Ethics in Business Part 4
Lately I have been on a bit of a rant on this blog. Part of it is I had a client take big time advantage of me and then refuse to pay.
I want to dive into what went wrong ethically.
The client asked for work to be done. He then refused to meet for a period of 5 weeks. He kept cancelling meetings. In the middle I had to cancel one due to a funeral.
I finally put my foot down and said we need to meet. It was time and this was enough.
We met discussed business strategies and that his bill was coming. Even before he received bill, he was complaining that he had money issues.
He had time to ask any questions and he chose not to. Sigh – how do you help people who will not communicate properly.
His original reponse was you will get paid when you get paid and if you want to you can take my website down. I need to clarify his contract said I could regardless if he said I could or not.
What a shock when I took the website down and reminded him to get a backup their was a $2000 restart fee.
How should this have been handled:
- The client should have communicated his money concwern in advance.
- The client should not have asked for work to be done if he could not afford it.
- The client should have voiced concerns up front.
In the middle of this entire process, the client had the nerve to lecture me about about business ethics. This is ironic when he was the one who treated me the wrong way.
The way I run my business is I always treat people the way I want to be treated.
Please try this and the world will be a better place.
