The perpetual nightmare that is Chimes
I got a call this morning from a woman who found my blog. She shared with me that she received a letter last week from Howard Ehrenberg, the court-appointed bankruptcy trustee for Axium International, parent company of Ensemble Chimes, asking her firm to pay back $86,000, for payments they received in 2008.
She’s looking for other firms in this situation and as a favor, I’m posting about it (thank god, the firm I work for had minimal exposure). If you are in this situation, please leave a comment or send me an e-mail at lisaamorao at gmail.com so that I can connect you.
May 11th, 2009 in
Chimes Chapter 7
unbelievable.
The ripple of effect of this continues…for some those ripples could bring be a tsunami. The courts might be looking for up to three months of payments. I know of companies where a Chimes account made up between 50 - 80% of their total business. Can you imagine the impact on a company whose gross sales are $10M with $8M coming from a Chimes account? That could mean that the would have to pay $1.6M. Of that they might have already paid out close to $1.2M to their contractors. That would mean that it those 3 months would effectively cost them $2.4M in cash. For a company whose run rate is $10M that is a massive impact.
Actually…in the scenario I describe previously the loss to the staffing provider would be substantially more than I indicated…$2M for the last three months would be paid to the trustee; this would be in addition to the $1.5M they paid out to contractors for services rendered. It is possible that a company doing $8M a year with a Chimes client would come out of pocket $3.5M for the last quarter of 2008 if the the bankruptcy court is successful. Is there are silverlining?