Painting Contractors: Know When to Say “No”
Hi there, Greg here from DYB Coach, and today I want to share with you a conversation I just had with a contractor.
I am sharing this with you for two reasons:
1. Stand up for your principles
2. Don’t let people take advantage of you
We just recently completed a job with a new contractor that I’m not too familiar with.
Everything went smooth with the job, without a hitch!
The job was completed, we had some serious issues with paperwork, so we had completed some change orders and their project manager did not follow protocol, and return them to us in a timely fashion.
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So, we were not able to bill for a very large portion of the job, which created a huge problem with cash flow for us.
When they finally got to the finish line of getting payment from the owner, they got to send us our payment, and they wanted to do a joint check because the job was completed with our supplier, which is totally fine.
Sometimes, when you do a commercial job, they ask for what is called a “Lien waiver”.
A lien waiver comes from your suppliers and it waives the rights for the suppliers to put a lien on the building for non-payment.
We were totally fine with that, we accepted their offer on it, but they were already two weeks late on their payment.
When they send us the payment, they only send the joint check for our supplier, without our check alongside it, which is not a normal process.
It’s something that they created kind of at the end, they promised they were going to send us the payment.
Two weeks later, it didn’t come, so I already have kind of lost my trust in these people, but we had already signed a contract for another job with them.
After careful consideration in the meeting, internally in the company, we decided to go ahead and cancel that contract, and not proceed to work with them any longer.
We figured, at the end of the day, it was just going to cost us money and time, and it was not going to be a fun thing.
I am sharing this story with you because you have to know when to say “No”, and that’s part of being in business –it’s knowing when something is not going to work out.
Now, it was a mutual agreement between myself and the project manager on the next project, to cancel the contract, we both agreed on it –it was totally amicable.
You guys can do that too.
Keep that in mind when you are out there working on jobs.
You might get a little ahead of yourself with sales, and think that you have to keep things roped in.
But honestly, in my opinion, it’s worth it to let it go.
I hope that’s helpful to you guys in making some decisions in the future.
If you have any questions, feel free to drop in the comments section below or email me at greg@dybcoach.com
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