We don’t buy much from the supplier but we do buy stuff every few months. We sometimes pay 45-60 days, but we always pay. However, now they don’t want my business unless it’s cash up front.

This puzzles me. As I say, I’m a payer so they’re not going to lose their money. I’m not ordering three reams of A4 paper; when I order it’s a reasonable amount of a commercial stock only they supply.

I’ve never seen one of their reps so I’m not taking up any of their time. My price book is from 2010 so I’m not even costing them postage. I’m not rude, difficult or demanding. All I am is a line in their billing system. How does that cost so much money that they want to kill the account?

If it is about saving money surely this is not the way. With an account, I ring up and place an order and am on and off the phone in minutes. Being COD will entail emailing the bill to me, me paying it and someone manually checking to see if it has been paid so they can release the stock. That has to waste more time and money than they will save by deleting my record from their MYOB.

I have heard from other printers that when their accounts have been closed, the only way it will be reopened is if they spend more. Sounds like self-defeating blackmail to me.

This happened to us years ago, but not so baldly. When we were much smaller, we used to divide our spend roughly 70/30 between The Paper House and Dunlops.

Even though The Paper House got the bulk of our spend, in a company-wide review of costs they deemed us small and so took away our rep, telling us to deal with the internal salespeople only. Our book quickly became out of date and we couldn’t get what we needed when we needed it so we started buying more from the Dunlops rep. Eventually it got to the point where we were buying about 90% our stock from Dunlops.

The Paper House realised the error of their ways and reinstated reps to smaller accounts but it was too late – we had found a better home and so had a few other smaller printers, offended at the treatment.

And here we are years later, no The Paper House, no Thomasetti but Dunlops’ direct descendant BJ Ball still gets the bulk of our business, which is 10 times what it was when all this happened.

I think all of this is a lesson to the paper companies. Don’t dismiss small accounts – they get bigger. And if you must, at least make sure a rep has actually set foot in the place to assess what’s going on.

Anyway, I guess it’s COD from now on and I’ll get used to it. But in return I will never buy another thing from them that I can get anywhere else. Just like I did with The Paper House.

[Related: More Industry Insider columns]

Baden Kirgan is the MD of Jeffries Printing Services and Black House Comics

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