So when do you throw in the towel?

General question - So when do you throw in the towel?  Pull the emergency shoot, chug a bottle of beer and jump off the plane?  Just a random thought while I'm here, working on a project that will not die, Sunday night, trying to get an f-ing submission to the Nazi-Township for 10am Monday.  52 page comment letter.  Why am I doing this?  Shot I just pull the plug and head back to my previous brain-dead 8-5 job as a permit reviewer?

I know it's not that easy.  I like to company I work for, we do not have a lot of dead wait, great people, but it's this one specific project, that sucks the life out of you, once a month, for who knows how long.

Background - former engineer who work for my company, solicited a client for a land development project.  Simple, a warehouse. Next step, proceeds to spend a **** to of time, and doesn't know anything about land development.  Then, he leaves my company, and goes to work for the developer (the client).  Trouble ensues, we find out they (the developer) didn't pay a fucking dime in 6 months... now, we realize that the entire site is eff'd.  No one in my company, cares for or even gives two shits about land development.  We are rich in oil/gas and landfill work. LD is not our forte.  Same guy, who worked for us, even denied his own fucking invoice when he switched teams. WTF?

Oh yeah, and when our CAD tech asked said former employee about how to design a landscape plan, he said "google it"... WTF.  I fucking hate this guy.  I hate to admit, he was a decent friend. F - him.

Anyway, end of rant.

Brian_PE

@Brian_PE Seems like if the client isn't paying, you should halt your work until they're current on payment and at that point reevaluate the budget. If the only future work you'd be losing by separating from this client is more LD work, it doesn't seem like it'd be detrimental to your company as a whole to pull the plug.

Are you the one in charge of making these decisions or do you have to rely on supervisors to lay down the law?

If LD isn't your firms bread and butter and the client hasn't paid, I would bail on the project. Issue the client a notice that all work has been halted due to non-payment of invoices. It is amazing how fast clients pay when they need a project completed. You are running a business not a charity.

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Let me tell you about the shell building from hell I'm working on...................

A notice of lien on the intended development usually gets their attention as well. 

if you pull out of the job, you should also notify the town as well so the original engineer can't revise plans himself and try to pass it off like it is your company doing the work. At this point it should be payment and revised contract, no work being done on the plans. 

I have just recently halted work for a client due to non-payment.  We have 3-4 projects in design and 8-10 under construction with them.  The problem has been building up for about a year with multiple promises on their part and multiple reminders on my part.  I finally told them we could not continue without payment.  They blew up, said I was being unreasonable and said they wouldn't be using us any more for design.  These guys owe more than all of our other clients combined, by twice.  I've been way more reasonable than I had to be and I'm the jerk?  I have never filed (pulled?) a lien, but really need to look into it.   

At my old place, my boss was terrified to put a lien on properties for non-payment in case he didn't get more work from that client - but if you ask me (he never did), is that a client you really want to have anyway? My new place just put a 700k lien (probably more that the other place did in work in a year) on a property like nobody's business.

Good idea about notifying the town. I forget that there are lousy clients would try to pass off their work as your own. I had a client try to pull that and he had his butt handed to him by the city. It is way too common that contractors do not want to pay their bills.

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Oh yeah, way past time to bail. No money, no worky.