A Client Horror Story
That time you got sued for fraud — by the actual people committing fraud!
Watch the full episode →Hey everyone, welcome to the latest episode of Client Horror Stories. I’m excited to have with me today, my cousin, Jason Roberts. No, he’s not my cousin, but it is my mom’s maiden name. So I feel an affinity…
I like it.
Like we are cousins. Can I call you cuz?
Yeah, we can do that. I’m good with it, man.
Cool. So cousin Jason, let’s jump right into your story. I have my coffee in hand and I’m excited to hear about your client horror story.
Yeah, it’s a good one. Never had anything like this happen to me before, but one of the first businesses that I opened when I was young in my early 20s, was a mortgage company and by accident… not by accident, a lot of hard work and a lot of luck maybe if you put it that way. That it grew big, we were the number one rural housing and lender in Missouri. We had close to a hundred employees at our peak and trying to do everything right. We predominantly did more purchase money, so we help people buy houses. We help people build houses and we did some refinances in that too, but it was mainly the purchase side of things. And we had a client who came in, he was paraplegic, and he was in a wheelchair. Family and friends brought him in and he applied for a construction loan. And that process, if you’re not familiar with it is, you come in, you basically get pre-qualified, then you obtain a loan for the construction portion of your build, which may take anywhere from four to… Four months to a year, depending on how long your builder takes. And then when that process is done, when the building process is done, then you come back into the office and you essentially do a whole another loan. You’re doing a refinance, but it’s paying the old loan off with a new loan.
Okay.
So it’s a little more in-depth process than your traditional buyer refi, because there’s two or three closings essentially, but, that’s the process for a construction loan. Thought everything was great, super nice guy, was happy to be able to help, was happy to be able to make a difference. And I guess it was probably, I don’t know, maybe a month and a half, 2 months, maybe a month and a half after we did that loan, the final loan. We get a call from a family member that was asking some kind of strange questions about, hey, what are the options to cancel this loan, what are the options to get out of it, this, and that. And there’s no way to get out of a loan once you close on it really. And so it was kind of just bizarre questions. They weren’t really giving us any info as to where the questions were coming from. And it wasn’t the borrower, so I really couldn’t go into a whole lot of things anyway. And I guess probably about a week after that, we get served, I get served at my office with a lawsuit.
Wow. So, interesting already. I don’t know what happens, but I’ll point out that’s a really quick time from the conversation to a lawsuit. Because usually, there’s like a prerogative to figure out what’s happening and talking and trying to come to a deal.
Agree, I have no clue what’s going on. There was no… everybody was happy. The loan went great. There was nothing wrong. Nothing that I was aware of was wrong anyway and so, yeah, we get… I get served, and the whole office is looking at like, what the heck’s going on? Why is… why are the police here with the summons? And, you know…
It was like in the movies where the police just shows up.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. It was full get up, dude. It was the whole band’s outfit, the whole thing. It wasn’t like a summons person. It was an actual county sheriff that came in.
By the way, I’m going to confess my ignorance. I always thought they did it in the movies. I didn’t realize, that’s actually how it’s the… what it’s like in real life.
And I don’t know if that’s how it always is in real life, but that was how it was this time anyway, maybe they paid extra for that. I’m not really sure how you get this.
There’s actually a good lesson there because I think what happens is when police come with this letter, it freaks you out. It freaks normies out…
For sure it does.
Fear factor that getting a letter in the mail that you have a lawsuit just doesn’t have.
One, and I’m in banking, you know what I mean? Like we’re mandated by the federal government. And so when the police come in with this… I’m thinking, what could possibly have happened? You know, like, this is serious. This is a big deal. And what did the lawsuit say? So, I couldn’t really make much out of it because it’s all legal. You know, it’s this big, thick…
Legal bases.
It’s all these charges. It named me, it named our company, it named the title company, it named the realtor. So they’re suing everybody involved in this transaction and it’s basically alleging fraud. And so I don’t… I’m lost at this point. So, we immediately call our law firm. They review everything. They communicate with the attorney on the other side and the… I guess the premise of the whole thing was them saying that the borrower was mentally incapacitated, okay. So, what I didn’t tell you is, the borrower passed away a week or two after they moved into their brand new house.
