find money, or you're going to find an experience, and you're going to have to do something about it. Maybe not you directly. Seeing some of the people who are on this live, some of you directly are going to have to support that. Pat, great. Excellent. Yeah, we got it right. We really need to make sure we have all the tools we need to succeed. Vendors are an important part of that conversation. Excellent. Last question. So we're doing great so far. Where can you find resources about your vendors to get information about them to learn what might be able to serve what? You can throw that in the chat. You can speak up if you want. First one out of the gate. That'll send tap. Absolutely. That's why we're probably here. Got word of mouth. Excellent. We have two more on that slide. Internet. Excellent. The last one's a little new. So I'll give you the benefit of the debt. That's a non-profit tech guy. So excellent. You have a bunch of resources that you have access to. Wonderful. Fellow programs. Not in the list. Absolutely right. Part of word of mouth, but that's definitely what happens. I have a couple people I'm guiding, and that's exactly how they're getting some of the insights about what they want to do. Excellent. Excellent. So you might be thinking, okay, well, what are we doing for the rest of the half hour? Look, at this point, there is more, but we're going to go a little bit into overtime, and I want to leave some stuff up here for a little bit later. We answered the basics. Like what we talked about sounds like we're all on the same page. I'm your tour guide, Josh Lazar. We'll talk about this QR code and this other stuff later, but I want to go a little bit deeper because the basics were what we wanted to address to start. Maybe we'll get into a few metaphors at this point, but we had three questions come into the pre-survey and some great questions about what people wanted to learn about vendor management and from this presentation. So what I'd ask if you can pop into the chat and let me know if there's anything you directly would like to know about vendor management or vendors or vendor and decision maker or client relationships, put it in the chat and I will go through the things that we received before the conversation and I'll address all of your other questions as well and that will take us through most of the rest of this conversation. So also if you are watching this on probably YouTube at the end of the day, if you have any questions that you want to ask feel free to either throw them in the comments or use any of the links that you see in this presentation and we'll get back to you as well. So one of the first questions we received was how do I proactively track hours worked and budgets of vendors or request an update for that? So this is wonderful because vendors, any, let's start here with requesting an update, any vendor that has a proactive client that is asking them for things, albeit not daily, but if you're asking a vendor for updates or information, you're probably in the one to five percent of clients. Typically vendors are on the other side asking questions, sending new emails, getting phone calls, doing all these things just to get your attention so we can work together to complete your RFP or your TIG grant or any type of project, whatever that is. So if you need to request an update from a vendor, ask. That's it. Just ask and you and your vendor have to work together on what is a good cadence to make sure they're not bugging you by asking too many questions and you're not bugging them in the same exact way. So how to proactively track work hours and budgets. So of all of my clients, I only have one that is a billable hour client. Everyone else is fixed fee. Fixed me meaning here's the budget. You do the work. I prefer the fixed fee version because the onus is on the vendor to produce and figure out how they're going to serve you and make money. Frankly, when you work on track of hours, it's the onus is on kind of the vendor to make sure you're fulfilled, but there may or may not be a steady like, well, we need to do this 150 hours. So I personally prefer fixed fee arrangements and it seems to work best for most. But if you have to track hours to a budget, let your vendor know beforehand because if I know that a client needs an exact amount of hours, I will start tracking it while I'm doing fixed fee or other pieces. And if you do it right, your vendor should be able to give you that information from their side quickly. For instance, of the one client I have that we do an hourly bill within five minutes of this moment right now, live, they can get a PDF with the hours worked for this month. But it's really hard to figure that out. If you didn't tell the vendor, I need a tracking and accounting of hours and then figure it out five months into a project. So you can't always do that from a client side because you don't know how the vendor is working and when they're working. And you can try to do that, but there's a lot of estimates and probably not great. Now, the budget part of it is even easier if it's fixed fee. If it's fixed fee, you just have to pay out of the budget you have, whether it's a grant and you're paying down on a grant or if it's your own internal project, that works too. So you just need to figure out what your project budget is, figure out the schedule that's built into your contract, and then pay it down. That should be an easy accounting process. Now, if you're hourly and you have a budget, then there's some things that need to work out. But the same concept works. If it's hourly, awesome. You just have to ask the vendor for the hours and put that into your accounting systems and figure out that mix. And once you get on a good cadence, you can do that. So that's how to proactively track hours worked and budgets of vendors or requesting