Trick or treat? FreeAgent customers’ biggest business scares

Everyone in business has a horror story or two to tell - monster tax bills, being ghosted over invoices, demon clients who make life hell…

As Halloween approaches, we asked our FreeAgent community to share their terrifying tales of ghastly business encounters, and how they vanquished those evil forces. Read on - if you dare…

Stuart Wistance of ProvisionIT is on call as a cyber-Ghostbuster

We battle digital demons

As the Director of technology consultants ProvisionIT, Stuart Wistance has battled the worst fiends of the internet underworld. “Negotiating with cyber criminals and ransomware attackers on the dark web - it’s enough to make your blood run cold!” he says. His team of IT heroes bravely face down real-life digital demons when clients become the victim of cyber attacks. “We’re often summoned like Ghostbusters to help clients strengthen their cyber security and ward off the malware monsters. We’ve faced more than a few ghastly hackers that have scared the pumpkins out of us,” he admits.

As our recent blog on cyber security highlighted, these are very real risks. Like an army of zombies, creepy cyber criminals are relentless: six in 10 small businesses in the UK were hit by at least one cyber attack in the last year and 30% say the attacks threatened their ability to stay afloat.

“It’s a concern for everyone; not just the IT team,” explains Stuart. “Many people depend on that business continuing to operate successfully. Threats such as ‘data release on the dark web’ or ‘ransom demands in Bitcoin’ before data is destroyed or leaked shouldn’t be part of any business’s reality, but I’ve seen it all firsthand and it’s gravely scary stuff.”

Stuart says ensuring cyber defences are firmly in place from the outset is the best plan. “Unfortunately, some clients only take action after experiencing an attack. The most proactive clients take a ‘defend first’ approach, meaning they rarely have to deal with a cyber incident at all.”

Sarah Coleman staged a daring rescue of her artwork

My products vanished into the night

Sarah Coleman is an artist, illustrator and designer, whose business, Inkymole, has a roster of global clients in advertising, film, music, publishing and health. She creates analogue and digital creative work from her studio in the East Midlands. But in one dark chapter, she was forced to go on a daring mission in the depths of spooky season to rescue products after a blood-sucking retailer vanished into the night without paying up.

“We had a company with a load of our products that they’d been selling on our behalf, who’d simply failed to pay what they owed over and over again. Over the summer, we began to suspect they were in trouble when phone calls, emails and faxes - yes, faxes - failed to get a response,” she explains. “One October day, we drove all the way down there in our little car unannounced and just walked in. Their faces were horrified, and yes, they were indeed going bust, and were holding onto the stuff - it would have been sold and set off against their debt. 

“With my camera aimed into the room - you never know when a classic fist fight might be about to kick off - they watched as we just picked up the boxes of products and left, and we never heard from them again! They folded soon after. Close call.”

Unpaid invoices caused a real scare for Andrew Bell

The client who ghosted me

Andrew Bell is a freelance senior graphic designer, and was forced to rattle some chains after a client ghosted him when he was chasing an unpaid invoice. “I got quite a scare,” he admits. “I didn’t do my due diligence and agreed to work a few days for a digital design company that was teetering on the edge of liquidation (and has since gone under). They didn’t pay my invoice for over 90 days, but after plenty of overdue reminder emails and a bit of good old-fashioned phone hounding, they finally coughed up the payment,” he says.

“It was a big relief. I was only about six months into my freelance career at the time so lots of lessons were learned! And FreeAgent was helpful because - being someone who’s terrible at tracking dates and time - it was great to be able to quickly quantify that the invoice was 90 days overdue! It also made it easy to send reminder emails to pay.”

Photographer Anna Moffat made her shoot in the nick of time

My mid-air nightmare

As a freelance photographer Anna Moffat’s business takes her out and about every day on commissions. So the last thing she needs when travelling is gremlins causing travel hiccups or things going ‘bump’ in the night (or day). “Is there anything scarier than dropping a helluva expensive lens on a hardwood floor mid-shoot and watching the glass crack in front of your eyes?” she says. 

