Page 107 - Paulisms: Gold Nuggets for Small Business

They sent an invoice. We were then in dispute, as they were saying we had to pay the full amount. I said no, as they hadn’t done the job as we discussed. This is not being unreasonable. There had also been a series of incidents that happened earlier and they needed to learn from their mistakes.
I then told them, ‘What you’ll need to do is remove the thermostat, relocate it to where we agreed, and patch and paint the wall.’ They replied that we need to pay the bill.
We went to the next stage. They thought they can just patch the wall and then paint over that small patch. Their inexperience showed through because it would never look like a pristine wall again – you’d always be able to see it. ‘Possession is 9/10ths of the law’ and we eventually had the thermostat relocated and the wall patched and painted. This cost was deducted from the bill and they were paid. Hopefully they learnt from this expensive exercise.
Once a company goes into liquidation, your money is as good as gone. On several occasions, to recoup some of our costs we went in and recovered as much as we could before the site was locked up. Then there was the time we ripped out a product on another job and it was reported in the local newspaper. We had recovered some of our loss. No request was ever made for us to reinstate the products. Possession is 9/10ths of the law.