Ooh. That…
Passed away. Died suddenly. So the family…
So, he…
Yeah, go ahead.
So, he took out the loan to refinance his house and then towards for a new house.
Yup. So…
And then he moved…
Go ahead.
No, and then he moved it and then took out the loan, then because he got the loan, he then bought the house and moved it, and then he died a week later.
That’s correct. Yep. Yeah. So, we’ve been working with him for a while. He originally came in to get the construction loan, so that whole time period passed.
Hmm. Fascinating.
Once the new construction was done, he came in and he got his permanent loan. And then at that point, he moved in, he was done, and we thought he was a happy customer and on down the way. So when I see this lawsuit, I’m not understanding what’s going on, my attorney finds out that the borrower, our customer, had actually passed away and that this lawsuit was coming from the family. So, they were suing us for fraud, alleging that he was mentally incapacitated and had… like didn’t know what he was doing. Like, somebody that was like Alzheimer’s or dementia, you know what I mean? A legitimate medical thing that you would need a power of attorney or something to act on your behalf, but, I mean…
But from your interactions with him, did he seem mentally competent and normal?
He’s normal as me and you are having this conversation right now. There was absolutely nothing wrong with him. Like I said, he was paraplegic. So, he had some limited movement and things like that, but nothing wrong with his mind.
Yeah.
I mean, that… because you have a physical injury, doesn’t make you mentally incapacitated. It doesn’t mean that you can’t make decisions. I mean, he, and… The crazy part about it was, that might even borderline fly if it was like a refinance and we only met him for a few minutes to sign papers at closing or something, but this is a pretty involved process. I mean, he came into the office, we met him face to face to get the construction loan, which is… it’s way more in-depth than a traditional loan because we’re looking… we have to evaluate the builder, we have to evaluate the down payment, the property, the construction costs, all those kinds of things. So it’s a more involved process. And then he has to come back in and do that whole process over again to refinance, so… beyond a shadow of a doubt, zero percent mentally incompetent, he was well aware of everything that was going on. And…
As a footnote there, I want to point out in my experience, after it’s not too… unfortunately, not too uncommon that people that are disabled or have a health problem in some way, use that as a sort of justification for other problems or other things that have absolutely nothing to do with it. So it’s interesting here that this is the same sort of technique, because he’s paraplegic, you get sympathy from the courts and the public and from everyone.
Well, yeah, and it’s not even him using the excuse, it’s his family.
The family.
He passed away, so they’re using the fact that he was paraplegic. But they’re also using the… and the sympathy that’s involved in all that. But they’re also using the fact that he passed away now, you know what I mean? And so, all of this looks really bad. If it goes into a courtroom, here’s this poor guy, he got roped into the… I can see the side of it, but in my mind, I’m thinking, there’s no way anybody’s gonna believe… like again, we met with him two, three, four times. We’ve met with his builder. We met with…
Yeah.
There’s other people involved. And so, if you’re going to try to swing this story… people dump coffee on themselves and sue McDonald’s and people slip and fall on purpose.
Yes.
And Walmart and sue Walmart. And unfortunately, there’s no shortage of people that may decide to exercise a handout or, give me if they can find one.
At any… cause I know nothing about these sorts of loans. At any point, did you have to meet his family, or get sign off from the family, or just him?
So, that’s the thing, man. He’s in a wheelchair. He can’t get… he can’t…
I feel like a bad person for laughing.
No, but like the funny part is, he didn’t get there by himself. There’s witnesses and the witnesses are the people that are suing it, you know what I mean? It was family and friends that brought him in. Like every time he came in, he had two people with him, somebody to hold the door, somebody to push a wheelchair. And so, that kind of further blew me away of like… again, had the loan officer went to his house, and there was no one else there, and he did or didn’t have a mental deficiency, and the whole thing was done like that. Like, it still doesn’t make it right, but you’d have a whole lot… in my thought, you’d have a whole lot easier case because it’s kind of… The passed-away person’s word versus ours. So, how are you going to… how are you going to argue that? But that wasn’t the case. He came into the office, he came with his realtor. We closed at a title company. Those documents have to be notarized. There’s somebody checking, you know what I mean? So there’s all these different people involved in the transaction that like are all shaking our head saying, “Why are we getting sued for this?”
