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Recovering my money!

wficka52

Plastic
Joined
May 25, 2018
Hi,

I have a couple situations here and need some guidance. I have a few clients that have not paid me after manufacturing components for Boeing SLS Program. These guys definitely have the money but they do not pick up the phone or respond to me at all. Do you guys have any experience with an agency that can collect in Michigan??
 
What's your contract say about payment? Selling a debt to a collection agency will get you pittance on the dollar. If you're desperate, try a small claims approach if the payable account is small enough. If you have a "few clients" that are all doing the same thing to you then something else is going on.
 
with companies using bankruptcy to get out of paying millions of dollars many places require a corporate credit card and get paid right away, then company who waits 90 days to pay or likes to declare bankruptcy can argue with the credit card company
 
Sounds like you have got yourself hung out there. How you deal with it depends on how many clients and how much money, and how old is the debt.

You can sell it at .50 on the dollar and be done with it, or you can hire an attorney and go after them. Finding an out of state attorney is a crapshoot. Hell, finding a decent local attorney is a crapshoot.

If the amount justifies it, you can try to find someone local that has connections in the state you have to file the suit. They won't handle the suit themselves, but they will deal with the other attorney.

You have to put the case together, they won't do crap. That means at least 4 identical binders for each client you are suing. One for you, one for your attorney, one for the out of state attorney, and one for the defendant. You have to provide the Purchase Orders, the proof of deliveries, the unpaid invoices, and a summary page that totals it all up.
 
Perhaps you could contact your federal representative, as this crosses state lines and is a government funded program. I think they would love to be able to tout protecting their local businesses when election time comes...
 
thats always the choice. do you deal with companies slow to pay and like to declare bankruptcy or avoid those companies and their potential business which can be considerable business in the millions of dollars.
.
i know many just ask for corporate credit card number and get paid right away. might even charge 5% discount to get paid right away rather than paid in maybe 90 days
 
Generally - our experience with aerospace companies is that you get paid when the project is complete and accepted by Boeing. The SLS contracts deal with a launch system and I would be surprised if Boeing paid vendors anything but 100% on performance of equipment NET 90 or 120 days.

We ALWAYS buck these payment terms and seek milestone payments NET 30 with 3% Net15 priced accordingly. If Boeing doesn't (or can't) meet those terms, if they really want to use us, then we start seeing RFQs from other large aerospace vendors who will carry the paper for some amount of markup. In those cases, Boeing buys the system through a company like Ascent Aerospace or even Siemens who marks it up and they pay us according to our terms.

We are in no position to be a bank for a company the size of Boeing and doing so makes it difficult for us to ensure that our employees and suppliers flourish . . . No deal is worth doing if the customer sees a big win in making you have to suck it up for a design, engineering, manufacturing, test, ship, startup, and qualify cycle that from the time of PO to the time you see your first cent in payment often exceeds 12 - 16 months on 6 and 7 figure jobs.
 
Hi,

I have a couple situations here and need some guidance. I have a few clients that have not paid me after manufacturing components for Boeing SLS Program. These guys definitely have the money but they do not pick up the phone or respond to me at all. Do you guys have any experience with an agency that can collect in Michigan??

What were the terms and how late are they?
 
No deal is worth doing if the customer sees a big win in making you have to suck it up for a design, engineering, manufacturing, test, ship, startup, and qualify cycle that from the time of PO to the time you see your first cent in payment often exceeds 12 - 16 months on 6 and 7 figure jobs.

It is not just "often" Brethren. It is so very standard that Boeing was taught as the case in Accounting textbooks around fifty years ago, if not also ever SINCE.

The "Special case" had to do with the ordinary 13 Accounting periods of each Accounting year "closing" for the year.

Boeing's case was "work in progress" typically taking 18 months from initiation to shippable.

Each year required handling of special accruals that few other companies had at all, or very little of. Most firms would have but one MONTH in their pipeline, so the value of it was small vs an entire year.

Boeing (and others like them), the WIP value could easily be greater than that year's entire gross.

Boeing themselves (I owned stock for Donkey's Years. No longer..) have stated that each new generation of aircraft, one after the other as they were begun, was a "bet the entire company" level of risk.

Consider what that means. Wilhelm Boeing didn't see-to-eye with a successful Dad. Left home, took work as a day laborer. His Dad branded him shiftless, figured him a failure. That pissed Bill off no end. He just was NOT going to wear that label. Turned out, he was good at whatever he did. He made good money in timber before using it to make seaplanes. His company has a seriously good record of success and getting paid for it. They even MADE MONEY when the SST was cancelled. Realists at Boeing had expensed it as unrecoverable R&D. They had to re-state the books when the government paid the large penalty for cancelling. Boeing then had a windfall profit!

