Being right was available

In January 2018 a client cancelled an order that was already paid in full. 100% prepayment, €5,535.58, contract signed, the supplier already buying materials. The whole explanation: “I’ve changed my mind. We’ll use different materials. Cancel the deal.”

I was the seller of record: the client’s contract was with me, and mine was with the supplier. Which made the cancellation my problem in the most literal sense — I was the one entitled to refuse it. Everything was confirmed in writing. The money was out. The supplier was in motion. I could have said no — politely, contract in hand — and I would have been right.

Being right was fully available. It just wasn’t my job.

The job is representing the client’s commercial interests — not the supplier’s, and not my own comfort. A line like that costs nothing to put on a website. It starts costing the moment the client is the one who breaks the smooth scenario — and you hold the line anyway.

So I went to the supplier and unwound the deal. How exactly — that’s another story. What the record shows: €5,535.58 went out; €5,535.58 came back, to the cent, with the supplier covering the bank charges on the return. Contract signed on the 19th; refund landed on the 30th. Eleven days, start to finish.

The cost in the moment: my work and the supplier’s, done for nothing, plus the unwinding on top. The return: a client who watched the position being held exactly when holding it was inconvenient — and stayed for years after. The supplier stayed too.

The project, meanwhile, got what it actually needed. The“different materials” turned out to be aluminum square tubes with the exact parameters of the cancelled steel, loaded nine days after the refund into the same container the steel had been meant for. Not money burned on a whim: a change of material, made possible without losses.

Money is asymmetric. It leaves in a day and returns in weeks, if at all. Paying is a button; unpaying is a negotiation. So the true price of a decision is not the invoice — it is the cost of reversing it. Read that price before you pay, not after.

And the promises at the entrance — trusted, reliable, client-first — are written for smooth deals. Whose side someone takes shows only when the smooth part ends; by then, you have already chosen. A broken deal, unwound and documented, is the only reference worth asking anyone for.