But, by the way, just as a parenthetical, I have bought and sold a lot of property in South America and in all the South American countries are that I know…
Yeah.
At least there, they have these laws, that for any financial transaction over some fairly small level number, like a few thousand or 10, 000 dollars, that your husband or wife has to sign it, period. No matter what.
Yeah.
So, it’s interesting because, in Latin America, there’s historically so much fraud of exactly this type.
Really?
No, he wasn’t in his right mind and misunderstanding that they force on everyone to say, no, no, like, you’re like, you want to…
You’re going to have somebody else sign to that was right there with you. Yeah.
Yeah, no, like you… in Latin… in every country in Latin America that I know of, you want to buy a car, your spouse, it’s over, whatever… the 10,000 dollar limit, whatever it is. So, or minimum. So your spouse has to sign it with you or else…
Wow.
Or else they just won’t do it for everything above a few thousand dollars.
Wow.
And it’s annoying, like I’ve been in situations where like someone just wants to give me like equity in a company and in the US, you would just sign a paper, but now…
Yeah.
But in Latin America, you have to get your wife to sign and get it notarized, no matter what.
I think we should have probably adopted that on that transaction. It would have saved me a lot of lawyer fees.
Just on the continuing that fun parenthetical, there’s another… there are a bunch of interesting legal differences, but another one that’s relevant is, everything has to be notarized in Latin America, and it’s part of the notary’s responsibility to make sure that the people signing it, understands it. So as a result, every single, they’re required by law, at least in Argentina for example…
Yeah.
They’re required by law to read every word of the contract out loud. So, you sign a loan and it’s 20 pages, the notary sits there and speed reads the 20 pages out loud.
That’s wild. We’ve adopted, what’s it called? The E-doc thing. Yeah, you know what I mean? Like, you can just sign it by email. So, I’m able to close on buying and selling stuff from 30, 000 feet in an airplane hitting buttons, you know? And it’s wild, the difference.
Yeah, so… okay. So, the family sued you for all of this and then the family would had come there in person. So like, you had met them and know them. So, clearly just trying to take advantage of the situation.
100 percent. 100… and this wasn’t like, they’re suing us for the loan amount. And I don’t remember exactly what it was, but it was four or 500, 000 dollars. Like, it wasn’t chump change. It wasn’t a 10, 000 dollar lawsuit. They were suing for the loan amount so that they could try to get the loan extinguished, which I’m not even really sure. Not even really sure why. I mean, just put the house up on the market and sell it. I don’t understand the lawsuit component. I could understand it like if the house is upside down and they were trying to protect assets in the… if there even was a trust, they were trying to protect from probate or something like that. But, it was a new construction house, so it was probably worth more than what he even owed on it. So, I don’t really even necessarily understand… I don’t even necessarily understand the motive behind all of it unless maybe they were trying to get paid a judgment and then just let the house get foreclosed on and keep the money or something. Like, I don’t even really know the… I don’t even know the motivation behind it.
I had a CTO of a company that I ran like 15 years ago.
Yeah.
He was like my junior partner. He was in a car crash and he died.
Wow.
And his wife and two kids were in the car. The wife was like in a coma for two months. The kids luckily were not injured. But when the… but right after the death, it was… by the way, when it was the most tragic situation I’ve been involved with…
I can’t imagine.
In like, in my life, he was also a personal friend and we’d…
Yeah.
Worked together for years…
Sorry, man.
And, but when the wife was in the coma, like the wife’s sisters and mother all ganged up and sued me for multi-million dollars. And I knew the wife very well, really, really good people. So it’s… so they were… it’s not that they were like, trying to get money from me. They were just really, really desperate.
Dude, I mean, strange things like this…. so, I’m not to sidebar this…
Yeah.
But along that same line, I had a lifetime, longtime friend who was… who came to work at that same company. She originally worked at a collection agency. She came to the mortgage company and she was just kind of… she brought that collection agency vibe with her to the mortgage business, which you can’t… You can’t talk to somebody who needs to turn in their pay subs in the same way that you talk to somebody that hasn’t paid their Discover card bill in six months, right?
