The £700k Client: Part 5

Here’s the strange part of this whole story. The real fix for a seven hundred thousand pound debt was never going to happen this week. It should have happened three years earlier.

You already know the shape of it. Seventeen years with one customer. That customer taken over. Payments drifting, then stopping. Seventy per cent of his turnover, sitting with one company that decided it wasn’t in any rush.

Here’s what I’ve been thinking about since. If he’d had proper credit insurance sitting behind that relationship, this never gets anywhere near seven hundred thousand pounds.

Not because insurance pays out faster. Because of what it does before anyone needs a payout at all.

A credit insurer isn’t watching one relationship. It’s watching that buyer across every supplier it insures. The moment payments start drifting anywhere in that buyer’s book, the insurer knows. And the limit it’s willing to put behind that buyer doesn’t wait for a crisis. It moves immediately, for every single one of that insurer’s clients trading with them.

So the buyer isn’t just risking one supplier’s patience. It’s risking its standing with an insurer that’s watching it on behalf of businesses it’s never even heard of. That’s not a threat anyone has to make. It’s just what happens, quietly, the moment the numbers start slipping.

Which means the real question was never “how do I get my money back.” It’s “why did nobody notice this drifting until it was seven hundred thousand pounds.”

The answer, most of the time, is that nobody was watching. Not because they couldn’t. Because they’d never set it up so someone was.

Do you need someone on your side? I’m Mark Smillie.