Due diligence

If 2009 was The Year of Playing Nicely with Others then 2010 is shaping up as The Year of Due Diligence.

I am looking down the barrel at a couple of hugely expensive undertakings that will test to the limit my usually comfortable financial buffer. As this buffer shrinks my psychic need for due diligence expands.

Whereas I am normally happy with my travel agent's best price on, say, a flight to the US, now I need to be 100% sure that there isn't a better deal out there somewhere. In practice this means additional hours online and on the phone. Those hours have to come from somewhere and so I'm calling a twelve-month halt to all but the least time-consuming of my creative pursuits.

Of course I'm aware that most of these efforts will be in vain and that the travel agent will have had the best deal all along.

I'm reminded of a marketing research project I undertook for a major Australian supermarket chain about twenty years ago. I conducted well over a hundred in-depth interviews with women who shopped at the budget chain to understand how we could improve their grocery-buying experience. The short answer was that we couldn't. Our client's stores were dusty and cramped and not that much cheaper than their more salubrious competitors but that was the point. Shopping there felt like work. It felt like work because it was work. Shopping there let these women feel that they were doing their bit for the family. If they couldn't be earning money then the least they could do was to spend it begrudgingly.

Effort = Contribution

Like I said, the need is essentially psychic. But when the bills are large and unavoidable then due diligence is all that's left.