Right.
Like, I mean, it’s not going to… these are customers, it’s a different thing. So anyway, it didn’t work out and she left amicably, no argument, no fuzz, you know what I mean? Like, we were friends and she’s like, you know what, this just isn’t for me. It was a mutual decision for her to leave. And a week after that, she went to the emergency room cause she’s having stomach pains and they found a football-sized tumor in her stomach. Huge, like enormous. And she didn’t opt in for COBRA… like when you terminate somebody and they leave, their insurance lapse, their insurance ends, and then COBRA picks up, but she opted against the COBRA. She didn’t take the COBRA, which sucks. Like, you know, I mean, I want to help like… I didn’t know any of this was going on. Same situation, man. I get sued with this several hundred thousand dollar lawsuit. And sued everybody involved, insurance company, us, everything else, and for a while, like I took it super personal. But I think in that story, unlike your friend’s story, I think they go to an attorney and they say, “What do we do?” And the attorney says, “Sue everybody.” That’s what you do. You sue everybody and everybody’s going to settle for 50 grand, 100, 000 bucks, and you’re going to have a little bit of money.
Like, the wife’s telling me I had zero money. Like, my employee maintained the entire extended family. So, they’re like…
Wow.
They’re like literally…
Yeah.
Desperate for food on the table.
Yeah.
So, okay. So, these… now, back to your story. So, these…
Yeah.
Desperate people, scared, the provider just died, and they’re freaking out, so they serve you with this lawsuit. You show it to your lawyer. Your lawyer explains to you what’s up and what does he say to do?
He says to settle. I think that’s what most attorneys advise to do. And so, he said, let’s make them a settlement. Like, you’re in the right here. You didn’t do anything wrong, but it doesn’t really matter right or wrong in court. I don’t think most of the time. I think what matters is like how it looks and how a jury could potentially interpret it and I… and the average juror, I don’t know that they’re… I don’t know that they’re making decisions based on what they think is right by the law. I think emotions play into it, right? Of course, they’re gonna feel sorry for the family, for the loss of loved one. They’re gonna feel sorry that he lived his life as a paraplegic. They’re gonna feel sorry for all this stuff. And then here we are, the bad bank that took advantage of him. And so, the attorneys sharing all this, you’re 100% in the right, but, this could drag out in court for two years. The jury could rule against you, could end up owing the whole thing. They also know that they’re lying, so they’re probably willing to take a settlement because it’s a risk on their part a little bit too.
Right. That’s… yeah. That is interesting because they’re lying on purpose, therefore they know that it’s not like a sure shot. So, them knowing that they’re lying, gives them the wrong incentives. It teaches them that you can lie and you can make a few 10, 000 dollars.
It’s exactly right. It’s like having children and letting them do bad stuff and rewarding the behavior. You’re going to subconsciously teach them that this equals this, right? And that’s exactly right. And I have like internal conflict with that, you know?
So, there’s actually an interesting concept in economics that economists talk about as what happens in most deals. The way people think about it is they think about it just in terms of the money. You pay this much, you get this much. But what happens is… and every agreement, even beyond the money transaction goes in a non-financial sense. Even beyond the money, there’s the transaction cost, how much time, how much distraction, how much emotions you have to go through. So, even if you are in the right and you can fight it, what’s the transaction cost to you? Hours and hours, and emotions, and anger, and frustration.
Yeah, that’s the biggest cost more than anything is going to bed at night worrying about am I going to get a half-million dollar judgment against me. Going to bed at night, just the state change of feeling like you’ve been taken advantage of. Feeling like somebody is lying against you. And we had a really good reputation in our community. That’s in question now because we took advantage of some old man that didn’t… that wasn’t mentally aware, like the whole… like the cost of all that. And then, like you said, have them to think about it, watching the lawyer bills rack up. Depositions in court and two years and a half of going back and forth, like at some point, you’re right. Like, from just a straight-up business perspective, maybe it is better to just write a check and be done.
Yeah. I agree. So, you ended up settling, wrote a check, and then end of story?