updates for them. Just be upfront, have good conversations. That's probably the answer to most of these questions. So again, I'm going through three of the questions that came in before this conversation. If you want to add to the conversation, feel free to put something in chat. If you want to ask a question live after I get through these these initial ones, you can feel free to unmute yourself and speak up, raise a hand, we'll get to you in just a moment. Website hosting vendors. So is it worth it to pay for substantially more expensive Drupal specific host or a website that uses Drupal? How do you choose one when you don't have that much technical knowledge? And what are some good questions to ask? Which is a very, very good question. So here's the first part. If you don't have the technical knowledge, use the tools available to you. What were those? Word of mouth, fellow, also known or also talking to fellow programs. Alice NTAP, both of the server may be on the website. You can definitely go to a web search and you can go to nonprofit tech guide. All those should get some of the information you need. Vendors to serve them information and insights about the industry and what you want specifically for your Drupal question. And Drupal is just a platform, platform specific host websites is a big industry too. So I have hosted many WordPress applications on WordPress specific hosts and the same thing works for Drupal and other dedicated platforms like that. And the way I equate whether you should or shouldn't do it, to me, it's like having a discussion about the Cheesecake Factory. I show a hands of the people live. How many people here have eaten at the Cheesecake Factory? One, two, God. At least one. I'll go two because I'm on here too. Oh, there we go. Two, three. Okay, we got a couple people. Here's the reality. The Cheesecake Factory, in my opinion, has lots of good food. You can eat all kinds of different things there. You know the menu. The menu of the Cheesecake Factory could be the butt of many jokes. They have good food. But you know what's really good at the Cheesecake Factory? Cheesecake. It's in the name. If I want good Cheesecake, I'm probably going to the Cheesecake Factory. They specialize it. They do a good job of it, personal opinion. But they have all of these other things they work on too. If I'm going to the Cheesecake Factory, I'm eating Cheesecake. If I want to go to a platform-specific host for a website, they're probably going to do it better because that's what they do. In my experiences, every time I've worked for, I've onboarded for more money, a specific host that's dedicated to that platform, it's been a better experience. They understand backups better. If something goes wrong within the main platform like WordPress or Drupal, they know how to fix it. If not, they probably have better contacts to those organizations to roll back or do things for that. In my experience, it's been worth the money. It might not be in your experience. Your mileage may vary, but in my experience, worth it. If you need to know more information about that and you need to ask questions, use your network. Use your resources. That's what vendor management and having discussions about vendors are all about. Because if you're asking me who should I use, the marketplace has done a really bad job of giving you a very unified, singular place to look for all that information. We have one last question that's in the chat. I have some questions that are in the chat here. I'm going to address this one last one, which is a really good one. And then I will get to the questions in the chat. If you have any other questions, please let me know. Add them to the chat now. How do you address issues when a vendor is meeting, failing to meet goals? How to address issues when a vendor is failing to meet goals was the last question I was asked. And it is a great one. I have had over 200 conversations with decision makers and vendors. Vendors clients, they are called different things in different industries and figuring out how to improve those relationships. And you might see some things if you follow me on LinkedIn about those conversations. I'll have some more of that insight in the future. But I have a few answers here. And they really depend on why the goals are having an issue. Is there a delay in production? Are they not doing what's quoted? What is that failure point? Those are the two biggest ones. So let's start with delays in production. The delays are common in any process. When you're working with a client, we try as vendors to build in slack time to get through that. But the reality is there are delays. And the delays can be in both sides. And I will use the TIP process of the LSE TIP process. An example I know well as an example. One, if you had a TIP grant that was awarded in 2022, you have to have that data into grantees by September. By the end of September. I've heard that some people might have in November, but that timeframe. As of this recording, we're in April, almost at the end and the beginning of May is where we're going. If you are trying to get your TIP and your technology assessment done between next month and September, can it be done? Sure. But everything has to be in alignment. Or the vendor and client have to have enough time to do the necessary processes to make it work. For example, if you have a technology assessment, whomever the vendor is going to support you is going to probably send you questionnaires and ask you for information about your organization. And probably send questionnaires to your end users talking about the technology process. Almost everyone does this. This is not novel information. But if it takes you a month and a half to get that data back to the vendor, when the vendor is expecting it to take like two weeks, or if you send out surveys