“Perhaps worse was being asked to deliver beautifully iced ‘Marry Me’ cupcakes as part of a surprise engagement shoot and watching them slide around the back seat of the car as I rushed to the job… They were fine and she said yes, so there was a happy ending!”

But Anna’s biggest nightmare happened on a flight abroad to work for a new client: “I woke up in the aisle with my feet in a stranger’s lap after fainting mid-flight on the way to the shoot. I’m not sure who was more alarmed - me or the poor gentleman who was asked to hold my tootsies while the flight attendant tried to bring me round. It didn’t feel like a good first step on the journey to appearing cool and professional with my new client.”

Anna had just 24 hours to recover before the big event. “The production team were scrambling around looking for a replacement while I nursed my fever in my hotel room, but I rallied just in time. And I’m thankful to this day that I was wearing clean socks on that flight!”

Hustle Mate’s Chris Wilson (and daughter Alice) battles dodgy Dave’s bad advice

Dangerous Dave haunts my clients

Chris Wilson is a Chartered Accountant and Founder of Hustle Mate, a UK-based platform giving self-employed people, freelancers and side hustlers affordable access to expert financial guidance. Chris knows that the devil is in the details - especially when it comes to tax and accountancy matters. The worst bogeyman he encounters is ‘Dave Down The Pub’ dishing out dodgy - and sometimes downright dangerous - advice.

“In my experience, the most dangerous Daves are the ones who blur the line between business and personal expenditure. The big three I’ve encountered are:

• “Holiday Dave, who swears that checking your emails poolside makes the whole trip tax-deductible
• “Family Payroll Dave, who thinks paying your kids a salary for ‘helping out’ is smart tax planning
• “Fashionista Dave, who insists that buying new clothes to ‘look professional’ is a legitimate business expense.

“They all sound convincing, and I’ve seen plenty of people get caught out,” says Chris.

“But usually it’s easily avoided with a bit of proper guidance. Most small business owners just want to do the right thing; they’re simply repeating what they’ve been told.”

Jolene Roberts of Oir Soap cut through her cashflow scare

My business was shocked by a monster order

This tale from Jolene Roberts, Founder of Oir Soap, starts with a surprise monster order that caused a beastly bill. 

“I got an email out of the blue from a huge online florist who wanted to add our products to one of their gift boxes,” says Jolene. The florist wanted to run a trial before Christmas, after which they could be ordering thousands of products each month. The deal “has the potential to really positively impact our business. But the logistics have been challenging,” says Jolene. 

“This initial order was for 460 of one scent of lip balm. We normally order 1,000 of each lip balm box, but we only had about 300 left. Thankfully I have a great relationship with our printers, so I managed to sweet talk them to rush a full order for 1,000 through for us.”

Because she had to bring her regular order forward and had agreed to pay up-front, that meant “a few thousand pounds I wasn’t planning on spending that month. We also had to order extra ingredients, tins and stickers - and the spend wasn’t in plan. Things are really tight around September / October time as we have a big influx of orders for wholesale, and we have to pay up front for everything to complete the orders. Then we get paid in November. So it’s been a real juggle financially, but one I felt I had to make work because of the opportunity.”

Jolene pulled money that had been allocated for other things and drew money from her tax savings pot - knowing it would be replenished when the payments came in. “The tax trackers in FreeAgent ensure I know exactly what I owe, so I can find that information easily.”

And was there a happy ending? Did Jolene come through the horror, like the Final Girl in a slasher movie? Thankfully, she’s through the worst peril. “The lip balms are due to leave here next week, we’ll have them ready to be boxed up as soon as the packaging arrives. Then it’ll be all hands to the pump to get them out of the door.”

See ahead - and avoid the perils 

As our fearless customers show, you don’t need protective amulets or lucky charms to ward off business horrors. With FreeAgent’s Cashflow reporting, you can see down the road to avoid the dangers.