I think there are people who are genetically against prevention and enjoy the excitement of remedial action.

So, they don’t do anything to prevent their back yards from flooding, and wait until it’s infested with alligators (brought in by the flood), and then enjoy to get busy “taking care of business”.

I think it’s some kind of masochist behaviour, and they enjoy because it makes them impressively busy. It’s the conventional wisdom of western society in general that if you’re very busy, you must be very successful.

Great points and one in particular I can identify with is the “friends” relationship.
I have a client for whom I have done an extensive amount of IT support but wasn’t always done formerly with contracts in place. The friends factor entered here for sure to my significant detriment.

When we met in 2002 the client was working from an old “white box” computer running Windows 98 (1st Edition) and using an AOL dial-up account.
I got them squared away with good workstations, a Linux file server and a firewalled DSL connection. For web presence I registered their company name for a dot-com domain and got a decent web site up and running. The site has placed page one on Google SERPs for key terms we want for the past 5+ years and have generated a fair amount of business.

Being I come from a business background I strongly pushed for a financial control system for a small manufacturing location they have but was told no as they didn’t see the value in investing about $2000 in my designing the system and putting the software in place. The job was actually worth closer to 4000-5000 USD but I was willing to discount to have this sort of project on my resume.

In the end it has cost them an estimated $150,000 USD in losses due to theft and mis-management by the plant manager and an ongoing issue with US tax authorities which will probably end with costing another $40,000 USD between back taxes and legal fees.

Interestingly, as you point out, the owner still doesn’t admit the advice I gave on this and a number of other issues was “all that valuable.” The fact is if they had acted on it they would have saved several hundred hours of time spent with lawyers and accountants and saved close to $200,000 USD as per above.

The discovery I made in all this is the owners don’t properly value their time so they don’t properly the value the time and expertise of other professionals. For example the “budget” (read inexpensive) accounting firm they hired is a major factor in the problems they are having with US tax authorities. That $75/month or so they saved by not hiring a more competent accountant doesn’t look like much of a savings now.