to your end users and they don't respond, you have a problem. So that's could be a problem with the client but the vendor will never say hey, we're late because you didn't give us information back that you really should have gotten back in a week or two and it took you two months. But they think it. And you might think that the process is not doing well and the vendor is not doing well because they're telling you to push you to get a month of future, push it out a month or two and grant these because we're not working together well. And maybe it's because the vendor isn't doing their job. It could be on both sides, but that delay in the production of any project is a big failure point. So how do you address the issues? If it's a delay, you need to have some common ground and you need to talk together. You need to be a partnership and work. Work all of it out. And sometimes you can press vendors to do things faster than possible. But there's sometimes reasons they want to take their time to make sure we get something right for them. Now, that's one thing. If they're not doing what is quoted, that's a whole nother bulging. And it unfortunately does happen. Here's my suggestion. First, if this hasn't happened to me, but if I dropped the ball somehow for a client, I'd love to have one shot to make it right. Things do happen. Balls get dropped. Vendor in the vendor and client relationship. I would say give them one shot to make it right. And unfortunately, because there are delays, you're going to have to take over project management for a little bit. Get them on a cadence. Meet with them every week. Decide if you're okay with asynchronous communications. Figure out whether or not you can get this relationship back steered right. And your active involvement, remember what I was talking about earlier, we love it. When we have clients that are proactively involved, that will kick them into gear. And if they fail you again, I'm not an attorney. What breach of contract sounds like it might be there. That's not an illegal opinion. I am not a lawyer. But once you've broken that trust more than once, you need to make another decision. You need to start having other conversations. You might need to go to your resources that we talked about here and figure out how to deal with this vendor. So we do have a question over here in the chat. If you have any more questions that's great. We have some time to answer those. So that's wonderful. We have a question here from Mark. Mark has asked, what are some best practices for resolving tradeoffs amongst vendor or product candidates? If I'm reading that correct, then please let me know. You're talking about selection. You have, we're doing technology assessments. We've talked about it. You have six to eight vendors that are trying to propose a technology assessment for you. What are some best practices for resolving the differences between vendor A and vendor B? Mark, is that kind of what you're saying? Did I get that right? You can thumbs up or chat. Yes, got it. Okay. So I can tell you a couple of ideas there. So one, that is hard. So I openly, I have a couple of clients that help them through this process. And if you're on LSN TAP, you've probably seen me guide some clients through this. There are two ways to do this. The way I do it, and I like to do it, but I do whatever the client's interested in, I take all of the RFPs and I take all the names out of there. And I've built RFPs that have a specific criteria. And I'll take that criteria and I listed out in a specific format. And in that format, I try to compare people on equal footing without knowing the company, without knowing anything about it, just pure facts. If I have a lot of vendors that are looking into my services or a lot of vendors that want me as a client, I try to take all the other stuff out of there because you might have some really deep organizations with thousands of employees that have some great information. And you might have smaller companies with two or three or four employees that can do it too. And if you strip out some of the fluff, you get to the core of what you're looking for. So first thing, you have to do your project or RFP based off a set of criteria that you can have some qualitative comparison to. Then what I do is I take out all those comparisons, sort them into a list so you wipe out all the other materials, add in some of the benefits and that they might add that some others don't. And then you get probably from eight to three. From there, what I do is I send my clients all the RFPs as they've came in. And then they can do one of two things. They can decide without seeing who's behind the curtain, are the three people who they expected or wanted or interested in? Are they the standard people you're used to seeing in your vendor list that you might see on other places? Or is there anyone new? And you can make some judgments a little deeper after that. And maybe someone in that list of three, maybe there's someone outside that didn't meet that initial criteria, but it's someone you might have worked with before. Or maybe it's someone that has a lot of visuals or something that didn't really translate when you wiped the slate clean and tried to have an unbiased opinion of your project. That's up for my clients then to decide, but I'm going to provide that best practice of trying to be as unbiased as possible to start, provide them all the information afterwards and letting them decide what's best for you. Now, on tradeoffs between vendors or products, really it depends on what your goals are with the product or the vendor. So I'll use a very big one. We have some of this in this industry. We'll do proof point and minecast. So proof point and minecast are like one A and one B. And there's others, but the big, the big vendors of email management security protection