No more Mr Nice Guy – We will name and shame the industry’s late-payers.
Like a demolition man that has to pay his staff, his chosen equipment hirer, his fuel supplier and his insurance company in order to work, I have a stack of people that I need to pay long before I can even consider taking my cut.
When money is coming in slowly, in dribs and drabs or – worse still – late, slowly AND in dribs and drabs, you have no choice but to juggle; to temporarily rob Peter to pay Paul.
You do so having been assured by one or more of your debtors that they will pay on a certain day and date that they have agreed.
We had precisely that assurance from a number of advertisers two weeks ago, each of which promised to pay on the Friday before the UK shut down for a Bank Holiday long weekend.
And do you know how many of those companies kept their promise? None. Not a single one. For all the friendships and alliances we have within the industry; for all the fair play schemes and initiatives operating across the sector, we were left high and dry.
A week on, and we’re still waiting on ALL of them.
More than a dozen big name and supposedly reputable companies, each of them with a turnover hundreds of times larger than ours and many of which are supposedly governed by an industry Code of Practice, had simply lied to us.
Although it varies from one company to another, the primary reason that companies advertise on DemolitionNews.com or in the pages of the Demolition magazine is because we have established an unrivalled reach and market penetration. Ours is the only magazine that is received by every single demolition company in the UK. Our magazine has a global reach and is read in almost 40 countries around the world. And it has achieved all that by providing those readers with an honest, independent and warts-and-all view of this industry of ours.
Advertisers pay us to access our audience in order that they might then sell them something. Given all of that, you would think that those companies might want to safeguard their reputation with the world’s largest demolition industry publication. You’d think they would want to ingratiate themselves with a team that – at the click of a mouse – can reach pretty much the entire sector in which they earn a living. Above all, you’d think they’d be keen to keep sweet an editor with a global reach, a big mouth and a hair trigger. Yet, they don’t.
Maybe they believe their reputation is bullet-proof, that it couldn’t be damaged by a disgruntled magazine editor. Maybe they’re not too bothered about how the rest of the world views them. Maybe they believe that my bite is worse than my bark; that I wouldn’t dare call out a company way bigger than my own.
And historically, they would have been right. But not any more.
I am done with waiting endlessly to be paid. I am done with providing a product and a service and not being paid for it in a timely fashion. I am done with being lied to. I am done with companies falling over themselves to access our audience while having no intention of paying to do so.
So, starting today, I will be naming and shaming those that abuse our payment terms.
I will name and shame them here on DemolitionNews.com, in the Demolition magazine, on Demolition TV, on the Demolition News Radio podcast, and across our various social media platforms. I will shout their names from the industry’s rooftops.
I know what you’re thinking. That’s commercial suicide, right. But what have I got to lose when so many companies have no intention of paying for the products or services we have provided anyway?
So if you’re a company that currently owes us for advertising or sponsorship and which wants to safeguard its reputation within the industry, now would be a good time to settle your bills.
You’ve been warned.
