Carrying on my theme from the Banning Directors post the other day, one of the main points raised in the comments section was that if suppliers were to take a moral and tougher stance on repeat phoenixers, then maybe we could cut out some of the dead wood our industry just cannot seem to be able to get rid of.

I simply do not see a valid argument for the same suppliers to continue trading with companies that have either gone bust or changed their name half a dozen times. What does that honestly tell them about the business or the people running the business? Sometimes suppliers will say that they will eventually recoup the money that was lost last time the business went to the wall. But that shouldn’t be the point.

The point of trading in our industry must surely be to be good at what you do. Be a responsible business owner. Try and make money, make sure you pay your bills on time. I seriously can’t see any financial advantage for suppliers who deal with the sorts of people that avoid tax and go bankrupt all the time. And this was the point with the previous post I wrote about banning MD’s. Because there aren’t any severe penalties or any serious legal framework to stop these idiots forming another company within 24 hours, they know they can get away with it then hit their suppliers for potentially very large sums of money.

Out of all the areas of our industry that are so heavily regulated, it really does frustrate me to see this very dark area of our sector ignored so blatantly. I would love to see bodies like the GGF get behind this issue and lobby the Government to at the very least take a look at this issue and see what can be done to make it more difficult to stop serial busters carrying on in business.

But I do feel that our suppliers have a part to play in this. If they can take a much harder stance against them and strangle the flow of credit to these people, then maybe we might be able to force a few of these scum bags out of an industry I know we all love.