The friend whose first order started my trading business also introduced me to the client who would one day threaten to burn my warehouse down. I’m still grateful to him.
I was in my early twenties when a friend — a coach I’d met through mutual circles — placed a small order with me. Equipment for a corporate facility he was setting up. Nothing dramatic. A few hundred dollars. But it was the first real order my trading company ever received, and it set the whole thing in motion: supplier relationships, logistics, invoicing, the entire operational muscle that would eventually become the backbone of three companies.
Over the next year, this friend co-founded a brand with an older, more established entrepreneur — a foreigner with a corporate background, a loud personality, and the kind of confidence that fills a room even when the numbers don’t. I’ll call the friend L, and the founder B.
Because of L, I became their go-to equipment supplier. We gave them preferential pricing — 20% off our standard rates, free delivery, credit terms. We treated the relationship as a long-term investment. They were growing, opening new locations, and we were growing with them.
The problems started quietly.
The Pattern
Their first unpaid invoice was $84. It sat for three months. I chased B directly. “Sure.” Then silence. I chased again. “Will do.” Then silence. I chased a third time. “Oh yeah, forgot.” It eventually got paid, but the pattern was set.
The amounts grew. A custom steel frame for a corporate client’s office. Equipment for their flagship location. Deliveries for satellite orders. Every time, the same cycle: we’d deliver on credit, then spend weeks chasing. Their ops manager — a good guy, always caught in the middle — would say “sure sure,” “I’m on it,” “I’ll nudge him.” But the cheque never came on time.
By mid-2016, the outstanding amounts had been dragging since February. I’d send polite messages. Blue ticked. Follow up. “Sorry, we’re swarmed.” Follow up again. “B’s been overseas.” Follow up again. Silence.
No one ever said they wouldn’t pay. But no one was making it happen either.
The Deposit
When their next big order came — a major equipment package for a new outlet, roughly $11,000 after a generous discount — I required a 50% deposit.
Their ops manager pushed back. “We’ve been your customers for so long already. Still need to drop 50%?”
I explained. The recent orders had been painful to collect. I’d also been burned before — L once asked me to produce 25 custom units, I didn’t take a deposit, they pulled out, and I was stuck selling those units for more than two years.
“A 50% deposit is market practice,” I wrote. “Whether you are buying products or services, your construction contractor probably has something arranged too. The bigger the potential purchase, the more we have to take this deposit in case the deal falls through.”
B himself had messaged me weeks earlier, unprompted, to say they’d just closed a major investment round. New locations in the pipeline. So I didn’t understand why a deposit on an order they had already committed to was generating this much friction.
They agreed. The deposit came in. We reserved the stock, placed top-up orders with our suppliers, and prepared for delivery six weeks later.
Delivery Day
August 2016. Two vans loaded. Picked, packed, and ready.
That morning, I messaged their ops manager: “Can I confirm the cheques are ready?”
Silence.
I followed up at 1pm. Silence.
By early afternoon, I learned the cheque hadn’t been prepared. B had been overseas and just returned. No one had arranged the balance payment despite two weeks of confirmations.
We told them we’d hold the delivery until the payment was ready. This was the agreement from the start: 50% deposit, 50% on delivery.
The Explosion
B called my business partner first. Then the messages came.
“Push me or my guys again, say one more sarcastic comment about us, do anything short of deliver my stuff immediately or you will never get another order from me.”
I responded calmly. I showed him the agreement. I walked him through the timeline — the follow-ups with his ops manager, the two weeks of “sure, sure,” the cheque that wasn’t ready on the actual day.
He told me to shove the equipment. He said he’d sue me to pieces. He said I had no idea the trouble he would go to, to bury my business. He said his lawyers would be in touch and told me to sleep well.
Then, over the phone — not in text, which is perhaps why he felt brave enough to say it — he threatened to come to my warehouse and set it on fire.
We called the police. They took it seriously. They advised us: if he shows up, stay inside the unit and call us immediately.
He didn’t show up. The lawyers never came either.
What We Did Next
We delivered the equipment that same evening.
Two vans. Up the cargo lift. Into the space. His staff — the ops manager, the trainers, the people preparing for their grand opening — didn’t deserve to be caught in the middle of their boss’s tantrum.
