The importance of tailoring your terms and conditions

Businesses rightfully pride themselves on their unique offering to their customers and their standard terms of business should reflect that uniqueness. At Brachers we take the time to get to know what makes each client’s business special, and apply our expertise and experience to tailor terms of business that reflect that.

This article forms part of our three-part series, focussing on the effectiveness of your terms of business. In our first article we discussed the benefits of updating your terms of business to ensure they are still fit for purpose, including the consideration of a re-alignment to its current needs and activities. In this article we summarise the key reasons for tailoring your terms and conditions, and in our final article we consider the pitfalls when seeking to ensure your terms and conditions form a binding contract with your customers.

Why should your terms and conditions be tailored to your business?

Each business comprises a unique combination of their particular business proposition, and the risks and challenges they face in delivering that to its customers.  The one-size-fits all approach so commonly taken to terms of business misses a vital opportunity to effectively target the business’s core risks while also projecting and promoting its values and personality.

Some of the key issues and risks arising out of using terms of business which have not been tailored to a particular business include:

• A mismatch between the legal terms and how the business operates in practice.  This is unfortunately all too common.  Whether it’s terms which assume a process for agreeing orders which does not reflect the business’s actual sales process, or which assume the goods ordered are being delivered when in fact they are to be collected (or vice versa), any mismatch will leave the business wholly exposed in the event of any issue arising with an order, as no effective legal terms will have been agreed governing that issue.
• Overly complex and lengthy terms.  The best template/generic standard terms must, by definition, cover a broad category of business types meaning significant portions are likely to be irrelevant to a particular business.  This results in terms which are significantly more difficult to interpret, and which are likely to appear to be materially more burdensome on customers than is in fact the case.  This can both increase the burden on staff trying to manage such terms with customers and, at worst, can result in losing customers who are put-off by having to agree to those terms.

How can we help?

At Brachers, our Commercial team are passionate at Brachers that every business deserves a properly drafted set of business terms.  To that end, if you are concerned your terms are not tailored appropriately to your business, we would encourage you to get in touch for a no-obligation discussion on how we might be able to help.

This content is correct at time of publication