MIPRO: What We Are, What We Are Not (And Why We Might Not be For Everyone)
There’s a saying: in business, you have two choices: win by being more regular, more standard and lower cost. Or win by being better, more remarkable, higher quality and more human.
There’s another saying, an adjunct, more a piece of branding reality: you want people to either love or hate your brand. Those in the middle, an area of relative indifference, will not be loyal to your product or service. They will blow with the wind, following discounts and cheaper rates, in no way connected to what your company represents.
At MIPRO, we bill ourselves as passionate about what we do. Because we are: we’ve been in the game since PeopleSoft’s beginning, and we’re an early adopter of Oracle’s HCM Cloud. Experience underpins everything we do.
We are not typically the lowest cost consultancy you’ll find. We are project realists: we don’t believe in proffering a low project quote, only to come to mid-project (once you’re enmeshed with us) and tell you there are scope increases we didn’t anticipate, or that more resources or necessary, or the project timeline is in jeopardy. We are experts in seeing the project in a very pragmatic light, and we price our projects accordingly. Yes, the up-front number can be bigger, but there are no surprises mid-stream, when milestones are looming. The last thing you need at that stage is a scope/budget increase discussion with your consulting firm. (We know how uncomfortable those can be, because we’ve come in and ‘cleaned up’ a project mess more than once.)
We are not for every client. We pride ourselves on telling the client what they need to hear, not what they want to hear. We’ve been praised for this difficult decision many times, but the truth is not everyone wants to operate that way. A great number of times, we’ve been thanked for our candor. But believe us, having that initial discussion isn’t always fun or easy. And that’s okay. We’re paid to do right by our clients, and sometimes, that means having a direct, sometimes difficult talk.
We have made our name in this market by being more human, more realistic and more honest than our competition. In a landscape dominated by cheap labor and questionable results, we aim to rise above that and become something more than your standard consulting firm. As much as we hate the overused and cliché term, we aim to become a partner with you and your team. It’s why we’ve won so many recurring projects with our clients: not because we’re embedded anymore, but because we’re a brand so many in the PeopleSoft community trust.
Brand values don’t mean a lot in a world filled with social media quips and headlines purposely worded to evoke a reaction. But we work every day to ensure our brand principles are understood and felt by every client – and that’s far more important than any mission statement ever could be.
