Pro Installer March 2020 - Issue 84 | Page 45

MARCH 2020 | 45 Business Read online at www.proinstaller.co.uk The solution does take some time and involve some cost, but is well worth the effort in reduc- ing your risk. You need to have well drawn up employment contracts and a company handbook and use them in 100% of cases. You must also make sure that you have carefully filed copies of the related paper- work with signatures. If there is no contract in place a court will deem a disadvantageous one to be in place which is much worse. When you come to disciplining someone, get professional advice before you start the process. You may think you know what you are doing, but it’s incredibly easy to say something that will lead to a painful and expensive loss at an employment tribunal. In my experience, these requirements needn’t ever stop you doing what’s needed for the business to prosper. It just means it has to be done carefully within the law. It’s also important to under- stand that if someone commences legal action against you, the risk isn’t just about the money that might be awarded to the com- plainant, which is unlimited in cases of discrimination. Probably more damaging is the time that you will have to devote to the the temptation to lower standards or fail to take fast action when needed, however busy you are. It’s better to delay work than trash your hard-earned reputation. Customer risk case and the sheer strain it is likely to cause. When your staff know that you do everything by the book, they are unlikely to even start a claim. By following these guidelines, I have never been dragged through an employment tribunal, despite a long management career and occasional threats by staff. Bad staff Once I had a great solicitor. I used him on several different housing transactions. Not only was he reasonably priced, he never failed to turn around ac- tions the same day. So naturally, I turned to his company when I needed help with litigation. Nightmare. I had to chase everything, deadlines seemed to be completely elastic and the dif- ferent solicitor seemed to add no value, only get in the way. Even- tually I complained and things improved, so I am guessing that a rocket was let off in the appropri- ate place. However, by then I was largely bypassing the solicitor and dealing directly with a barrister. Fortunately, we won. The point of this is that the quality of service you provide is totally dependent on any staff that you employ or subbies that you use. These represent a risk – your reputation for quality can quickly be ruined by a single bad worker. As a result, you must always resist I recently used a fair-sized ground works company to do some work on my home. Before I took them on, I looked into their history. Why had the directors previously run a similar company that had gone bust, I asked? The answer was that they had done a lot of work for a larger contrac- tor. That contractor had gone out of business, leaving a big debt owing. This is the difficulty of relying on one large customer. Once you couldn’t cope with non-payment of the outstanding debt from any one customer, that customer’s business risk is added to your own risks. The horrible thing is, you have no control over that risk. And it gets harder and harder to try to insist on payment terms the larger the amount of business that you do with them. There is nothing you can do oth- er than to reduce your reliance on them. For these reasons, it’s probably worth turning down work once you are above a certain thresh- old, hard as that is. Unexpected expenses I wish that it was easier running a business, but I guess that then the potential rewards would be smaller. One of the easy traps to fall into is not allowing for large expenses that may arise down the road. Some examples of this are the VAT bill on a large invoice that hasn’t yet been paid, assum- ing you are on the standard VAT reporting scheme. Another is the replacement of important machin- ery. Then there is the annual in- come tax or corporation tax bill. Knowing what’s coming and planning ahead is the answer here. www.powerednow.com About the author Benjamin Dyer is CEO and co-founder of Powered Now. Pow- ered Now’s mobile app aims to take the pain out of paper- work for installers, as well as other trade businesses.