"Bet the entire company" on the grand scale of Boeing is not an exercise for small-money players. Nor even entire nations.

Scarebus could not even get INTO that game without being a de-facto multi-nation, multi government agency at the outset, still partly IS, and China has not done well at it, either.

Gear-up to deal with that sort of environment.

Or go elsewhere and do something more comfortable for your resources.

Odds are, of course, the seat under you on that journey will be Boeing built. Even when we leave the Solar system. They already ARE "comfortable" with that business model.

Y'know? If Bill's Dad had been a better communicator instead of a borderline asshole?

We might still be flying Super-G Connies that took-off on four, flew on three to reduce the damned fire-hazard, fired up the truant radial for landing, just in case of need of a go-round.

Side-issue, but he was also a hard-core segregationist as to his extensive property developments on a scale and intensity that might not have been allowed to stand even in the Old South, post reconstruction era. Or might have. Some seriously dumb s**t has been carried-on in our history. Slow learners, we seem to repeat the worst of it all too easily. Look him up.
 
I used to purchase items for my department in a large Southern California aerospace company. They would always pay slow. I would get phone calls from the vendors who were often small machine shops complaining of 60, 90, 120 day or no payment ever. When I passed these complaints on to the accounting department, I was told that this was a routine that they went through to hang onto as much cash as possible until the very last minute.

The company was sued on numerous occasions by the government for poor quality and poor delivery. The company is no longer doing business. They are a name on a door somewhere in another company.

Small companies do business with large companies at their own risk.
 
This is what I do for a living

Hi,

I have a couple situations here and need some guidance. I have a few clients that have not paid me after manufacturing components for Boeing SLS Program. These guys definitely have the money but they do not pick up the phone or respond to me at all. Do you guys have any experience with an agency that can collect in Michigan??

In the agreement you signed when you took the job there may be (doesn't have to be) a clause dictating how disagreements are to be settled arbitration, what state laws, what state courts, yadda yadda. If there is no such clause then you are free to frame your lawsuit however you please. Find a collections attorney in your state. The CLLA ( commercial Collections Lawyers) is a society you can google and they have lawyers all over the place. Or you can just ask locally who does commercial collections. That will solve your problem. The lawyer will want about 20%. You will get paid.
 
Hi,

I have a couple situations here and need some guidance. I have a few clients that have not paid me after manufacturing components for Boeing SLS Program. These guys definitely have the money but they do not pick up the phone or respond to me at all. Do you guys have any experience with an agency that can collect in Michigan??



Guess cash on the barrel head isn't so old fashioned after all.
 
How late are they? Don't worry about it until they are past 6 months. You need to plan cash flow accordingly if playing with big companies or make sure you are still holding onto something they need.
 
good work if you can get it. I find that the cash customers, though, are the smallest and fussiest ones.
The bigger the company, the slower to pay.

Yeah cash is pretty inefficient. Plus lots of fun paperwork if you are doing real work in the 5 figure and up range.
 
Other option, depending on the place, just walk on in there and take your shit back, once its back in your possession there's absolutely fuck all they can do if they have failed to meat there contractual payment terms. They broke contract there for you recovered your goods end of. Unless you agreed to stupid terms with them.

Way too many people play this game way too softly, taking goods with out payment is theft, recovering stolen property is not a crime. Get into the whole payment courts and solicitor mess and you never win, becomes like using leaches to fix the common cold. Get known as a hard ass who gets paid or recovers his work and the rest of your customers fall into line.

Non paying customers are no use to you there stealing from you and you really don't need them. You don't give a tic a blood bag, you burn the fucker off with a cig.

That said im not into this whole COD bullshit either, i want the ease of issuing invoicing once a month and getting paid in a known time scale, don't care if thats 30 days or 90, just needs to be agreed upfront and stuck too, fuck me over on it and i will recover my property first and for most and my terms and conditions are such i can legally do that in the area i sell into on credit based terms.

hence my advise, play hard ball, visit non payers out of work, at there homes etc, peruse them like a rabid dog persues a bone and at least try and act less than 100% sane so they can't predict your next random action. No violence or knee capping how ever tempting, just constant reminders your awaiting payment in the most public of possible places. One of my customers had great success in getting payment by following said non payer into his church and quietly made it clear he would have a cheaque monday or he would be back the following Sunday to make a far more vocal appeal. keys to get them pissed off enough paying you is the easy way of getting you to leave them alone. Websites, projecting outstanding debt value on the front of there building etc, all great ways to bring there dirty laundery out into public and get results.

You need to find leverage, currently unless they want more you have none and ergo they don't need to bother with you. Its just a mind game kinda thing, legal action - playing the std debt collecting games, these people are totally use to it, you have to go a different unique angle if you want fast results.
 








 
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