Well, in my younger foolish days when I worked in succession for 3 $multi-billion international firms, everyone of them made us qualify every customer, It often took longer to go through the customer qualification process than to actually strike the deal, which was either a formal tender with presentation or a couple of hour drunken lunch with the CEO and his super-hot pet secretary and relevant financial / tech guys. Then it was 1 to 2 days of paper work and internal negotiation to get the customer accepted. It was all about reputation because the company brand was everything. These firms even have a specific colour number for the logo colour and specification of how far from the left hand edge of the page the logo can go. Anally retentive doesn't begin to describe it. So yeah, customer qualification is a really big issue, and a walking red flag like 4DS would have had legal tearing their hair out.
It could cost us $30 to 50k just to start up a new customer in terms of internal costs, so we just couldn't even think about anything small or fast or innovative and you leaned heavily toward governments and mega-caps because there was practically no qualification of those. It's one of the reasons I refused partnership and left to start my own firm with a bunch of other equally frustrated almost partners.
4DS Price at posting:
6.1¢ Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
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