Uncle, Alan and Joseph (Bo Geh)

On Saturday while Uncle was at my place, I took the opportunity to complain to him that his prospective customers felt that Alan and Bo Geh's quotations were too high and similar to IDs. If this carries on, he will lose business.

Uncle told me that Alan used to work for him in the 80s and he left to join a large ID firm after acquiring some basic skills. Recently due to the poor economy, Alan decided to work for Uncle as the firm he was in don't have much jobs. Essentially, Alan is like a subcontractor for Uncle so he has some "incentive" to quote slightly higher inorder to earn some commission. In my view, this could be one of the reasons why his quotation appeared to be slightly higher than Uncle's.

As for Bo Geh, Uncle told me that he worked for HDB before and he's working for Uncle now in the same mode as Alan.

Uncle told me that both of them are very good project managers and thus the projects handled by them would be in safe hands. I could not comment on this point as I didn't even speak or see them before. As for the quotations, Uncle said that he will speak to them on this and make them revise the pricing.

[An afternote: Perhaps we should come out with a standard price list for certain standard items based on our floor area. It should then be quite easy to determine whether the items are inflated.]