The Credit Curse

Yes, that's The Credit Curse, not The Credit Crunch.

"The Credit Crunch" has become something of an ageing cliche, something to do with banks which either went bust, or didn't quite - and were then bailed out by the taxpayer.

It's a nicely technical term which doesn't really capture the ongoing and, if anything, the increasingly severe implications for smaller business - hence "The Credit Curse".

I've come across three quite separate examples just today.

A friend who runs an online services business was telling us over lunch over he has completely changed his payment ethics. He said, "I don't pay now unless people are screaming. You have to be like this, even if you don't like it, just to survive."

Another friend, a web designer, told me how he has become much organised and determined in charging for his time, saying, "People are expecting more and more for less, or even free. They are phoning me with what seems like small queries - the kind of thing normally I'd just deal with - and then trying to slip more and more into that space between a quick query and formally charged work. I simply can't do it all for free in this way."

A third friend described to me the stresses within her commercial properties rental business. It has taken until now until strain has begun to show on a fair few of her client businesses. Other items would appear to have been cut in the face of some ongoing poor trade - but now the recession is beginning to bite deeper on some really core expenditure, like rents.

- It's no mere Credit Crunch out there for a lot of businesses; there's widespread evidence of a Credit Curse, with money and goodwill getting very tight as slack in the trading chain simply runs out. This is no mere technical monetary thing in the upper reaches of the financial system.

Malcolm Evans is a founding partner of The Cultureship Practice, which specialises in business ethics and corporate culture.