Our employee stole from us, and our bank let it happen. Now, we’re tougher, smarter business owners
When a 1099 employee stole thousands from HVAC-R in Douglasville, Georgia, it almost sank the young company, which struggled to get answers, support, and accountability from their banking partner.
Author Novo
In December 2022, Chasty Wilson had the unpleasant task of firing an employee.
The manager of HVAC-R — a Douglasville, Georgia-based HVAC and refrigeration business that she owns with her husband, third-generation HVAC technician Steven Wilson — sat down with one of their repair techs and let him go. He had broken a few cardinal rules of the company: He was showing up late to jobs, and he still hadn’t signed up for HVAC school to earn additional certifications, which the company requires of all contractors after three months.
“It wasn’t all negative feedback, but we had to let him know he had gotten lax,” Wilson says. “We’re big on training and helping people grow, whether with us or in their own career. In our line of work, small things matter. You don’t know what you’re doing, you could blow someone’s house up. Continuing education matters.”
The conversation ended on good terms; the employee apologized, and the Wilsons offered to be a reference for him. They felt like they’d done what they could to support him over the last few months. Wilson and the young technician had talked about ways to build financial stability through saving and budgeting; she’d even given him his first paycheck a little early to help steady his finances.
So a month later, when Wilson got a call from her bank to verify some checks she’d written to him, she assumed it was nothing more than routine caution.
“I was trusting,” she says. “I didn’t have any reason to question him.”
But after the bank rattled off about five check numbers, Wilson logged in to her accounting platform and saw that all the payments the bank was inquiring about had already been cashed — in some cases, multiple times.
“I’m embarrassed that I didn’t notice it sooner, but I started to see that check 100, for example, had been cashed more than once — and each time, our bank released the money,” Wilson says. She ended the call, printed out a stack of documents, and raced to her local branch to sort out what she was starting to process as theft.
In total, the former contract employee had written and cashed $6,000 worth of fraudulent checks — enough to seriously strain the finances of the young business, which had launched just two and a half years earlier and was learning to manage the monetary ebb and flow of a seasonally-driven business.
“The bank said, ‘We didn’t release these funds,’” Wilson recalls. “And I said: ‘Yes you did!’ I was there for two hours, sitting in this bank, being told I had signed off on them, as though it was all my fault. I kept saying, why would you cash check 100 from the same account over and over? They were never able to give me a straight answer.”
After filing a police report and freezing their existing accounts, the HVAC-R owners were able to move forward. The bank reimbursed them, but it required a lot of paperwork, and a lot of time.
“We couldn’t access our money,” Wilson says. “We were strapped. I take accountability for what we did wrong, but it started a financial tornado.”
Three years later, the skies have cleared up for HVAC-R, and Wilson and her husband have emerged as tougher business owners more likely to think defensively. They’re still committed to hiring young talent and supporting career growth through education — they even dream of opening a trades school — but they’re more proactive about protecting their business.
“Every action has a reaction,” Wilson says. Here are some of her hard-won lessons — and the most impactful ways she changed the way HVAC-R does business:
1. Scrutinize every business partner’s offering before committing.
“We started with a major bank and found it to be amazing for small business, but after this experience, we moved on. I was never able to get a straight answer, never connected with a customer service rep that understood my business, and only got empathy from one kind employee at our local branch. Reimbursement took a long time — long enough that we couldn’t access our money.”
2. Embrace online tools that create more transparency.
“This forced us to get more organized, and it forced me to learn Quickbooks — which I hated at first, but now I just love everything about it. And some of our subcontractors prefer to be paid via Zelle, but that’s fine with me too — as long as we have that digital paper trail.”
3. Embrace 1099 workers to minimize risk while growing.
“When you’re a small business, W2 employees come with so much more risk, so for now, we’re staying with contractors. But we have to protect ourselves there, too. Not everyone requires a certificate of insurance from subcontractors — but I do. If I send a subcontractor to a restaurant and they mess something up, it’s not paid from my insurance, but from theirs. I implemented this rule after the experience with the theft.”
4. Create strict boundaries — and stick to them.
“With the contractor that stole from us, when we hired him, we gave him his first check a little early. We thought we were just helping him out, but looking back, I think it set a tone that we were lenient. I’m always going to be accountable for the role I play in our business, and now I know to build and keep boundaries.”