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.