No, but I… that’s what I said would probably be the smarter business decision. But I was… I didn’t necessarily do the smarter business decision. So…
So, what did you do?
I just had this internal conflict with… we did not do this. We did not do it. And so, here’s where it got crazy, so now that they move into deposition world, right? And so they’re deposing everybody. And the party that sued us is saying that… saying that they never came. They were like… we did… we did the loan transaction with him alone like he came in by himself. So, they’re alleging that he was mentally incompetent and we interacted with him alone. And so… and you know what I mean? Like, they brought him there, they brought him there, but they’re saying that no one brought him there, that he came by himself. And so none of that interaction took place, which now then makes it like, if someone believes that, now it just makes it us against the dead person’s word. You know what I mean? Like, there’s no more, there’s no more…
But, that actually… what I understand about them making that argument is if he’s paraplegic, someone needs to physically move him there. Like, it’s physically impossible for him to come alone.
And so, they alleged that he had a transportation service that would take him to his doctor’s appointments, take him to different places. And so they said, ” We didn’t take him. We don’t know who it was. He had a transportation service that took him to doctor’s appointments, that took him to the park.” And they don’t have involvement in transactions or anything. So they would bring him in, they’d go wait in the lobby and then they would get him when he was ready to go.
Okay. So they made this ridiculous-sounding argument and then what happened?
So now, yeah. So, now my attorney saying, “Jason, this is bad. This isn’t really helping your case because it’s… again, now it’s going to be your word against theirs, but now there’s… now they’re flat up lying. You can’t really prove that they were there because they didn’t sign anything. I mean, yes, you have these other people that can say it, but they’re saying that they weren’t.” And so I was kind of feeling back again… back against the corner. And then it just, one day it popped into my head, wait a second, so I had the whole right wing of this bank building. Three-story bank building. There was a university on the third floor. There’s a financial bank. And then we are… our mortgage bank was… we had this whole right wing of it. And it just popped into my head, the bank has to have video cameras. The bank has to have…
Ahh.
The bank has to have cameras. And so, it was a big hoop… well, first of all, the bank said, “Oh, well, we’re probably not going to see it. Cause they just came into the lobby and then they came over into your space.” They didn’t want any part of it. They didn’t want any part of it cause they didn’t want to be dragged into it, you know? So, then my attorney had to go to them and request it and I’ll be damn, man, they… clear as day, the two sisters and the guy, wheeling him in…
Wow.
Banging on the thing.
You got the video camera footage that exposed them as lying.
Game over, yeah, game over. And we didn’t think we were going to get it because the bank didn’t want to submit it. And then I thought, well, they’re just going to say that they don’t have it. But we had a good relationship with them too. And so every time I talked to that branch manager at that bank, or who was the president of that bank, actually, I said, “Look, man, like this is serious. Like we’re not trying to involve you in it. We’re not trying… we can have a video editor edit it.” Because then they were worried about showing faces of their other customers, and all these different like compliance things. And I said, “I get it.” But, this is what’s happening. This is really, really bad for me and I need your help. And they eventually, released it. And like I said, you could see clear as day. You could see clear as day.
Wow. So, as a parenthetical there, I’ll observe, this is a good lesson on the importance of having good relationships with the key figures in the businesses that you work with because sometimes you just need to call on a favor.
That’s right. And you never know when.
And you never know when. Yeah, I just really need that security cam footage…
Yeah.
As a huge favor to me, make sure you get it.
Yup. That’s why you’d be nice to the maintenance guy. And that’s why you’d be nice to the groundskeepers. And that’s why, you know what I mean? That’s why you’d be a good person to everybody that you come across, man. Because you never know when that person saw something and you need their help or whatever, anything, right?
Classic saying in the sales field where sales or salesmen say that the way to get to an executive is to, first get to his secretary, like you befriend…
Totally agree.
All of those people and that’s how you actually get you in everywhere.
That’s the person who has the keys, right?
Good point, literally and figuratively.
That’s right. Yeah, that’s right.
Okay, so you got the footage and then you showed it to them. And their faces turned red of shame…
It was game over. Now, it’s automatically dead because they perjured themselves. There were depositions. They just straight up lied to the judge, to the… you know what I mean? To whatever that… I’m no lawyer. I don’t know what the…
Yeah.
