Sometimes you just lose faith with people that promise to pay you for their website and Jason Mitchell of Essex Kitchens in Basildon and now of Whitehouse Construction and Maintenance in Brentwood is one such person, here are the emails we have sent them after they have spent 18 months / 3 visits and about 50 emails trying to avoid paying, having looked into this individual we have now found out he has been a director of a string of companies that he starts and simply dissolves and judging my the calls we received after taking his website details down we are not the only person they have ripped off.
[Website Designers]
1 Despite numerous emails / phone calls / texts and promises you haven’t paid for the work we completed months ago. So with regret it has led to this legal requirement / warning of our potential removal of your services if payment isn’t made within 48 hours.
FINAL NOTICE BEFORE SUSPENSION OF SERVICES
According to our records the attached invoices / statement remains unpaid. We are not aware of any outstanding queries relating to this amount and therefore request that you make immediate arrangements to pay the full amount outstanding within 48 hours of this communication.
Should we not receive your payment in cleared funds by this deadline, we will have no option but to exercise our right to suspend all services to you as per our standard terms and conditions. You will also be liable for interest on all late payments and the matter will be passed to a 3rd party collection agency. Please also be aware that this will result in you incurring further additional fees.
If we provide you with an on-going service please note that during suspension you will continue to be liable for all service charges, and before normal service can recommence a reconnection fee will be charged. Please also note that suspension of services will take place without any further reference to you if payment is not received within the given deadline
Please ensure our accounts department is made aware immediately a payment has been made to avoid any unnecessary interruption to your services:
2 We assume you have or will shortly have our final demand with invoices in your possession, that have been now sent via royal mail to your registered addresses and email addresses multiple times, this final letter contains a clear / polite request to settle your account within 7 days. As recommended by the court guidelines and our solicitor we agree to allow you 7 days to pay the outstanding invoices.
Failure to pay the outstanding invoices then we reserve the right to begin legal proceedings against you on the 19th September 2012 if no payment is made before that date. This date is 7 working days after our estimated receipt of your letter and over two weeks since your acknowledgement of the last email request for payment.
Trusting this final request will be met with the knowledge that we have now given you every opportunity to avoid legal action and the inevitable legal consequences of not paying the owed monies.
3 The solicitor has drafted up some suggestions for a cost effective solution to recovering your debt and one of them is to use a debt collection agency which we are considering so will once again give you the opportunity to pay the remaining invoice before we potentially enter an agreement with a debt collection agency which will increase the costs and inconvenience for yourselves and will obviously initially cost us more to recover your debts.
We already have been offered the services of some well known and very very efficient debt collectors and suggest you stop this process before we start this process as once the debt has been sold to the debt collections you know they will go the extra mile to collect. I strongly suggest you contact me unless you want another debt collection agency coming after you, and can assure you this matter isnt going away and we are not going to ‘forget’ it and wont settle until we get our payment recovered from yourselves.
4 I have been told that one of the new residents of your properties wanted you to be told to ‘sort your lives out’ so happy to pass that on to you but dont think it will make much difference to you. Karma is something I dont think you will ever get.
5 We have now discovered you have both moved residential address, I can assure you that this doesn’t mean you can avoid payment and can assure you that you will be found and made to pay the outstanding monies. Now that you have clearly avoided contact and refused to pay we will do everything in our power to get this debt of yours paid to ensure we are rightly compensated for the work completed To put a stop to all proceedings you still have the option to pay in full the outstanding debt.
6 As of this morning there has been no payment received for your outstanding invoices, I have started legal proceedings by booking a meeting with the solicitor with a view to take this case to court, the meeting is for Monday so if the payment is received between now and Monday we will stop proceedings.
I operate an open, flexible, reasonable and honest policy on payments and even at this stage would be willing to take your calls / organise a meeting to discuss your situation before we absorb more costs in solicitor fees and you will invariably end up paying for our fees and the outstanding invoices.
7 Have just been informed from our secretary that you are now committed to completing the websites and getting them back and sorted. This is great news, To get us back on track we need the final payment on invoice 258 (£903) and for invoice 265 which is for the hosting / transfer / development of the other two websites we require a minimum of a 50% / £600 deposit.
