Disappointed with professionals

[Merandder]

The past month or so I've needed to contact professionals regarding a project to see if they're interested in assisting. Estimated cost of their services will not be cheap.

Also, a company that sells products I'm in the market for (cost upward of £30k).

I've contacted at least 8 companies:
Two didn't reply to my initial enquiry (fair enough)
One responded within a day and scheduled a telephone call with me, and did call on that day (perfect)
The other five responded and said they were very interested and also booked a telephone call, only not to phone.

The company with the products keeps saying he'll phone but never does.

A couple of the non-phoners emailed a few days after not phoning to apologise and ask to re schedule the phonecall.

How much slack do you give professionals? If someone didn't phone you when they said they would and didn't get back to you, would you still entertain their services?

My gut feeling is to bin them off but I'm not sure if that's unreasonable.

Depends what you mean by professionals. In some areas, poor practice is so normal that you just have to go along with it if you want to give yourself choice. Frustrating but it is what it is.

Architects, expert planning consultants, survey providers, that sort of thing.

This is a difficult one because my instant reaction is to agree and bin off those who didn’t call and immediately showed poor service. However that happened potentially because they were busy. In professions like those I’d be skeptical if someone was able to talk immediately and didn’t have a long waiting list, as I suppose you’d expect the better ones to be busy. We had the same issue when deciding on builders for some work. I was cautious when one came
round quickly and had availability fairly soon.

I suspect if your project was more compelling they would have called, does it sound overly difficult or is the budget too small for them?

Or have you just been unlucky picking 8 very busy / poor quality organisations?

Or could they tell that you had likely asked so many businesses to respond that it probably wasn't worth their time given it was time wasting for 7 of them

Exactly it's a difficult one! With the scheduled phone calls they booked me in for 7-10 days later so they were busy (good sign) but I felt it poor service to then not phone - I appreciate them being busy but not to apologise/follow up quickly is worse.

I'd get hung, draw and quartered if I did that in my professional life!

But there is only a limited pool of who can help so I feel frustrated. I certainly don't want to just go with the only guy that responded, I need to speak with a few as they all will have independent approaches.

Resilience needed!!

Unfortunately just because they charge money for a service doesn't mean they're any good at admin... or indeed the thing they charge money for!

It's a straight forward project, 'refreshingly uncomplicated' the one professional said.

The project is sizable. Not small-scale but not mammoth, so I have thought worth their time but I could be very wrong!

Yes, they could have thought I've contacted a few and that's why, that's a possibility.