The customer was one of the largest industrial names in the country.
Everybody wanted that logo. I had it.
We agreed to thirty-day terms. That is what the paperwork said.
What actually happened was four to five months.
One invoice went past 370 days overdue and still carried a balance.
Nobody did anything wrong. There was no dispute, no quality claim, no argument. They simply paid on their own schedule, and their schedule was not mine.
Here is the part I got wrong. I read their size as safety.
That is an easy mistake to make. A big name feels like low risk. The logic goes: they are not going to disappear, so I will get paid eventually. That logic is correct and useless. "Eventually" is not a payment term. It is a cash flow problem wearing a suit.
What I should have done, and what I do now, takes about an hour.
Before I agree to terms with anyone, I pull their actual settlement history. Not the terms we agreed. The real dates. When the invoice went out, when the money landed, and what the gap was.
That gap is the number I am actually underwriting. Everything else is paperwork.
Then I do one of two things. I price the delay into the deal, or I decline it.
Pricing the delay is not a penalty and it is not a moral position. It is arithmetic. If their cycle is five months, and my cost of money over five months is real, the price has to carry it. If it cannot, the deal is not the deal I thought it was.
Seventeen years in, this is the check I would give up last.
Size is not creditworthiness. The biggest name in the country can still be the slowest payer you have, and the fact that they are good for it does not help you make payroll in the meantime.
The rule: look at how they paid last time, not at how big they are.
Sunday afternoon is part of the price
Nobody warns you about the Sunday afternoons.
Not the tenders. Not the competition. Not even getting paid.
The hard part can be a quiet day in a city where you know nobody, your family is far away, and the street language is not yours.
The business feels solvable because it has a process.
Loneliness does not. You just decide it is the price, and you pay it.
The mistake: treating profitable and survivable as the same question
A job can be profitable and still be one you regret.
Profit and liquidity are two different calculations, and they answer two different questions. One asks whether the deal was worth doing. The other asks whether you can survive doing it.
Run both before you accept anything large.
Most people run only the first, then wonder why a good year felt so tight.
The five checklists are here if you want the rest: https://checklists.hardmarkets.net
What market are you trying to get into right now, and what is actually stopping you? Hit reply and tell me. I read them all.
Nazem