A few days later, we discovered a defective medicine ball in the shipment. We air-freighted a replacement from our supplier at our own cost — not by sea, which would take four weeks, but by air — so it would arrive before their opening.
Their ops manager thanked us. “Thanks for being professional. Appreciate that.”
B never apologized. Not that week, not that year, not ever.
The Friend in the Middle
What made this harder wasn’t B. People like B exist in every industry. They’re loud, they run hot, and they confuse aggression with leadership. You learn to deal with them.
What made it harder was L.
L was the co-founder. He was also my friend — someone I’d known since before the company existed, someone whose first order had literally started my business. When the threats came, I reached out to him directly. I laid everything out. I told him we had contacted the police. I told him my business partner had needed reassurance before sending our delivery crew, in case B followed through on his threats.
I told L, honestly, that the only reason I hadn’t posted the entire exchange online was because of him.
He replied that he was deep in construction for their new outlet. He said he’d call me that night.
He never did.
I don’t hold it against him. He was caught between a business partner and a friend, in the middle of an expansion that probably felt like the most important thing in the world. He chose not to step in. I understand why. But understanding doesn’t make the silence land any softer when you’re the one who just got threatened.
Ten Years Later
I’m writing this nearly a decade on.
There’s a coda to this story that I find hard not to smile at.
Even before the blowup, B’s company had started selling our products through their online store — a consignment arrangement where we supplied the goods, they took a commission, and we handled fulfilment. After the fallout, they began sourcing directly from the same factories in China, branding the equipment themselves. They were building toward something bigger.
Five years after the threats, their ops manager reached out again. The company wanted to partner with — or buy — an equipment supplier in Singapore. Scale things locally and internationally. A “much bigger play,” he called it.
They approached us first.
I declined. Politely, but without hesitation. Too much bad blood. B had never apologized. You don’t go into business with someone who threatened to burn your warehouse, no matter how much time has passed.
Their ops manager understood. He said he’d reach out to someone else. That was the last real conversation we had.
Less than three years later, the brand shut down all its outlets. Key investor pulled out. Liquidators appointed. Members scrambling for refunds.
The company that once wanted to acquire what we’d built couldn’t keep its own doors open.
I don’t say this to gloat. I say it because there’s something worth examining in the contrast.
We were twenty-something when this happened. Our trading company was small, bootstrapped, running on margins thin enough to see through. We had no investors, no PR, no media profile. We had a warehouse, a van, and a set of payment terms we believed were fair.
Enforcing those terms against a bigger, louder, better-funded client felt terrifying. When someone threatens to destroy your livelihood — when they threaten to physically burn your inventory — the instinct is to fold. To tell yourself it’s not worth the fight over a few thousand dollars. To deliver the goods, eat the delay, preserve the relationship.
We did deliver. But we didn’t fold on the principle. And that distinction matters more than I understood at the time.
What I Learned
The companies that shout the loudest about their growth are often the most fragile underneath. A business that can’t write a cheque for $5,600 on delivery day — after agreeing to the terms, after confirming twice, after closing a funding round — doesn’t have a cash management problem. It has a discipline problem. And discipline problems compound.
A 50% deposit is not an insult. It’s a basic commercial safeguard that every serious buyer understands. The ones who take it personally are telling you something about how they run their operation. Listen.
The people who threaten to bury you rarely have the follow-through. The lawyers never called. The warehouse didn’t burn. The business wasn’t destroyed. What actually happened is much quieter: we kept operating, kept our terms, kept building. And the person who made the threats eventually ran out of runway.
And gratitude and boundaries can coexist. I owe L something real — his first order set everything in motion for me. I can hold that gratitude while also recognising that he went silent when it mattered, and that the friendship was never quite the same after. Both things are true. Neither cancels the other out.
If you’re a young founder reading this and you’ve just been shouted at by a bigger client for enforcing your own payment terms — for doing the thing your business needs you to do to survive — I want you to know something.
You’re not being unprofessional. You’re being a business.
The discomfort you feel right now, standing your ground when every instinct tells you to apologise and comply — that’s the price of building something that lasts.
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