Legal word for deposition is, but, that’s like you’re pledging a statement.
Lying under oath is a serious violation.
That’s right. That’s right. The footage was good enough that there was no denying… it was the… you know what I mean? Because that was kind of my next thing was like, oh, they’re going to say it still wasn’t them, but it was game over at that point. And we’ve got our title person and the realtor who were all there that are testing the same thing. And now, when you lie, and you try to trick people, the sympathy card goes away. You know what I mean? Now the perception is, oh, you’re trying to get something at someone else’s expense as opposed to poor them, you know?
It’s interesting to me that they didn’t think about the video camera angle before they did that. So like…
Dude, I didn’t think about the video camera angle until six months into it when it was getting more and more serious and we’re like, “Shit, we’re going to go to court. Did I make the right choice here? Maybe we should have just paid them.” And when they were… when we got that thing… but I just… I could not believe like, it’s one thing to tell a white lie, which I’m not a fan of either, but we’ve all done it and we’re not proud of whatever. It’s another thing to just fabricate a crazy ass story, like a whole made up… a whole made-up movie. It wasn’t just… I said I went to the grocery store and I went to the bar. It was this whole six-month made-up world. And just lied about the whole thing, you know?
And often, there are ways to achieve the same goal without lying. They could have said, “Yeah, we brought them there. We just didn’t go into the conference room. Because we weren’t part of the deal.” And no one would have a way to prove or disprove that.
You’re exactly right. And that’s the problem with lying, right? You don’t remember your lie. You didn’t think through your lie enough, because you’re right. Had they said, “Yeah, we were absolutely there. We brought him there, but we’re not involved in his financial decisions. And we just sat out in the hall in the waiting room in a chair.”
Yeah.
What are you going to do?
Okay. So, came over, let’s talk about some lessons you learned and things that you changed through this client horror story,
Man, that’s the crappy part about a situation like that is… you did do the right things. One thing that I learned is having cameras, having… not necessarily surveillance, but having some sort of backup of just people that are coming out just for your own protection. Like, I hate that. I hate to even say, I can’t stand thinking that I have to have video surveillance of people coming in and it just sucks, you know what I mean? It’s for the 99 out of 100 people that are good. We’ve got to make a decision out of the one that’s bad. But, again…
So…
When people can dump coffee on themselves and sue, I guess that’s just part of the world we live in now.
Maybe I would interpret that in a different way, which is…
Yeah.
I think the lesson here isn’t quite the importance of surveillance cameras, but the importance of “CYA”, Covering Your Ass, and…
Yeah. Yeah.
There are lots of different ways to do that. So like in, we’ll take it in this case and I’ll abstract it out.
Yeah.
In this case, even if there weren’t cameras, if made up of examples, if not a lot of buildings, you need to sign the name and the room you’re going to in order to get in.
Yup.
That, while that’s not… doesn’t have the emotional awesomeness of a camera, dude, it’s a signature and it matches.
Yup.
And there are different ways to achieve the same without any sort of balanced state.
You’re right. Yup.
But then on the higher, more abstracted out level is, I think it’s CYA is very, very underestimated in every part of business. And I set over it, it’s just this documentation, documentation, documentation on every little thing. One of my favorite pieces of legal advice I ever got is me 15 years ago, I was involved in a major lawsuit. Far too many zeros and I paid this lawyer an hourly fee with far too many zeros also. And one of my favorite pieces of advice that he gave me that I always remember and I’ve quoted this, friends in different situations all the time is, “You have to approach everything like you’re a judge.” And how would a judge think about it? Judge would say, you say there’s two sides and you don’t trust or know either of them. And you start with the assumption that both sides are good, honest people. What happens is this side just says, “blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” And you think he’s a good, honest person. The other side says, “blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” And you think that’s also a good, honest person. And every single thing turns into, he said, she said…
That’s right. That’s right.
And a judge has truly no way to choose when he said, she said. You have no way to side. But the thing that makes the difference is documentation, CYA. When it’s, he said, she said, but look at all the emails.
Yeah.
