The Contract Mistake That's Easy to Miss
It's surprising how often we see businesses making the exact same mistake.
On the surface, everything looks fine. They have terms and conditions in place, clients are signing paperwork, and business carries on as usual.
But when we take a closer look, we often uncover issues that could leave the business exposed if something ever went wrong.
In this short video, I shares a few real examples we've come across recently, and why it's worth checking your own documents before they need to protect you.
It might be worth asking yourself... could your business be making the same mistake?
Working with you,
Ross Millen & The Millens Team
Ross Millen:
Hi. If you're involved in business, then you often have a set of standard terms and conditions. And we've just noticed recently that we've seen a couple of instances where the standard terms and conditions clearly have problems. Now, one of the first things is it's all very well to have great standard terms and conditions, but if your order form or the form that you actually get clients to sign doesn't refer to them, then they're not incorporated into the contract. So we found a client that hadn't actually connected the dots, put the two things together. So we had to redraft their order form.
Another thing is sometimes it's a very set and forget. So we found a client that had terms and conditions that wasn't up-to-date with references to corporations, law, privacy act. It had some conditions that probably could be considered to be unfair. So it needed a review. Maybe they were 10 or 12 years old and that's too long to wait to update your terms and conditions. We had another one where the client had downloaded a very useful copy of terms and conditions from the internet. The only problem was it referred to a whole lot of New Zealand legislation rather than Australian legislation. So therefore, if anyone actually read through the terms and conditions, they think, "What's going on here because we're doing business in Australia, not in New Zealand."
So all this points out to you is that if you're in business, you're using a set of standard terms and conditions, send them to us, get us to have a look at them, make sure they're up-to-date, they're fully protecting your business, and they've got no errors or omissions. So remember, I'm Ross Millen at Millens. Contact me or any of the Millens team for help with your terms and conditions.