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NEON- Advice needed -- What to do about bad customers?
I have another problem, would like any advice you all can give me.
As a contractor, in the past 6 years, I can in all honestly say I have never
delivered a job that cheated the customer, that is what I strive for. I
deliver an exceptionally good product.
However, I have had my share of bad customers, chislers (chisler=Am slang, a
person that takes pride in cheating others out of money owed using dishonest
excuses and tortured reasoning.) that attempt to find some excuse not to pay
me. I'm a little guy, so one or two unpaid jobs can wipe me out for a long
while. So I fight back and try to collect my money. Needless to say, I always
get a deposit but getting that final payment sometimes seems to reopen
negotiations in those with whom their ego is tied up with their self-image as
a shrewd businessman, so-called.
In some of these situations, the chisler becomes disgruntled at having to pay
up, or disgruntled that I have the nerve to try to make them pay, using legal
methods. So they retaliate by badmouthing (slang, trying to hurt my
reputation with other customers) my work. One minute they are bragging about
how their neon is to their friends, and the next minute they are saying bad
things about me to my customers.
My question is, is it good policy to go after these bastards, or should I
give up and leave them alone in order to avoid having them attack my
reputation and eventually hurt my business with good customers that can't
tell these guys are just bad news? The assumption here is, where there's
smoke, there's fire. Enough of these guys and you can be out of business, no
matter how fine your work, it seems to me, since they seem to like to
retaliate if you try to fight them. I would ordinarily say, no way, but
lately they have started to really hurt me, even though they are a very, very
small but vocal minority of mean bastards, out of my normally happy
customers. And I have had advice from some other contractors that they never
sue a customer, no matter what, in order to save their reputations.They just
shrug and go on to the next customer.
I had one vendor say two weeks ago, he's a friend of one of them and now he
didn't want to do business with me, since he heard I "run around screwing
customers", something I have made great sacrifices for a long time to avoid
doing even when the pay was very small. But he heard it, so he believes it. I
made his friend cough up the $8K he owed me, and he wasn't happy about it. So
he badmouths me now.
What do you people think about this?
Jeff Golin