and things like that. Well, I had to make that decision in the past. And they were so close on those tradeoffs. There wasn't anything that was so much better than either or. I went with the one that was $6,000 less per year. Sometimes cost is okay when things are all equal. But if you have pre-made that list of what you're looking for, use that as your guide to resolve the tradeoffs. And if everything is equal at the end, kind of should go by trust. Trust is a big thing I'm talking about online and a big thing that's kind of broken in some of these relationships between vendors and decision makers. And I could spend another hour talking about that. But that's what I would do. I kind of take some of the fluff out of it, prep your project or your RFP or RFI, RFQ, whatever it is to that. And then from there, take all the fluff out, kind of do some narrow you down your vendor selection, bring all the fluff back, see if you make a fine decision between yourself and the decision makers in your firm. Did I answer your question mark? Thanks. That's great. I'm glad I did that. And we have about 10 minutes left. So here's what I would ask of everyone. On your screen is a QR code. If you're watching this live or you're watching this later, could you take your phone, take a scan that QR code and provide some feedback on this presentation? I think I was a pretty good road tour guide. But who knows? I love feedback. I love knowing how we can do things better together and how I can make these presentations more interesting for you. I really do hope you enjoyed your road trip from normal to Eureka or to Farmer City or to wherever your future technology decisions take you. I would love to play life as a highway right now, but I don't want to RIA take down of this video on YouTube. So I hope you have a great rest of your day. I'll stick around for a little bit here live. We'll probably stop this recording. So bye everyone who is watching this later. If you have any questions, I'm Josh Alzar, your tour guide for the day. You can reach me at joshatechthinktank.com on LinkedIn, wherever guide maps are sold. Thank you. Thank you, Josh. I just want to let people know that we do have quite a few resources on our website. If you go to the website and then ellisontap.org and then click on the resources tab, we have a whole section on project management and vendor management is a subsection of project management or so you will find our project toolkit or project management toolkit. We have some project management tools that you can use such as Trello or Asana for keeping track of a project midway. Your vendor may have a project management software that they use and getting access to that is very helpful. So make sure that that's something that you work with them or have something where you can see the steps of where your project is currently and you have a way to communicate and having all communications, getting those emails out of your inbox and into that communication platform is so helpful to just cut down on emails, but also so that you can look back and see where the project has been, where it's going, what has been communicated. Then there's always, you can always point back and say, hey, we discuss this on such and such a day. You agreed to follow up on this if you're having issues with getting things done on your project. So there's lots of good resources there on our website. If people are willing and would like to, if you want to shout out your favorite project management platform, we'd love to hear your suggestions or if you have other questions. We've got Josh here so or and I'm here also if you have questions that you would like answered. So just so you know, if you're not into Trello or Asana, which are also wonderful Kanban boards, you can use Project within your Microsoft tenant. Most legal aid organizations use Microsoft 365 and that's free as long as it has been made available to you by your administrator. So that's something I've used in the past. I've used all three of those. Kind of works. I kind of personally go where the client goes. If they like Project or if they like Asana or Trello and it's all relatively similar technologies to me. I mean even something as simple as Teams to have all your communications in one spot or Slack or whatever your platform might be. I just find it very helpful to eliminate email. I agree. And maybe for another conversation, but the emails or asynchronous communications or wonderful emails can be for certain things. And there's definitely reasons to use one versus the other. Again, maybe a different conversation. Well, I don't want to take up any more of your day if you have other things to do and you don't have questions. I do want to thank you for taking the time to join us today for this webinar. And if you have questions, stick around and we're going to stop recording now, but thank you again for your time. And we hope to see you. We have our community meeting on Thursday. We also have coming up next month. We have an office ergonomics webinar coming up. That webinar will not be recorded. So you must be in attendance if you want to hear that information. And if you want to submit your office for an assessment, we have a form up available for that as well. We also have a training coming up on June 1st that will be how to create tech training for staff. So if you're in the IT department and you're responsible for creating tech training for staff, that might be helpful. There will be many techniques discussed that will be helpful for creating any type of training also. So it's not just limited to tech training. And then we have several other things coming up in the future. So please keep an eye out on the LS in-tap emails or on our social media and we'll let you know what's coming up. Thank you again. Bye everyone. Have a great rest of your day.