Last week I heard a tale so shocking, it nauseated me. It was way worse than the creepy film trailers I sat through with my brother prior to the movie “Underworld: Evolution” (his choice, not mine). That’s because this tale comes from real life.
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| HEATHER CLANCY Can be reached via e-mail at hclancy@cmp.com. |
Take the case of Lesley Taufer, whose company Boulder Corp. was featured prominently in these pages until late last summer, when everything went silent. I didn’t worry about her until the holidays, when I realized all my e-mails kept bouncing. It was only last week that I managed to find her with the help of a former colleague. I was relieved to hear she’s working for All Covered, the small-business IT service provider. I was less thrilled to hear she had lost virtually everything. Simply put: Boulder Corp. is no more.
I need way more space to share every detail about the debacle, but it really came down to her exposure to a single client, someone who attracted the worst kind of attention from the FBI. When this customer was raided, her latest batch of invoices was sitting on his desk, now never to be paid. Suddenly, incoming cash flow slowed to a trickle. Ironically, Taufer told me last week, this client had always been good at paying his bills. Another irony: Taufer was one of the solution providers who helped us write about the problem of bad credit some months back, after she caught some potential customers trying to pay for orders with fraudulent credit cards.
Maybe Lesley could have saved her company with a little bit more due diligence, but in this industry of private companies, you never really can tell what’s on your potential partner’s or customer’s balance sheet. In my gut, I believe credit and financing will be huge issues this year, both for you and your clients. And as Lesley Taufer discovered suddenly last summer, what you don’t know can hurt you.
Do you have a good grip on your cash flow? HEATHER CLANCY, Editor at CRN, is interested in your tips at hclancy@cmp.com.
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