If you are thinking of Midas we know them very well having dealt with them for many years until about 5 or 6 years ago, Until 7 or 8 years ago they were cash rich, the only larger regional contractor with money in the bank. For example, when ROK went bust, they had more than enough money to hand pick & buy up live shovel ready project sites from ROK, so were a very safe bet to work with. They were also very open & honest until around that time.

I still work for one of their most successful directors, he had the most profitable part of the company under him by miles, until near the end credit crunch. He then suffered a rather strange happening when his department made a loss after a break even year. He got shut down & his department closed just as things were picking up again. He was dumbstruck.

What then followed was, they were vacating the offices (he had gone some months earlier), they had taken on some ISG Pearce people & they turned up at the offices & redecorated & moved in.

Following on we went to a presentation by this new crowd of what I call ‘clever people’, & they were saying how things were going to be, & indicating that the cash was going to come flooding in. It was a change of style which we recognised as the ‘Balfour Beatty’ style of management. Our hearts sank as this was a very bad sign for what had been a very long good relationship with Midas.

We continued working with them for a while but the site organisation became more & more chaotic, & we had clients telling us terrible tales of mismanagement & dissatisfaction. The payments got slower & slower with retention nigh impossible to recover. (Chasing for 4 years past the due by date was needed for our last payment of retention from Midas).

This is the crowd who run their projects using subbies & suppliers money, to cover their poor pricing & site practices, whilst impressing their directors with the cash they show in the ‘pot’, or the ‘treasury account’ as I have heard it called. They also won’t pay the subbies & suppliers in the month/s before reporting time, so massage the figures before the directors & stakeholders see.

These are the very same people who, just before the credit crunch came, were doing up houses on their companies accounts, billing everything to a project. We couldn’t finish one major project as all the trades were working on a house for the buyer. It was all billed to the project.

As the credit crunch went on each year, payments took an extra month, until it was out around 6 months for a payment. Then you wouldn’t know what was coming, as there was no pay less notice, or any paperwork prior to the payment arriving. This is the chaos that arrived with Midas, once a great company & team to work with. No wonder it all got out of control.

It is still the greatest mystery to me, why do we all do it, get involved with these badly run projects, why won’t people share information about how these companies are treating them, then we could make better informed decisions & move forward.