Avoid Deadbeat Clients with BusinessBeware.biz

Check BusinessBeware.biz, a Web site where contractors share tales of customers who won't pay their bills or are impossible to please

By Rebecca Reisner

"Avoid Deadbeat Clients with BusinessBeware.biz" was suggested by BusinessWeek.com reader "Cody" via a post on our What's Your Story Idea blog.

Story Tools

• post a comment
• e-mail this story
• print this story
• order a reprint
• suggest a story
• digg this
• save to del.icio.us

Irrigation contractor Robert Bodi launched BusinessBeware.biz in June 2008.

Over lunch last spring, as Robert Bodi listened to a buddy complain about a customer who refused to pay for irrigation work on her property, he knew something sounded familiar about the story. Bodi, an independent irrigation contractor in Venice, Fla., realized the same woman had stiffed him after he fixed some wires in her irrigation system following a lightning strike. "And it turned out, there was a third guy in our business who said she never paid him for putting in a new pump for her," recalls Bodi, a 30-year-veteran of the contracting business, who runs Rainmaster LLC. "Some people you just can't please."

With the help of his daughter Ashley, Bodi responded by establishing BusinessBeware.biz, a Web site where contractors share stories about deadbeats and those infamous, impossible-to-please customers. The site also names names, to help business owners avoid toxic clients. Since it began operating, in June 2008, the Web site has acquired about 650 members and received 20,000 page hits. BusinessBeware.biz has become something of a reverse Better Business Bureau (BBB), a resource that many small business owners look to for guidance—especially in a depressed economic environment in which few can afford to let customers ignore invoices.

"When it comes to work contractors do, they invest a lot of money, so it's only natural for them to get nervous about not being paid," says Alison Southwick, a spokeswoman for the Better Business Bureau.

Not Just Letting Off Steam

Like the BBB, Bodi, 48, and his daughter are taking pains to ensure their site's legitimacy so that it doesn't turn into a repository for general nastiness or diatribes from folks seeking to rant for the sake of ranting. "The first couple of months we had to delete stuff like crazy. I was worried about lawsuits," Bodi says. "Then we started charging a one-time $5 fee for people to become members. You would not believe how that reduced the number of crazy claims. And members have to give us their business license numbers." The $5 fees are used to defray the site's administrative costs. (The Bodis take no payments for operating BusinessBeware.biz.)

Although Bodi doesn't retain a lawyer for advice about the site, he says he and his daughter calmed their fears about potential lawsuits by doing some legal research on the Internet before starting the site. They've posted a disclaimer, citing Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which says that, as long as Web site owners don't alter reader comments to make them defamatory, they can't be held liable. The Bodis edit to remove defamatory language from the site, and prohibit profanity and personal insults. "You have to stick to the issue at hand," says Robert Bodi. "You can't call anyone fat or ugly on our site." So far, no one has attempted any legal action against BusinessBeware.biz or the contractors who post complaints on the site.

Dino Garnett, the sole proprietor of Dee-Noz Tractor Work, in Port Charlotte, Fla., counts herself as a fan of BusinessBeware.biz. "If I put down a load of pit shell, that's $1,500 just for the material, and I can hardly go back and scrape it back up into my truck if the customer refuses to pay," Garnett says. "Now before I take on new customers, I check BusinessBeware.biz to see if other contractors have had problems with customers not paying their bills."

Indeed, tales about deadbeat customers—or those who subjected a contractor to a particular onerous experience before paying—dominate the site. "After she used us for cleaning service, she would not pay us. She told us many times she would pay us but never did," reads a typical comment, from a contractor in El Paso. Although most posts don't disclose the amount that was owed, the average among business owners who reveal that information is $2,000 to $2,500. Bodi and Garnett say they have found that wealthy customers are the ones most likely not to pay.