One of the joys of running a company

… is when large multi-hundred million or multi-billion dollar public companies try to ignore “small” bills from smaller than multi-hundred million dollar companies. Very much related to this. We are operationally funded. Every dollar I pay my team with comes from cash flow. So when companies try to cheat us out of money by not paying their bills, and then ignore our requests for payment … Yeah, this gets old. I prodded a reseller on this pretty hard today. They have a long outstanding bill that we’ve been trying to get their attention on. They’ve ignored us. Completely. No phone call returns, no email returns, nothing. Until today. When we sent the customer a note indicating the reseller’s failure to fulfill the reseller’s payment obligations, inviting them to provide payment on the reseller’s behalf, and then let them deal with the reseller on their own terms … … ka BOOM. Yes, we finally, after months of ignoring us, got a response in minutes. A very … very … unprofessional response. Times like this I really enjoy my job. No, really. [sigh/] We have a very simple policy on non-payment of outstanding bills. All warranty and any other support is suspended until we get payment, in full. Something tells me that there will be some more nasty-grams going back and forth. Not quite enough money to warrant a lawyer-gram, but enough to invoke other legal remidies. … and I just responded to two of the nasty-grams. Yeah, times like this just suck the fun out of this job. Note: I won’t name and shame them. Yet. Give them more time to do the right thing. If they fail to do the right thing, all bets are off. I have no sympathy for cheaters like this reseller. The larger customer isn’t an issue, apart from wanting to use this reseller to provide a terms and conditions firewall. [update] In a panic’ed email back to the customer, whom we let know of the situation, the reseller claimed they have it handled. After offering us 10% on the dollar. WTF? Seriously? Very very sad. They are being removed as a reseller. We are done with them.