Once these are paid the websites will be both put back to include your phone contacts and we will give you new passwords for your email accounts (or set them back to your old passwords)
[Whitehouse Construction] Hi James please pass on to me your solicitors suggestions and details , as D and M services are no longer trading due to a developer going into receivership owing us £26,000 your details are with the accountant but due to you threats on your last email we have past it on to our solicitor dealing with everything and also to the police, we will not tolerate threats or abusive emails . We do have information from various sources that the web site was not worth the money invoiced, that you have a reputation for over charging and the fact that you turned everything off and stopped us from getting a income off the web site and try to pay you is in effect bad business . If you wish to sue please continue as we will counter sue for loss of earnings on 3 web sites , 1 of which had nothing to do with you , and also remember do not make threats .
[Website Designers] According to companies house (contacted them yesterday) you are still trading and regardless of that fact that is inconsequential to me you owe me money which needs to be paid. I have no concern whatsoever if you are trading or not. Feel free to send my correspondence to your solicitors and your police (I have heard they are looking for you anyway so perhaps thats not your smartest move) You have let a lot of people down but let me assure you I am not going to let you simply go bust and for us to forget about the costs associated with your website development.
Your ‘various sources’ that talk about our charging are pretty pathetic and I wont waste my time replying to these stupid accusations. You seem to suggest that I am at fault by removing your website services but the facts (that are not completely documented) are that you had over 20 reminders to pay for our services and repeatedly refused or ignored these final demands and even when the email service was temporarily removed you had the option to re-instate them immediately once payment had been received.
The invoice clearly shows what you have been charged for and the website that you said ‘has nothing to do with us’ was charged only for the transfer and the hosting. I resent any idea that we are a rip off or overcharge. You have a new website that is attracting an increasing amount of website visitors and that is what you wanted and have got.
The solicitor has offered another way out of this predicament for you and its one I would consider. If you transfer the website back to us (you simply change the IPS tag back to us using the code ‘ENOM’ ) then we will reduce the outstanding invoice by 75%. If not then we will chase you and recover the full amount outstanding. You are not the first ‘company’ to attempt this and you wont be the last but luckily for us the first company to try this gave us a free lesson in how to ensure we get paid fairly for our work and this is one lesson we will repeat in order to get our guys paid for their work.
As no reply has been received you leave us no choice but for us to take immediate action to recover the debts.
[Whitehouse Construction] You Can do what you wish, I have now sold the web site on, D and M is no longer trading. These emails will be shut down today.
[Website Designers] Website is still registered and even if you sold it on, the owner is still personally liable for it and in selling it, you are simple making your problem / debts worse. Thought I was being reasonable in trying to give you all the options and happy for you to try to wiggle out of this but we will do everything in our power to see that you dont wiggle out of paying for the work you have got.
Just spoke to the website owner who is now seems to be ‘claiming’ that the work was never finished but be assured 100% of the essex kitchens website was completed including design / seo and webcopy. We have never given this project anything but our best work and this is demonstrated by the fact the website now brings in over 250 website visitors per month (this is a 446% increase on the same month last year) and by anyone’s reasoning is proof that our website build / webcopy and SEO has been completed.
You have told me to take you to court and that seems like a good option to get this payment as you haven’t acted responsibly or reasonably at any stage of this process in trying to get the final payment sorted.
[Whitehouse Construction] My 1 and only offer will be £200 , as a final payment
[Website Designers] Thanks for the offer, I think this is the reasonable / best way to go forward, but please try to see this from our perspective:
1 we have been chasing these payments for months now.
2 Website has been live since April 2011
3 your website has had 2308 visitors since it was built
4 we have done exactly what you wanted and made the website a success.
5 you owe us two lots of monies over two invoices
£162 for the hosting / domains of the 3 sites
£903 for the essex-kitchens website work for the design / seo / webcopy / logo etc
6 Total outstanding is £1065 and this is after we took off the work you agreed to then decided you didnt want.
7 We have done this process of reclaiming monies before so know the way it works and know that our case is solid (and almost exactly like the last person that tried to avoid payment) So we are confident in reclaiming our invoice costs and knowing that our costs would be added to our claim.
But having already spent £200 on solicitor fees and being prepared to spend another £200 to simply lodge our claim with HM Courts and Tribunals Service via the solicitor you can see that anything but a very sensible offer close to what we are owed is not what we had in mind. If we agree a sensible offer I will also fix your contact forms for you and do any tweaks you want.