It was quite a scary process for me to finalise the contract with the development house I engaged to develop my site. They are based outside Australia (where I am based), and so all negotiations and discussions were conducted via email and telephone. You don’t realise how difficult it is to develop rapport with someone unless you can see them and engage with them in a physical environment. My business partner at the time found a useful technique to deal with this constraint was to engineer many different excuses for phone calls. For a period of about three weeks, she arranged calls, and made requests for various documents and reports. What she was actually doing was testing the suppliers punctuality, accessibility, language skills, reliability, and personality. Doing this over a few weeks meant you ironed out any potential irregularities, if they were being unusually attentive this would become apparent after a few weeks.

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