Out Of The Blue Bailout

What are you gonna say? I was caught between a rock and a hard place the other day. It was with a person I've got a certain debt with that I've been working with—which is a business debt. No issue, cash flow management, the rest of the stuff—but we've never called him and said, "Hey, it's tough economic times, we're having hard times."

We've never been, to my knowledge, late on a payment—and again, with the ebb and flow and flux of business, the U.S. Postal Service, etc., I don't consider a few days or even a couple of weeks late. Because what goes around comes around.

In other words, we've been a model customer! Why in all the world would this guy call us up and say, "Listen, I know that things are tough and everybody's having a hard time making ends meet, and I'd like to reduce your payment"? Hey, you read it right: "I'd like to reduce your payment."

Well, what's a man supposed to do? I said, "Okay, I'll take it!" He's reducing my payment. He's reducing my debt.

But I was thinking, "Hey, if he needed cash—and this couldn't have been a well-thought out motive for that—what he should have done was said something to the nature of, 'You've still got an outstanding balance of approximately $15,000 on this. We will discount it to $10,000 if you can pay us today.'" And BAM, I'd write the check for that kind of payoff.

But that's the thing. There's a madness going around… that's what I'm trying to communicate. There's a madness in this depression, in this recession environment, and a lot of it is that those people who are collecting money are assuming that everybody's in bad shape, everybody's hurting, and everybody's in trouble.

The fact of the matter is, it's just like we teach about negotiating—intervene at the lowest level possible. At the lowest level possible. Open your eyes to this point. This company has an account that's in perfectly good standing, and they call up out of the blue and offer us a bailout.

What kind of business is that?