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…