Customer refusing to PAY! 😤 What would you do?

I've got a customer who's refusing to pay let me explain back in about March of this year I got a phone call from a company whose name shall remain anonymous who said that they've got an EV charging job that they wanted us to do in our area this is a company that basically gets leads for EV charging jobs from all over the country and then Farms them out to local subcontractors and to be honest when they phoned me first of all alarm Bells did start to ring because I've always had a bit of a rule in business which is never to subcontract for other people there's a story from my past where my dad got really badly stung doing exactly that and it taught me to avoid subcontracting for other companies make sure you watch to the end of the video because I'll tell you the story about my dad it's pretty tragic but it affected me so much that I have a personal rule for my business which is that as far as possible we will avoid subcontracting for other companies the problem was when this lead came in we were a bit tight for work there was a few days in the schedule which were open and we kind of needed the work and I just felt like okay let's give it a go you know let's take it we got the job booked in I did a quote for it and the funny thing was very ironic actually when I contacted the customer so they sent me the customers details I recognized the customer's address and it turned out it was a customer that I had done the guard on lighting for when I just got qualified about 14 years ago so it's kind of one of my customers so when I saw it was his name and address I was amazed and I got in touch with him and I said hey I've been asked to quote for this electric vehicle charging Point install you might remember me I did your garden lighting we had a bit of a catch up and I went out to the site to do a survey if you know us you know from our previous install videos that you've probably seen that attention to detail for us is key making sure that all of our installs are compliant they're neat and we only fit the best quality products so we quoted for high quality charging points I think it was zappy that we quoted for in this particular project as far as I was concerned that was what we would be fitting the contracting company said to us clients accepted your quote please go ahead and book it in got the job booked in everything was hunky-dory then Lee turned up on the day to do this job and something fishy happened the charging point that we had quoted for was not there instead they supplied this random rubbish quality charging point that we'd never seen before never heard of before and Lee had to basically figure out his way through installing this junk charging point for the customer who I think was none the wiser because their National contractor had basically said to him you know this is the charging point that we're going to fit or whatever and our kind of quality and standards got Lost in Translation through this other company so just to explain for electric vehicle charging Point installations here in the UK there have been Grant funds available to pay towards the cost of installations at domestic properties to help customers basically with the cost of installing a charging Point these ozev grants have to be applied for by the contractor on behalf of the customer and then the contractor claims the money directly from the government and gives a discount to the customer this particular install was a grant install so the job got done we did a good job everything was fine customer was happy although we were not really that happy with the actual quality see the charging point it is what it is it worked it was safe fine whatever so we send in our invoice to this particular contractor and guess what happened weeks go by no money comes through so we have a system where we Chase up payments on a regular basis so we send an email reminder we send another email reminder we send a third email reminder nothing so then we start to chase by phone so we phoned the company they send us all around the houses eventually we get to the person that we need to speak to and this is what they say we're not going to pay you until we've received our grant money this contractor has apparently still not been paid by ozev their grant money and therefore they are not paying us the full amount of the job and we're not talking a small amount of money here it's hundreds of pounds right so we're sitting here hundreds of pounds down the customer who we worked for this main contractor is refusing to pay us until they get their money from osef now I'd love to know in the comments from you guys what would you do in this situation because as far as I see it there are a few options I can get legal on there but basically and pursue payment through the small claims court for example because at the end of the day we have payment terms and conditions that contractors agree to when they choose to go ahead with our services they have breached those terms and conditions we are within our right to actually charge them interest on the money that they owe us until they pay us so we could go down that route of pursuing it legally second option is we could just let it slide and say you know what it's not worth the hassle and stress of chasing it up forget it we'll just write it off but for me that stinks to do that because you shouldn't let people get away with this kind of stuff at the end of the day if people are in the habit of not paying others for services that they have rendered and rendered properly they need to be taken to justice for that because that is not right in my opinion if I owe somebody money for service that they have provided for me if I'm happy with the service that they've done I will pay them straight away and if there's ever a delay it's usually just because the invoices got lost in