The Insanity that Keeps Business Owners Up at Night

I’ve alluded to these stories before but I want to tell one of them again, with an up date.  These are things that you could never foresee when you plan a business.  Everyone who has never done this would argue that somehow they are too smart or talented to allow these things to happen . . . but in reality, there is nothing they can do.

We we chose our office space, I picked the newest and prettiest office building on our island. I think it was a smart choice. As part of our SBA loan, we had to sign an agreement that I would not leave this space for six years, the duration of the loan.

We we first moved in, and had given out our address to all important entities, we noticed we weren’t getting any mail. Now the Post Office is just up the street and I’m sitting here typing and can see the top of the building easily. But, to my horrors, the Post Office told me that they did not deliver to this building.  I spoke to the Post Master and he said they “never would and never will.”  That was the only reason given.  They had also sent back all of our mail as “no such address.”

This caused a huge amount of nightmares including having our malpractice cancelled because we didn’t pay the premiums. It also caused a stir with many of our vendors, such as insurance companies.

Finally we had to get a PO Box at the Post Office while we continued our fight.  We had to give a “change of address” to the PO Box. This created a month delay in getting our payments and almost caused us to go bankrupt last summer.

I was about to give up the fight in December, when Regence and a couple other insurance companies announced that they would no longer do business with practices who receive their mail via PO Box.  One insurance company had already denied $3,000 in claims because of having a PO Box.  I had to move forward more aggressively.

The Post Office finally agreed to deliver mail but only of the mailman didn’t have to get out of his truck.  There was only one spot where a mailbox could go. The landlords denied permission to put it there.  I had to make the empty threat to move out (empty because if we moved out we would violate our contract with SBA and I would be force to pay them $65,000 immediately).

So, finally the landlord approved the site. The post master took another month to give his approval. Then we put in our “change of address” to all entities. Oddly, every single insurance company, which refused to do business with us because we used a PO Box, only had PO Boxes. They are bullies and hypocrites!

So, while we remain working our asses off, suddenly our income started to dry up again.  Today, we finally had the chance to work on that. It turns out that if you do a “change of address,” in our case from a PO Box to a street address, it is counted as a “move.” So, if a practice moves, then the insurance companies denies payment until they credential you at a new site. This is so frustrating and they don’t care if this makes no sense. Any excuse to delay payments makes them richer. The last one, which had not paid us in a month, was medicare. We called them and said because we moved they would withhold all payments for 4 months. That was the last straw for me so I called my congressman this morning and we are working on fixing this.

But who would have guessed that this would create such a nightmare for a small business.