I have a small marketing agency which has been going for 4 years following a career in media & marketing. It’s been going really well but of course we have had some troubles with clients along the way, but nothing that hasn’t been miscommunication or resolved, and we don’t have any negative reviews. We also have a social media account with a good following where we post our work like a portfolio as a lot of our customers come from social media. We get a lot of really positive feedback there too.
Anyway, our rates are very competitive due to being small and outside of London. For a long time I’d say they were too low if anything.
We recently had an enquiry from a new business that was looking for our services. I answered his questions, sent him through our portfolio and case studies as well as giving him details on how we work, expectations as it’s not generally an instant results basis, and that we have a minimum three month sign up as anything less they are not going to see the value they want and it would be a waste of money. It’s not worth the bad feedback for us by offering shorter terms when we know you need a certain amount of time and we of course want to generate the best results.
We also had a phone call, and he said he wanted to go ahead. But throughout this time he was bombarding me with phone calls unannounced and repeatedly messaging, which I was okay with because they are new and seemed very excited to get started.
An agreement was made and signed, with the client agreeing to three months, everything was stated in the contract and he seemed happy, signed and over the next few days he spent some time going through onboarding for us to work on an initial strategy. He also asked me to send through the invoice early so he can get this paid, which he did within 2 days. We do have a 7 day period whilst we work on onboarding & strategy so he didn’t have to pay immediately which he was aware of as stated on the invoice.
We were working on a retainer basis so a payment each month of the same amount over 3 months.
I received the onboarding on Monday morning, and explained that the strategy would be with them by Thursday so that I could go through, ask any further questions, speak with the team about deliverables and put the strategy together which is indepth, covers three months and takes time.
Anyway, on Thursday I got a random message saying they wouldn’t be continuing after a month because they ‘hadn’t seen results yet’, I explained that this is because they have only just sent onboarding and we start the project once this is done and strategy signed off, that they are not charged for onboarding time and reminded that as had been mentioned, the service takes time to see the results due to XYZ (don’t want to go tomorrow in-depth on what we do as could be outing), but it is standard practice across the industry. He like reacted to the message and didn’t reply.
Later that day I got another message saying they needed to cancel as they now have ‘stock issues’ which I questioned following the first message, and the fact we had already spoken about and confirmed their stock level. They didn’t reply.
Over Easter weekend I was bombarded with messages complaining about the service, saying we had forced them into paying and into an agreement and that he’d had a really bad experience etc. Again I was confused, asked where he had been forced and what had been ‘bad’ so far but he didn’t answer and just messaged again saying he doesn’t want to proceed.
I said I would contact him on Tuesday after Easter weekend, but he was blowing up my phone and making me really anxious because of the things he was saying, so I just agreed to cancel because obviously I didn’t want to work on a bad relationship.
He’s now asking for a full refund despite our contract stating that we have the three month fixed period. Whilst I have agreed to cancel, we have lost planned revenue for the next two months, and I had actually increased a team member’s hours due to needing more support on this project due to their expectations. I have already agreed on her payment, and as a small business we don’t make a huge amount of money at all, and so now I’m not sure what to do.
I tried calling Citizen’s Advice to see if they could advise me on what to do, but they said they normally deal with consumers rather than B2B, and gave me another number but I haven’t been able to get through.
Of course I am still being messaged, but I am not sure where I stand and am normally quite a pushover because we’re such a small fish in a big pond that a bad review could affect us - but I have already allocated the budget and will need to let a team member down due to this.
Sorry if it’s long or I’ve missed anything, I’ve not been through this before and any time I have asked to cancel a contract early I have been told no and continued to pay with or without the service. Obviously I am not doing that but with the payment he has already made, the work being started, the agreement of 3 months fixed, the team member increased, I’m not sure where I stand. He sent a screenshot of how he had a 14 day cooling off period according to Google, but according to what he has sent it looks like that doesn’t legally apply with B2B unless expressed and agreed in the contract? Maybe I’m wrong!
What would you do in this situation? Any advice is greatly appreciated and sorry for such a long post just don’t want to drip feed!