Fighting back against big company requirements

[triumph406]

Sounds like a numbers game. If the 1200 is a 3rd of your work raise your cost by 33 percent.

Where do you get the 33% from?.

You raise your quotes 33% customers will go elsewhere. Well they do in my world.

 

[michiganbuck]

Big government will never stop growing bigger, their kids need cushy jobs.

Next they will say you need a certain color paint in the jon.

 

[ttrager]

I'm just a small welding shop and have been in business since 1988, a company that I do a few thousand dollars of work for a year wants me to pay $ 1,200.00 to sign up with a safety company called ISN, unfortunately, I'm just a 2 man shop and don't have company manuals on dealing with blood pathogens, employee discipline and 10 - 12 other areas. So I sent them a email letting them know I'm going to decline any work that requires me making a company manual and paying an annual fee every year to belong to this ISN.
I have always had an abundance of work and don't feel like submitting to their requests.
Is any one else fighting back ? or am I crazy ?

You aren't "fighting" back as far as I can tell. You've made an informed decision that tells you, for a variety of reasons, why you can't continue to do business with them as a small shop.

Your reasoning seemed sound.

 

[joecrs]

I'm just a small welding shop and have been in business since 1988, a company that I do a few thousand dollars of work for a year wants me to pay $ 1,200.00 to sign up with a safety company called ISN, unfortunately, I'm just a 2 man shop and don't have company manuals on dealing with blood pathogens, employee discipline and 10 - 12 other areas. So I sent them a email letting them know I'm going to decline any work that requires me making a company manual and paying an annual fee every year to belong to this ISN.
I have always had an abundance of work and don't feel like submitting to their requests.
Is any one else fighting back ? or am I crazy ?

I have to fill out stuff like that once a year for some customers, I do it only because I get enough work from them to be worth my time, as far as the manuals I got copies from other customers made a few edits and done so not a big deal. I did have a customer that wanted me to carry special insurance for them on the parts we made, a 1 million dollar policy in fact. The parts were not safety critical they were for injection molding machines, at one point we did a lot of work for them but by then it was only a few thousand bucks every year since they moved most of their stuff down south. Needless to say I did not take that policy out and never made a part for them again. In 38 years I never had a customer ask me to do that I thought it was insane, the big companies can be very hard to work with lots of paperwork so you have to decide if it worth your time and in your case the money it sounds to me like it is not. If they value you as a vendor there are ways around it, I do a lot of military work but mostly tooling for them so they exempted me from a lot of the requirements as a tooling supplier no mil-spec no ISO so you may be able to talk them into something like that. It is worth looking into, I sure would not pay that $1200 bucks under those circumstances

 

[Farmer Phil]

.The normal process would be to wrap it in the shop overhead but, if only a few customers are demanding it, let them pay for it and know where the cost is coming from. If it's broken up that way, they might be able to creatively code it in their accounting system for tax purposes too.

We do this for maintaining MSHA certification. Only charge our mining customers for the financial burden of that bullshit annual "training" taught by some woman who has never held a shovel, but somehow had been deemed qualified enough to teach us how to stay safe in the event of a cave in.

Man these people piss me off more than Adam Booth does when he takes three hours to do any simple task and behaves as though he has harnessed the power of Greek gods to do so.

 

[john.k]

the sandblasters had all that stuff to work for the oil companies ,and if there was a dangerous way to do something,they were doing it............their QA was a joke too ,everything fiddled,or straight out cheated on............I remember one time they blasted the interiors of hundreds of 4" pipes ..........Col says ,just do the end s,they wont look inside ..........they did , a pipe inspection camera.