The boss of a print finishing business fears his firm might not survive the collapse of company that owed him tens of thousands of pounds.
Ian Chamberlain, managing director of Tudor Specialist Print Finishers, said his business lost £40,000 following the collapse of Taylor Bloxham Group last week.
He said he was keeping his 18 staff up to date on what was happening.
Mr Chamberlain said he had worked with Leicester-based Taylor Bloxham for 28 years but had seen it go downhill from being a leader in its sector.
He said: “How we will survive I do not know.
“If you take £40,000 away from a company like ours, with a turnover of £600,000-700,000, and also lose the work we were doing for them, it’s like a double whammy.
“We’ve never been hit this badly before. I’ve already told staff I do not know what I’m going to do.
“We’ve got some funds we can draw on, and work that is due in, but about 15 years ago we were owed £15,000, and we had to lose two members of staff.
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“We won’t do what Taylor Bloxham did because we will keep the staff informed and if we can pay them we will.”
Some 150 workers lost their jobs last Thursday when Taylor Bloxham Group went into administration.
As well as suppliers losing money, staff who worked on the production side of the business revealed they were laid off just one day before their monthly wages were due.
The group, which had been trading for eight decades and was headquartered in Beaumont Leys, on the outskirts of Leicester, said it had faced mounting pressures following “severe cashflow pressures”.
Administrators were able to sell one of its four divisions, a mailshot specialist called Mailbox, saving 21 jobs.
However, the other divisions – printer Taylor Bloxham; point of sale specialist Instore; and warehousing, distribution and e-commerce division FastAnt – were closed down.
Mr Chamberlain, whose business is based in Wigston, just south of Leicester, said the writing had been on the wall for Taylor Bloxham for some time.
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He said: “It’s been a shambles for 10 years and was getting worse and worse over the past three or four months.
“It started to follow a pattern, with phones calls not being answered and e-mails not being answered, and we started to feel like we were just a number on a spread sheet.
“There are people that will be able to stand the losses or are insured against them, but there will be dozens of suppliers like us – unsecured creditors who will get nothing.
“There’s a one man band running his own van owed £9,000 and another owed £42,000.”
Another supplier, who worked with the group for more than a decade, said they were more than £10,000 out of pocket.
The company owner, who did not want to identify his Leicestershire-based business, said he had found it hard to speak to anyone at Taylor Bloxham Group since early December.
He said: “I’ve got e-mails to prove they have not replied since last year.
“You have to question what was going on. They were a top notch business, a company that had invested in machinery, but everything went wrong.
“We won’t get anything.”
A machine operator, who worked at Taylor Bloxham for 24 years, said it was a “disgrace” that he and many of his colleagues were laid off the day before payday.
The staff member said it was clear that the group had been struggling since the autumn, with paper and ink supplies not coming in.
He said: “The salaried staff were paid on January 28 but the drones on the shop floor went unpaid.
“We’ve had to apply to get the money back through the government. I don’t know how long that will take.
“I’m a bit older than a lot of the people there, and haven’t got debts, but I don’t know how the younger ones with mortgages and kids will manage.
“We were told absolutely nothing about what was happening.
“I’ve no idea what I’m going to do, we’re still sifting through the wreckage.
“They had not been paying some of the suppliers for a long time, and struggled to get things like paper and ink and cutting knives.
“It’s just a shame. Taylor Bloxham was a big business.
“The business had prided itself on its reputation within the industry, but it seems at the end that they didn’t care any more.”
In a statement administrators at FRP business advisors said: “The company has suffered severe cashflow pressures, which had become unsustainable in recent months following a period of losses and a tightening of supplier terms.
“FRP had been working with the directors of the company on an accelerated sale process with the aim of securing a sale for the entire business and had received interest from several parties.
“However, ultimately, an appropriate offer was only received for the Mailbox division for which a sale has been completed, protecting 21 jobs.
“The joint administrators will now focus on maximising returns for creditors through selling the remaining assets of the business and providing support for all affected employees.”