Kickbacks

Has anyone seen evidence of kickbacks in the ID world.
I have a notion that it might be a common practice with ID firms, to secure a continous income.

Yes some firms do work on royalties, however never only on royaltie basis as the client has no real insentives to take any product to market…meaning you worked for not.

Yes I had to give kickbacks under the table to secure long term business. It was unethical but all the other vendors working with this corporate client did it so I had no choice.

Do you find that this was a common practice with most corporatations, or just a few.

I’m straight out of school and I’m trying to get some freelance work, but I’ve heard that a lot of this stuff happens especially in larger companies that have huge product development budgets.

If kickbacks are the norm then how can someone legitimately get there foot in the door?

You pretty much have to know someone inside teh company as they won’t trust just anyone with doing kickbacks. They rather bring in someone they already know to keep it discreet.

So connections is the key?

In your experience does this happen a lot?

I feel like I’m opening my eyes to a whole new underground world of business dealings. How does someone, trying to start out, compete with something like this, is it through connections only?

It’s kind of discouraging, because it just tells me that it doesn’t matter how good of a designer someone might be, or how competetive their price range is, all that matters is having an inside corporate connection to get you work.

How would a design firm show that “loss of money” when filing taxes?

THat loss of money is usually shown as an expense to the person you gave the kickback to. In otherwords it appears you hired that person outside of his day job to do freelance work for you

Live and learn…it is who yo uknow first then what you know. You still ahve to be a good designer but one that also knows someone. I get almost all of my jobs thru referrals and connections so network a lot and keep a good rep. A rep is almost everything in this field.