Look at the sign-in to the building. Look at this, look at this, look at this. Suddenly…
Yeah. Turn the odds to your favor.
He said, she said.
Yep, for sure.
Yeah.
For sure. And I mean, that was… you bring a good point and I guess like part of me, you’re 100 percent right. Part of me thought… part of me thought we did enough of that. You know what I mean? Like we, we have… there’s a notary that, like you said, there’s a notary at the closing. There’s the title agent at the closing. There’s the realtor at the closing. There’s my loan officer at the close. You know what I mean? So there was a… they signed all the, you know what I mean? Like, you would think, you’re right. CYA, but also know that people can sue people for whatever they want, for whatever reason and…
They do.
They do.
People are assholes. And what makes it complex is it’s not even the people you deal with, it’s just like the…
Yeah.
Widow of the…
Right, right. Yeah. It wasn’t the happy customer that was happy as can be that he got his house. It was somebody that wasn’t even our client. You’re right. That we didn’t even deal with.
Yeah, so as much as you can do CYA with the people you’re dealing with, it’s practically impossible to do CYA with them and everyone they’ve ever dealt with like maybe their ex-wife’s mom will go crazy and get angry at you and it’s just… it’s part of the general risk of doing business.
Yep. A hundred percent.
So, one broad category of lessons here is CYA, cameras, etc. Another broad lesson is you can protect yourself against assholes, but not their family members. And this is an interesting variation. I always try to get at least 1 good, 1 new lesson from every episode of Client Horror Stories. And 1 common lesson a lot of people say is, don’t deal with assholes and identify their souls. But this one is a new lesson. Whereas even if it’s a nice guy…
Yeah, we have a lesson in all of our different companies. It’s a simple one. It’s difficult in the beginning, difficult in the end, that we have that rule with clients. We have that rule with employees. We have that rule with businesses that we consult for anything. If they’re difficult in the beginning, they’re always difficult in the end. So, anytime that you have that too high level in the beginning, just cut it off and be done. It’ll save you all kinds of heartache, but you’re right. This guy was awesome, he was a great client. He was super cool What we didn’t factor in is difficult family members.
So, something that I usually do before I do business in a serious way with someone, like a business partner, a lot of zeros involved…
Yeah.
Taking a job, or like a very big gig, or a job for someone, or starting a business together is…
Yeah.
I make the point of meeting their spouse if they’re married or their partner.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
And I always frame it… just frame it as, oh, I’d love to meet so and so.
Yeah.
And when you’re starting…
Yeah, I’m familiar.
A big relationship, it often starts out as friendly. But what’s interesting about that is, just meeting the spouse for the 90-minute dinner or whatever it is.
That’s good. Yeah.
You can often get a sense of whether the spouse is a bitch or not.
Yeah. Yeah.
And that’s very much the…
Yeah. That whole dynamic, right?
And the whole dynamic, and you learn so much from it. And what’s interesting about that is, if you think about, let’s say the widow and the sisters or family of this person suing you, that you… That while you can’t protect yourself or no, as we’re seeing from the family… If someone’s a bitch, they’re likely… they’re related to similar people as well. Who acts as someone, so it could be a proxy to help.
Birds of a feather. Yeah, for sure.
Oh, I had forgotten about that saying. That’s right. Birds of a feather flock together.
Yep.
Exactly right. Okay, this is great. I achieved the goal of this podcast of a fun conversation with at least one new lesson. So…
Good, good.
Any other final observations, or thoughts, or wisdom you wanna impart to yourself, 20 years younger when you were starting out?
Man, I think just put your best foot forward every day. Try to do the right thing. Try to put your best foot forward, try as hard as you can, and at the end of the day, things are gonna happen. We can’t change what happens to us. We can only change how we respond to it. So, things are gonna happen that we can’t control. What we are in control of is, how we handle it in our response.
100 percent. Wonderful wisdom. Great words. Santa’s on. Jason, cousin, it was great having you here. Great getting to know you and everyone who’s made it to the end. I hope you had as much fun and learn as much as I did. Thank you for watching and farewell.
Thanks, everybody. ©2026 Client Horror Stories by Beloved by Clients – Privacy Policy, Terms & Conditions – Resources – Beloved by Clients