I was in Starbucks yesterday with a guy I know from the sourcing industry. He is a consultant who often works on supplier comparison, helping companies to looks at the strengths and weaknesses of different suppliers, and hopefully helping them to pick the right one for their project.

He said something interesting to me that chimed with some news I read in the Indian press this week about TCS starting a new unit focused on small to medium sized enterprises – with an expectation of earning $100m a year for at least the next five years from this new unit.

My coffee companion recently had a client with a fairly small project. Not millions at all, but probably about £50,000 a year of work. That’s about $100,000 per year to a supplier, so it is comparatively small, but the client was interesting and so the potential was clearly there for the relationship to grow bigger. It was a helpdesk project that could expand into support for several languages. He had called one of the top 10 Indian suppliers to ask if they would be interested in the project. His call was not returned. He tried calling again. He got nothing but voicemail. After three days of getting voicemail he gave up on them, thinking that if that’s the way they organise their own customer service then how are they going to organise it better for the client?

It’s not even as if they were just avoiding him because the project was too small to deal with. He was calling the switchboard of their London office and getting this reaction. Even if the project was too small to be of interest, the very least someone could have done is given him a call to let him know.

No, this was not TCS, but it was certainly one of the well-known Indian suppliers and it does demonstrate once again the old adage that a plumber never has time to fix the leaking tap in his own bathroom.