The Fish
The Fish
Nobody tells you, when you start an engineering company, that one day you'll be crawling through a hotel car park in another country with your feet sticking out of a minibus window, trying very hard not to be sick.
That part tends not to make it into the business plan.
The Missing Third
By the time Guy Bromby boarded a flight abroad in January 2011, ThinJack had already done the hard part. Eight months earlier, the team had separated a seized flange on an offshore platform that had resisted everything thrown at it for nearly a year. The job had been completed in a single extended shift.
What hadn't come back was $130,000 of the invoice.
The contractor handling the work had paid two thirds on ninety-day terms and then gone very quiet. Months of chasing had produced clarification questions, promises, and nothing else. ThinJack was now issuing late payment invoices on the original late payment invoices, accruing interest at eight percent above base rate.
Guy decided to go and look the problem in the eye.
Snakes and Ladders
This was a country where, in 2011, was still finding its feet, after almost a decade out of a lengthy civil war. Business operated, as Guy would later describe it, like snakes and ladders with all the ladders removed.
He and his industry colleague Colin had been there a week, attending meetings and making progress in the slow, relationship-dependent way that the country’s business required. On the Friday evening, hungry and tired at nine o'clock, they returned to a street restaurant they'd eaten at earlier in the week.
The fish had been sitting in a warming oven. It was contaminated with typhoid.
Colin started feeling ill by Sunday. Guy felt fine through Sunday, fine through Monday. On Tuesday at midday, standing in his hotel room, the room began to rotate.
He called the insurance company while he still could.
The Crawl
What followed was the kind of story that gets better with distance.
Six people appeared in Guy's room. The door was open and someone was rifling through the safe, looking for his passport. The insurance company worked through the labyrinthine requirements of the country’s hospital system to get their line of credit accepted, a process that would have seemed farcical if he hadn't been feeling so comprehensively terrible.
The only way to reach the transport without being sick was to stay horizontal. Guy crawled through the hotel, took the lift lying down, crawled through the car park, and climbed into a minibus with his feet near the window.
Two hours later, still horizontal, he arrived at the best hospital in the country. A young doctor, Mademoiselle Brigette, spent an hour with him, carefully and methodically, making absolutely sure they'd got the diagnosis right.
They had.
The Meeting
Several days later, still unsteady, Guy discharged himself and went to the meeting he'd come for.
He sat in the office of the man holding the keys to the outstanding payment and told him what had happened: the fish, the hospital, the crawl across the car park. The man felt so sorry that he immediately started calling around to the chain of people who could release the money.
The final resolution came later, on the telephone to Paris. The operations manager who had been sitting on the invoices had resigned that morning. His replacement found everything in his in-tray, unpaid and unprocessed. She settled the full amount, principal, penalties, and interest on the penalties, promptly and without argument.
It was, Guy reflects, quite a lot of money.
Presence
ThinJack has a philosophy that runs through everything we do: if there's a problem to be solved, we show up.
We get on the plane, walk into the room, make the case in person. Not because it's comfortable, and not because it's guaranteed to work, but because presence carries a weight that no number of emails can replicate.
The invoice got paid because Guy went to the headquarters.
Sometimes the most important thing you can do is be there.
If that's the kind of partner you're looking for on your next project, we'd like to hear from you. Or take a look at our other stories to see what ThinJack looks like in action.