Are You being Respected or Are you a Vendor?

There is a certain undercurrent of indifferent cruelty that runs through Indian corporate life, and it shows up most starkly in how we treat the people we owe money to. We call it “process”, “finance cycle”, “system delays”. But underneath the jargon sits something older and uglier. It is the ingrained societal belief that if you are waiting to be paid, you must be lower in the food chain.

How are You coping with being a VENDOR?

On the phone, on an email, or in meetings, these words you often hear, sound harmless - “Please loop in the vendor.” or “Has the vendor raised the invoice?”

Except that the “vendor” in question might be a founder who has built a product you cannot ship without, a design studio that has carried your brand for a decade, or a former CEO who now advises your leadership team. When the words are used so casually, we forget that these are not anonymous suppliers of office stationery, but partners who are enablers of critical parts of your business.

The problem isn’t the word. It’s the smirk that often travels with it. The indulgent tone. The patronising, “Don’t worry, this is a large, reputed company. You will get paid… eventually.”

Eventually does not pay salaries. Eventually does not keep servers on. Eventually does not tell a founder’s child that the school fees will, in fact, clear this month. For startups and smaller firms, cash flow is oxygen. You may think you are managing “working capital”. In reality, you are squeezing the windpipe of the very ecosystem you claim to support.

Talk to any SaaS, design, training, or consulting founder and the story is depressingly similar. Just this last week alone, there were three company founders on Linkedin who wrote heart wrenching posts about being a "vendor" - disrespected, and unpaid for months, for services their people delivered on time. Two of them are former CEO's of large institutions who run startups whose systems and services are critical for the functioning of a number of BFSI firms in India.

Their narrative was all too familiar to anyone who has made the transition. You deliver on time, you rework endlessly, you respond to midnight pings. Then you spend months chasing your own money. A company boasting thousands of crores in revenue takes six or seven months to clear a few lakhs and flinches at a late-payment clause in a contract, as if accountability were an insult.

Working capital, not competition, quietly strangles many young businesses in this country. When a profitable giant sits on dues to smaller firms for half a year while proudly posting record profits and shiny new offices, that is not “prudence”, it is moral bankruptcy dressed up as corporate sophistication.

A Reflection of Social Behaviour

This behaviour doesn’t happen in a vacuum. In India we are a society that still struggles to treat domestic helpers with basic dignity, even as we give lectures on equality and inclusion. The helper (nah, lets just call her a maid), the lady who takes care of your human or canine child while you are at work, but is not allowed to travel in the same elevator as their employer, because they must take the "Servants' lift". The security guard who is invisible and his smile and greeting remain unacknowledged until he eventually gives up. The driver who chauffers the child to the international school in a Porsche, and eats on the staircase. And yet we bristle with righteous anger when our own bosses micromanage and disrespect us.

Is it any surprise that the same mindset walks into the office in a crisp Arrow shirt sporting an MNC badge? The “office help” and the “vendor” sit in the same mental bucket - people you can keep waiting, people who should be “grateful for the opportunity”.

And that’s where this stops being merely a moral issue and becomes a strategic one.

If you are a CXO in a large firm this part is for you

Dear CXO - while you are busy talking about innovation, ESG, “partner ecosystems” and “India’s startup story”, your managers are quietly torching your brand.

Every delayed payment that needs five follow-ups tells the market you do not honour your word. Every condescending response to a polite reminder tells founders you see them as supplicants, not partners. Every refusal to accept interest-on-delay clauses announces that you expect a one-way street on accountability - you can penalise vendors for being late, but you will not be held to the same standard.

Founders talk. Agencies talk. Consultants talk. Screenshots of email chains and WhatsApp messages travel faster than your brand films. The next time you wonder why the best startups prefer working with your global competitors or smaller, more agile clients, remember this - reputation compounds faster than revenue. You cannot claim to be an “ecosystem leader” while treating your ecosystem like an ATM with no withdrawal limit and no recourse.

My father taught me a rule I have never broken. He drilled into me as I was growing up: "always pay on time for services rendered". Not because the law demands it. Because character demands it.

After a long stint in senior leadership, he briefly became an entrepreneur, providing a critical service to several large firms who he had known for years. Overnight, he became a vendor. I was 20-years old and in college, and remember a day when he sent me to collect a long overdue payment that had been promised that morning at 10am. At 1pm I was still waiting at the reception despite a few reminders to the concerned official by the embarassed elderly receptionist who had known and respected my father for many years. Then the official nonchalantly walked out for lunch. I got up, stood at the door blocking his exit. In a firm tone, I reminded him that I had been waiting for a cheque for three hours which had become due two months before. I then remember telling him: 'I don't expect you to respect my time, but I do expect your company to be professional enough to meet your financial commitments just as you expect others to meet yours.'

I got the cheque in the next five minutes. My father told me that evening he was proud of me for standing up for my rights. End of that year he quietly closed down his venture. The transition from CXO to 'vendor' is not for everyone, he told me.

In three decades of leadership roles and now as a founder myself, his lesson on paying for services rendered, has stayed with me. I am firm in my belief that if I have to beg you to honour an agreed timeline, I am not your partner. I am your prey. When my firm or my colleagues are treated like that, I call it out. And if it does not change, I walk away, irrespective of the size of the logo on your office gate.

The irony is that this is not a complex problem to solve. You do not need another policy, another task force, another offsite. You need one non-negotiable principle that everyone from a junior manager to the CFO understands - in this company, we pay our partners on time, and we treat them with respect, not as "vendors". No exceptions. No “finance cycle” excuses. No hiding behind “the system”.

Your balance sheet may not notice the difference this quarter. But the ecosystem will. So will the next generation of leaders watching how you behave. And it will define your legacy, and the reputation of your firm.

In the end, your culture is not what your posters and annual reports say it is. Your culture is defined by what you do when no one is watching - how you treat the people who are at your mercy today and potentially cannot punish you tomorrow,