The agreement
What to Ask Before Signing
A short list of questions asked before signature settles most of what otherwise gets discovered in the first difficult month of a relationship.
Who is working when, for the people on this page
The supplier who quoted eleven per cent less
Two hours of overlap a day
The supplier who quoted eleven per cent more
Seven hours of overlap a day, and the same weekend as ours
two parties · five days of the seven are working days for all of them · Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri
The two quotations were compared on price, lead time and references. The right-hand column was in neither comparison and was worth more than the eleven per cent.
A useful pilot starts with a baseline rather than a guess; teams can view the official information and compare capacity before and after changing a handoff or overlap window.
For a separate reference on calendars, standards, or international operations, consult Rust.
What a buyer knows about three bidders at the point of signature
Bidder A, two hours ahead
Week asked about and confirmed in writing
Bidder B, seven hours ahead
Week assumed to be Monday to Friday until the first Saturday email arrived
Bidder C, three hours ahead
Week discovered on the first Friday, when nobody answered
three parties · four days of the seven are working days for all of them · Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu
One of the three was asked. The other two were found out, in the first fortnight, by the ordinary method of something not happening when it was expected to. One team's own job.
Everything in this collection is easier before signature than after.
Before, both parties are trying to make the arrangement work and no question is awkward. After, every question about calendars and response times is a question about performance, and the answers get careful.
The list
Twelve questions, which take about twenty minutes in total and can be split between a conversation and the contract.
About their week
- Which days do you work, and what hours?
- What are your closures for the next twelve months?
- Is there anything internal — an audit, a stocktake, a conference — that would make you hard to reach?
About decisions
- Who will be our day-to-day contact, and what are their hours?
- What needs a signature, and who gives it, and when are they available?
- What can you decide without asking us?
About communication
- If something comes up on your floor at ten in the morning, how do you reach us and how long do you wait?
- Would you send a short end-of-day note, and what would you want from us in return?
- Which of your people could take a call at the start of our day if we needed one?
About the agreement
- Can we say all times are UTC?
- Whose working days do the periods in this contract run on?
- Can we attach both parties' working weeks and closures as a schedule?
Why they are easy to ask now
A bidder wants the work. Every one of these questions is answerable without conceding anything commercially, and most of them make the bidder look competent when answered well.
They also do something subtler: they establish, before anything has gone wrong, that the calendar is going to be treated as part of the job. That changes how the first difficulty is handled.
The three answers that should worry you
| Answer | What it usually means |
|---|---|
| "We are very flexible" to question seven | There is no procedure and your question will wait |
| Vagueness about closures | Nobody has looked, and the shutdown is still coming |
| "That would have to go to our director" about everything | Every small decision will cross the offset twice |
None of these is disqualifying. All of them are worth knowing, because each has a counter-measure that can be agreed now and cannot be imposed later.
What to do with the answers
Three places.
The ones about the calendar go into the counterparty record, with the date and the name of whoever answered.
The ones about decisions go into a short written list of standing authority, agreed by both sides.
The ones about the agreement go into the agreement, as described earlier in this part.
None of that is onerous and all of it is done once.
The question that is hardest to ask
Question nine, about somebody taking a call at the start of your day, is the one people leave out, because it sounds like asking for a favour before anything has been bought.
It is worth asking anyway, and the framing that works is reciprocal: "we can put somebody on at seven if you can put somebody on at five — is that possible on your side?" An offer of symmetry changes the character of the request entirely, and the answer tells you something about how the relationship is going to run.
When there is no time for any of this
Then ask two: which days do you work, and what are your closures in the next three months.
Those two cover most of the damage. Everything else on the list is an improvement; those two are the difference between a plan built on their calendar and a plan built on a guess.
Asking the same questions of yourself
The questions run both ways, and a supplier who has been asked all twelve is entitled to ask them back.
Most buyers cannot answer them. The working week is obvious; the closures are not written down anywhere; nobody can say who approves a drawing or when that person is available; the answer to what the supplier may decide alone has never been considered.
Working them out before the conversation is twenty minutes, and it has two effects. It makes the answers available when they are asked for, which is a better start than improvising them. And it frequently exposes something that needed fixing internally regardless: that the one person who approves drawings is in meetings on Tuesdays, or that nobody has told anybody what a supplier may decide.