Dead Beat Clients Can Kill A Business!

It's amazing how many "dead beat clients" I have had through the years! Clients who I would have never thought would have "screwed" me out of money after years of hard work and dedication on my part, did. And the part that gets me most is that I'm still angry almost a year later.

This past week, I came into contact with three of my "dead beat" clients. The first, a women's association, asked me to speak at a seminar. I was actually surprised they asked me because we didn't end on the best of notes. I decided to speak and "hold my head up high," even though I felt a little uncomfortable.

Last year, the group hired my firm to handle the logistics of all their meetings. After exceeding the allocated hours each month and evaluating the job, I found that each month we lost thousands of dollars on the job. Therefore, after the contract ended, I explained to the volunteers that we would no longer go forward. They understood, I thought. I finished off the month of work and at the end of the month, I got a call from a past president asking me to renegotiate the contract. "What do you want to be paid," she said.

My staff and I prepared a new proposal and presented to the client. They asked me to go one month at the same salary they had paid us during the year while they thought about it. We continued with them. At the end of the month, we sent them a bill and they refused to pay. They ended up giving us a quarter of what we were supposed to get paid!

Another former client, was a non-profit organization that hired us to organize and coordinate their black tie gala. The Director negotiated my contract down. And the clue to me was that it was done during my vacation! We went forward with the job thinking that we would meet lots of people and get other work from it.

The Director was so difficult to work with. She refused to work with any of my staff. She only wanted to work with either myself or my Vice President. So for nearly six months, my VP was out of commission, working solely on her job. She worked weekends, evenings, early mornings, all to appease the demanding client. As the event got closer, the rest of my staff got pulled in and they worked evenings and weekends to make sure the event was a great success. Through this process, things got very hectic with my staff. I started to loose people over this particular job and my VP was also ready to quit.

When I asked the Director to give us more for things not included in the contract, she said fine. She pushed off the bill until after the event. When I spoke with her directly she told me she would pay the couple of thousand she owed us. Instead, she decided not to pay!

We helped raise this organization more than $500,000 and they refused to pay us $2000! This job ended up costing me thousands of dollars due to the fact that my VP was totally out of commission from other jobs. It also cost me money in turnover and so many of my staff were so stressed from dealing with this person that it took me months to re fix what she had broke.

I thought we were finished. Until, my VP bumped into her at the parking lot of a local mall. And then, we received a nasty email asking us to take all references to them off our web site and networking sites. So, here we diligently work on a job that we charged very little for to try to get more work from others in her network to find out that we couldn't even talk about the success that we helped them achieve. I think something is wrong with this picture!

Finally, another association that we represented this past year, decided that they could not pay us the $30K that they owed us. We had worked on this job for 13 years. We always went above and beyond the call of duty. I totally expected them to pay us for the work we did. Then, budget time, they realized they had no money. I told them they could pay it out over time. They finally agreed to a payment plan of $500 every quarter. By the time they pay me back, if they ever pay me back, it will be almost 15 year in the future!

It's amazing how all three of these events occurred in the same year! I hope 2008 is better!!!!