We were contracted by a large national brand to help detail vehicles for various events. This is back when I still was just working by myself, with a mobile detailing rig. Over time I was taking on more and more projects for them, which led me to hire employees basically mostly for servicing this one wholesale account. Eventually we were doing so much work for this one account it represented half of our gross revenue.

Right about at the peak of the busiest we had ever been, servicing this one account, everything changed. Suddenly a "corporate decision" shifted payment policy from COD to NET30. Poof, no cash flow for 30 days. That was a difficult month, but I was able to absord the cash flow hit without too much fuss. All the while we were becoming increasingly busy servicing this one account.

Sometime later, corporate policy changed invoicing to NET60. At this same time a new employee was hired, who apparently was not submitting our invoices correctly for payment. It took several months for me to figure out that our invoices weren't actually being submitted to accounts payable at all. Finally after I figured this out we stopped servicing the account due to non payment.

Pretty quickly (within days IIRC) I was able to get a meeting with someone high up from corporate who ensured our invoices would be paid ASAP. They even put the most overdue invoice on a personal expense card to show good faith that everything will be promptly taken care of because they still needed our services.

I had no reason to believe at the time that the invoices wouldn't ever be paid due to our prior track record and multi-year relationship... it was just an unfortunate series of events that created the absolute worst case scenario. So, we kept working out there, even on weekends, often accruing overtime for my employees. Unfortunately, after everything was resubmitted it still took 60 days after that for the payments to be issued.

We went about 180 days, with minimal cash flow from retail jobs, since most of our efforts were spent servicing this one wholesale account, waiting for all these invoices to be paid. At certain points I had to finance payroll to keep the business running. It was the most stressful time in my life.

Eventually everything was paid in two lump sum payments. Some time later another "corporate decision" slashed the rate they were able to pay for detailing. We stopped servicing the account not long after.