The company I work for recently won an award for Business of The Year. It may be because we had a great troop drive where we shipped about a ton of ‘items from home’ to our troops overseas this spring. More likely, it’s because we give our clients great customer service. We offer inexpensive solutions that help them promote their businesses through e-mail newsletter marketing, websites, blogs and search engine optimization… Also we are all teachers at heart, and this helps our clients become more productive.
That is why it was a shock to get a call from our “Member Coordinator” from the Better Business Bureau, requesting our presence at an arbitration regarding a website we built. Our client refused to pay for a site, and we disabled it on our server. He had snagged a copy of the ‘site files’ and had another company put those up online, giving him a website. They didn’t get it exactly right, but it was obvious he had stolen the files he refused to pay for. (Good enough to steal, but not good enough to pay for??).
My boss appeared before the arbitrator with a signed consulting services agreement, a signed hosting agreement, and some e-mail documentation. The client apologized, paid us what he owed us and is still a client today.
The point is, if I we did not have a process in place to deliver and collect these documents, we would have been in rough shape during the arbitration. Overall it was a good learning experience. I would have preferred to work this out prior to arbitration, however my client he wasn’t interested in anything but being angry…
The takeaway is this: Have a good process to protect yourself, even if you trust every one of your customers. Sometimes things happen that are beyond our control, and without contracts in place, it’s simply your word against theirs. I tend to be trusting, and I would prefer to do business on a handshake. However, I have learned the hard way that the one with the best documentation wins.
Jason
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