Chapter Three | Boom to Challenging Times | Chapter 3 of 6
The ‘90’s were incredible. The tech sector was going crazy. There was so much innovation coming out of Silicon Valley North and the spin-off business was great for businesses like Brougham. We didn’t care about what Government was doing.
The booming tech sector’s attitude was that if you worked in government, it was because you couldn’t handle the best -the tech sector. That held true until about 2001 when, to avoid the Y2K apocalypse where millions of computers were supposedly going to fail and business would grind to a halt, everyone had the latest equipment. Being ready for New Year’s 2000 resulted in everyone not buying for at least a year and all the companies that were booming in the ‘90’s had no market and crashed. When the market came back it was mainly the biggest of the big companies that survived. The little ones went out of business or were bought for their technology. Former clients suffered until the pain of change passed and everyone globally settled into the reality of the new millennium.
Family and friends
Business in Kanata dried up quickly. Head offices were moved out of Canada, and we went from having lots of marketing departments needing promotional products and buying North American made products, to buyers from the biggest US cities where China was making big inroads. Many of our manufacturers started being importers who warehoused, marketed, and decorated. I, like many, jumped off the sinking tech boat, and moved to targeting government.
I had a drop in business for about a year and then sales were flying again. Of course, government was not adapting as fast as the private sector, but it is not like the government does not change. The civil service marching orders depend on social issues not business.
In the early 2010’s the Harper government came to power and spending money in Ottawa quickly shrank. That came with new criteria for buying that was getting multiple quotes on everything.
Consulting with lawyer early '90's behind drum.JPG
Our partner companies who did manufacturing and had employees who did it all were being undermined by individuals who incorporated, lived in an apartment in Vancouver, and represented Chinese companies who were bidding on government contracts. The result was boxes directly from China being delivered with the only Canadian content being ground shipping or from the airport to downtown. In all fairness, the spending practices in government needed work but the new criteria was being cheap and it hurt everyone involved. Goal -ocused transactions ended and so did good supplier-customer relations. The government had untrained, uncontentious buyers, and vendors lined up to exploit them, however there were highly educated, goal focused, conscientious buyers and quality vendors but as usual policy was initiated to deal with the bottom level civil servants who could not be properly dealt with or even fired, so everyone suffered.
That said, I met some great procurement people in the government and crown corps. When orders were big enough, they go through a full procurement process where real work and research is done, and a clear statement of work is produced and sent to tender. That is the best way to go however it is normally reserved for very big orders such as all the computers the government buys.