>Was this during your last self-employed period, or being an employee. I'm thinking of doing some more work with a friend of mine. He's been on his own for a while, and his biggest problem seems to be finding reputable people to work with.

This was when I owned a small consulting company of 10 employees. A major client of ours was a foreign company. They decided (without telling us) to pull out of the US market. Literally, one day I went to their office and they were gone. And they left owing us many tens of thousands of dollars.

>He's a hardware guy. He just finished a sub-contracting job, where the main contractor is claiming that because they didn't bid enough, they can't afford to pay him everything they owe him.

That's BS. Did your friend have a contract of his own?

>If you are able to put together the marketing type seminars you talked about, make sure "Getting Paid!!!!!" is one of the seminar topics.

I wasn't thinking of giving any marketing seminars :-) I was thinking about, maybe, doing something about best practices. Me? Market? Hmmm.........