MarkW Posted January 13, 2016 Posted January 13, 2016 Just had a call from our biggest client to say that they are selling their business and cancelling all on-going projects. That's just wiped £650,000 off our 2016 forecast at a stroke. Inconvenient is not the word. Quote
Joeman Posted January 13, 2016 Posted January 13, 2016 Who they selling to?? Contact the buyer and offer them a great deal on the same work for £750k Quote
thebendyfox Posted January 13, 2016 Posted January 13, 2016 Who they selling to?? Contact the buyer and offer them a great deal on the same work for £750k Yeah this pretty much. That or your BD team just had a heart attack. Quote
MarkW Posted January 13, 2016 Author Posted January 13, 2016 Thanks guys. I fear there's no easy solution here, as the client had raised a significant amount of finance to run this project, which obviously will all be pulled now the company is being sold. Finding a buyer could take a long time, and there's no guarantee that the new owner would want to run the project, or be able to raise the finance to do so. We are now in touch with our solicitors to see if there's any way we can claim some of the lost income. They haven't been honest with us at all: getting this contract was contingent on us increasing our capacity, both in terms of staff and facilities, which we did. The project then started a few month ago, and as late as Friday afternoon they were sending me emails with details of the next batch of material they were shipping to us and reiterating that they wanted everything completing this year. Going from that to deciding to sell up in the space of a weekend is mind-boggling! Quote
Joeman Posted January 13, 2016 Posted January 13, 2016 Got to be a case for breach of contract or something surely?Still on the bright side, now you've ramped up capacity you can take on more projects. Get the sales guys out there asap to win some more business. Quote
MarkW Posted January 13, 2016 Author Posted January 13, 2016 Got to be a case for breach of contract or something surely?Still on the bright side, now you've ramped up capacity you can take on more projects. Get the sales guys out there asap to win some more business.It's a tricky one: the main company is Kenya, so we wouldn't have any rights there, and the UK subsidiary with whom we have the contract is probably going to go bust. Either way it looks unlikely that we'll get anything.We're only a small company of five people, and business development is one of my roles. Better get to it I guess... Quote
gsxrrr Posted January 14, 2016 Posted January 14, 2016 650k! Wow, that is brutal. Hope you manage to plug the gap with other work mate. Quote
MarkW Posted January 14, 2016 Author Posted January 14, 2016 650k! Wow, that is brutal. Hope you manage to plug the gap with other work mate.Cheers. This contract also had very tight deadlines that we were obliged to meet, so we have been turning away all but the smaller projects in order to make sure we had capacity. I've had better days, it has to be said... Quote
Hoggs Posted January 14, 2016 Posted January 14, 2016 so we have been turning away all but the smaller projects in order to make sure we had capacity. ouch. Is it the kind of thing that a competitior of the original company would want? Or as I think mentioned above find some end users for it? I have no idea what it is you do so sorry if this is a really stupid suggestion Quote
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