How not to send a Business Proposal

I’ve been doing online business for years now, getting business proposals and job offers from people/companies halfway across the world since 2000. It’s nothing new to me now so whenever I get emails from people who say they’re coming over from the US to talk to me about a certain arrangement, I approach the situation with a certain level of sincereness but with minimal expectations.

Anyway, I got this email the other day and the person did not introduce himself completely (no last name) and even avoided mentioning his company. He tells me that he knows we are a web hosting company here in the Philippines and he would like to directly hire a bunch of sales and support people which we will manage for him. He followed up with a couple more questions about me and my company’s background.

I would have answered his email thoroughly but there were red flags all over the email which made me think this could be shady backgrounds:

• No complete information about the sender, just the first name.
• No clear information about the company (no company name, no website url)
• Uses free email service instead of official company email.
• Email was adress back to the sender and not actual recipients (used blind carbon copy, BCC)

Clearly, the person who sent this did not do any background checks except for the email address posted on our website.

I did a background check on him using his email address and only found one old website containing a similar email composition address to an Indian company where he’s looking for ASP developers and another one on a freelance/job site where he posted an ad but did not follow-up on requests for more info.

In doing business online, the very first thing one should take into account is transaparency in order to build trust between two parties. Not being upfront about such basic details as company information only solicits suspicion and distrust.