I have had this statement thrown at me several times during my tenure as Managing Director of CygNET. It still never ceases to amaze me of how shameless people can be when they don’t want to pay for something and the flimsy excuses that they come up with to justify the same.
Not that we have had a flawless run of projects in the history of CygNET, its just that we have been ALWAYS paid finally for genuinely problematic projects while this line "This work is useless and I will not pay for it. !" always seems to come for perfectly implemented projects.
On postmortem of these "useless" projects, it always turns out that the client just does not want to pay and will pick on anything to justify the non payment. No matter what you put in front of the client in terms of justifications such as deadlines were being met, requirements & quality standards were being met, the client seems to just wake one day and decides not to pay. Most often they seem to even get away with it.
How can one do that ? Yes business is fluid and situations might be ever changing but you have to pay for the work done so far and respect its utility even if it does not serve your purpose any more. More importantly you do not run down its creators as a lot of time and honest
effort has been put into it.
We were hit by this recently. We were sent a spec sheet of a project by a supposed reputed company based in the UK and we were asked to estimate for it. On first glance of it, I knew it was a rather large project and hence requested dedicated time to study and estimate it. We estimated the study time, got it approved by the client and began the work.
The progress was regularly reported and prototypes / documentation of the same were also regularly delivered. There was regular communication and the client knew exactly what was happening. Not once thru out 90% of the estimated time was anything wrong even indicated.
Suddenly towards the end of this study period even before the deadline date, the project was cancelled and the line "This work is useless and I will not pay for it. !" cropped its ugly head up.
Here we go again.
The client had seen the work so far and even approved of it but hey there was no convincing him, he just was not going to pay. He even went to the extent of insulting our capabilities and integrity in an effort to justify why he should not pay.
Why did this happen ?
When the project was initiated, they were under the impression that it was a small, quick and inexpensive project. On near completion of the study, they realized that it was a much larger project than anticipated and hence decided to shelve it due to anticipated costs. In the process of shelving they unilaterally decided to further save costs by not paying us for the study as well. As far as they were concerned the study was now useless as the project has been discontinued.
So what do they do..."This work is useless and I will not pay for it. !"
Again I repeat, how can one do this ? When you claim to be a business professional, you should be a professional in all scenarios including the ones that are difficult for you. You will never be able to grow your business with this habit and what is more, you should have the courage to stand up and give the real reason. Not only are you not paying for hard & honest work done for you, you further decide to insult the people that have done the work so as to back up your false claims. This is unacceptable.
Your actions not only cause undue financial strains on people that don’t deserve it but your actions have demoralized them too.... it is just not done.
