How not to send a Business Proposal

I’ve been doing online business for years now, getting business proposals and job offers from people/companies halfway across the world since 2000. It’s nothing new to me now so whenever I get emails from people who say they’re coming over from the US to talk to me about a certain arrangement, I approach the situation with a certain level of sincereness but with minimal expectations.

Anyway, I got this email the other day and the person did not introduce himself completely (no last name) and even avoided mentioning his company. He tells me that he knows we are a web hosting company here in the Philippines and he would like to directly hire a bunch of sales and support people which we will manage for him. He followed up with a couple more questions about me and my company’s background.

I would have answered his email thoroughly but there were red flags all over the email which made me think this could be shady backgrounds:

No complete information about the sender, just the first name.
No clear information about the company (no company name, no website url)
Uses free email service instead of official company email.
Email was adress back to the sender and not actual recipients (used blind carbon copy, BCC)

Clearly, the person who sent this did not do any background checks except for the email address posted on our website.

I did a background check on him using his email address and only found one old website containing a similar email composition address to an Indian company where he’s looking for ASP developers and another one on a freelance/job site where he posted an ad but did not follow-up on requests for more info.

In doing business online, the very first thing one should take into account is transaparency in order to build trust between two parties. Not being upfront about such basic details as company information only solicits suspicion and distrust.

Abe Olandres

Abe is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of YugaTech with over 20 years of experience in the technology industry. He is one of the pioneers of blogging in the country and considered by many as the Father of Tech Blogging in the Philippines. He is also a technology consultant, a tech columnist with several national publications, resource speaker and mentor/advisor to several start-up companies.

https://www.yugatech.com

4 Comments

Delia Herman says:

14 years ago

REMOVE this after reading. Do NOT post this
I couldnt locate your email, so Im writing this here. I wanted to privately explain to you how I generate over $1000 a day. No gimmicks. I have outlined the method, posted images, and even a video clip. This WILL work for you too. It’s right here
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Abby says:

18 years ago

Looks nice
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Dave Starr says:

18 years ago

An excellent point. Not long ago an online aquaintance (who runs a sizeable web developement and web commerce business (6 or 8 fill time employees) wanted to hire a person with copyrighting skills who also knew rudimentary audio and video production skills (this fellow wanted to start using audio and video on his ecommerce sites and in his blog).

Since he asked for applications from folks on hs blog, I expected he’d get swamped. He got somehting on the order of 30 resposnes, only 4, count them 4, bothered to even use his name.

Out of those 4 only 0one mentioned how she could help with his goal of integrating audio and video … one out of 30 actually ‘answered’ the add … the others just said, please sir, pay me money, I need it.

No need to ask who got hired, diba?

Not long ago another friend was reviewing email responses from a job he’d posted on monster.com. He showed me several in the deleted folder with email response addresses like “mrbigd*****@****.***” and “younggirllooking f****@****.*** … I mean if one is too cheap to have a’real’ address, since Yahoo is free, how long would it take to set up an address that was non-offensive and made it appear the person was actually serious abut wanting a job.

Abe you have more patience than I … I wouldn’t have even answered that guy’s request for info on your company … sounds to me just like someone wanting to copycat your business, “fishing” for information on your emplyees, rates, physical plant, etc. Hope it turns out right in the end.
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J. Angelo Racoma says:

18 years ago

Yeah, using free email looks bad enough. However, some of my contacts use Gmail and I think Gmail’s cool notwithstanding being a free service. :)

If it’s something like Hotmail, then that’s not good.
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