the junk mail file or something like that I think that everyone should be the same okay some companies who give them a 30-day terms or something if they're you know a big company and that's what they ask for but more than that it's just not right and in this day and age where things are getting tight financially around the world although it may seem like a fairly small amount of money a few hundred pounds that could be make or break for certain companies now if we zoom out and look at the bigger picture here this is a little bit of a problem that the government is causing as well because ozev with all these grants is supposed to help people supposed to help customers it's supposed to help contractors but we're then not paying the grant money quick enough they're causing serious cash flow issues for a lot of contractors us included because we had ten thousand pounds owed to us by ozev which was owed for about three or four months before they paid us that grant money so we've been in a similar boat to what this contractor is in now maybe this contractor cannot physically pay us maybe money is not physically there in the bank I struggle to believe that because they're doing hundreds if not thousands of installs they should have the cash flow to be able to pay the subcontractors who are working for them and maybe they're on really tight margins because they're offering these chargepoint installs for next to nothing and maybe because of that they've got themselves into a little bit of trouble I don't know and only time will tell whether this company is still here in a year or More's time but one thing's for sure it winds me up when people owe you money and their used to pay without a genuine reason what about you guys what is your story I'm sure there are some horror stories out there from you guys of customers who've refused to pay I'd love to know your stories in the comments below so I said at the beginning of the video that I'd share with you the story that happened to my dad that changed my opinion of working for contractors so here it is when I was an apprentice me and my dad and his company because he had a few people working for him at this time we wired up this swimming pool big swimming pool Leisure Center kind of building and we were subcontracting or my dad's company was subcontracting for a building contractor to do the work a lot of money I think it was about 30 000 pounds which probably about 20 years ago actually that was a lot of money it still is a lot of money now so we did this install it was absolutely beautiful everything was great worked perfectly the building was nearly completed and guess what happened the main contractor went bust they went under although the swimming pool had paid them they didn't pay us because the money was gone and so my dad had to take a hit of 30 000 pounds approximately he'd paid for all the materials all the labor for months putting all of his sweat Blood and Tears into this install to make it absolutely fantastic and he didn't get a penny back from it and I remember him saying to me that he felt like just going in there and ripping the sockets off the walls you know ripping the lights out the ceilings because all of that stuff was in there he'd paid for it himself the client was using it but he didn't get the money back for for it so it was like he'd done that whole install for free and it nearly drove my dad into bankruptcy himself he only just scraped through it and he did and his company continued on and I was able to become a qualified electrician with him and learn a powerful lesson which was don't put all your eggs in one basket and avoid working for other contractors if possible especially on big scale projects like that now you might say I'm being paranoid and a lot of you out there you might work regularly for Builders and it might all be fine I don't know I just tried to avoid it personally because of that incident that happened in my life that has kind of scarred me and put me off from working for main contractors that's the story and it is a sad one because this kind of thing shouldn't happen but unfortunately it does this is real life and in business there are ups and downs and there are big challenges what am I going to do about this customer who's refusing to pay well I am going to pursue it I'm going to do everything that I can to make sure we get that money out of principle more than anything so stay tuned for an update and make sure that you do like and subscribe if you haven't subscribed already to the channel because we do post videos all about the life of an electrician we show our work usually it's not just me ranting to the camera we do actually show the work that we do all the different forms of electrical work and the kind of daily life of running an electrical business so I hope you have benefited from this video in some way if you have or if you know somebody who's going through a similar situation make sure you share the video out to somebody else who might benefit from it and I'll leave a playlist after this of other videos that are similar about business where I share my experiences and some of the challenges that I've faced and some of the solutions that I've found because I think that as business people we owe it to each other to share our Joys share our losses and learn from each other's mistakes as well so thanks for watching guys and I'll see you on the next one

Channel: Artisan Electrics

Views: 364,722

Keywords: artisan electrics, electrician life, what would you do, wwyd videos, how to start a business, debt, late payment, bad customer service, bad customers, government grants, ozev grant ending, ozev grant schemes, ozev grant claim form, electrician, sparky, ev charger, money, payment, invoice, missing invoice

Id: 9TNLtvC7trU

Length: 11min 47sec (707 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 02 2022