Page 106 - Paulisms: Gold Nuggets for Small Business

If you’ve got money held back, you’ve got control over that supplier or installer to come back and do something.
You have the power if you are controlling the purse-strings. That is, being the one controlling when the bill gets paid, and it becomes a negotiating tool. As soon as you pay them and something has gone wrong, it becomes very difficult to get them to come back to resolve it and you have no bargaining power. Possession is 9/10ths of the law.
Here’s a recent example: an electrician came and did a job at our home. He needed to install a thermostat in a particular place. We talked it through in great detail where we wanted it. After the job was completed, we found that it had been put in the wrong place. They’d taken the easy route and not put it where we wanted it, as it was a little bit trickier. The point here is that they should have consulted us, as owners, before moving it. We had already decided and agreed on putting it in a particular position. That’s called COA – Curse of Assumption – on their part. We were extremely unhappy.