When you laugh and cry at the same time..

Those are important lessons

Every week, I write an article to share my learning or discovery during my startup journey. Here is the link to my reasons for penning these articles for myself and many others like me.

As an entrepreneur and also a consultant you get to see both sides of the world i.e. you use the services of some vendors and you also provide your services to some customers. Sometimes the contrast between the two situations leaves you perplexed, that you don’t know if you should laugh or cry at that situation.

I did consultancy work for a reputed company. It was a small assignment for 2 weeks. They had a monthly invoicing system. The payment process looked to be well defined as on every 25th of the month, they will send you an invoice template where you need to fill in the invoice amount and your bank details. The payment will come in the first week of next month. According to this process guideline, after sending the invoice on the 25th, I checked the amount in my bank account, but could not find any payment related to that work.

The second week also passed by and still no payment. Finally, I connected with the Manager who was my point of contact from the client-side. I wrote an email, she responded that she checked with her account department and according to them the payment has already been made to my bank. But how come it did not reach there. I asked that person to share the payment reference id, so I could enquire with my bank. She did not respond. I called her after a few days and asked again for my pending payment. She told me that she had been busy with other tasks, so she did not follow up with her accounts department. She told me that she would follow up with them right after ending my call and would update me in the next 5 minutes. Instead of 5 minutes, 5 days went by, and still no update. I called her again. She was very apologetic for the delay. She mentioned that she connected with the accounting department, but they have not responded. I asked her to share the accounts person number, so I could directly follow up with them and she could work on her other important tasks. To my surprise, she replied that she does not have the number. She had been communicating with them via slack. This is weird. This company uses slack to resolve vendor issues. No wonder it had taken more than 3 weeks and still no sign of its resolution. I was thinking if they use slack for their customer issues as well. in that case with this speed of their issue resolution, only God can save this company.

After a few days, I received an email from that contact person to confirm my bank details. I just resent the same information that I had sent earlier 3 weeks back. Bank information does not normally change so fast. The very next day, I received my payment. I called my contact person to confirm the receipt of payment as well as to thank her for her help in resolving my payment issue. She mentioned that the earlier payment had bounced (which they never acknowledged before). The account team wanted to release the payment in next month’s payment cycle. WOW! What a people-centric company. The people here are not customers or vendors, but the accounts department. In this case, my contact person supported my case and convinced the account people to release the payment earlier. I will be grateful for this person though I do not want to work again with this company. Getting operational issues resolved over slack is not a great strategy.

Now I can also connect to other dots. In this company, my contact person has been changed thrice. I am not sure if they moved out of this organization or moved into different roles, as they never picked my calls later. But I am sure if the vendor management process is so broken, the other HR processes would not be mature as well.

Where is the contrast?

It is — when I had to follow up for my payments with a client for an assignment that I completed almost one month back. Whereas my CA is asking for advance payment when he did not even initiated the process for my company registration. Maybe this is my fault. I should have set the milestone payments for him, rather than agreeing to make the payments at his convenience. But who said that learning for an entrepreneur will ever stop?

Wishing everyone happy holidays. I hope each one of us ends this year with more earnings in form of money as well as wisdom.

The next article will be published at weekly intervals. Simply send me some claps and feedback if you enjoyed my article.

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