Ferrandino and Son review: property maintenance company not paying sub contractors

This company preys on small businesses, as I am sitting here writing off over $20,000.00 that they owe us, I just don't understand how this happened. We signed a contract with Ferrandino and Son on May 17th, 2022. We were to take over weekly landscape maintenance on all of the Salt Lake County, Utah Walgreens stores, 18 total. We were told that emergency clean-ups had been performed and that we would just take over maintenance. The following day we started receiving complaints from our account manager. The account manager was complaining about the state of the Walgreens stores, store managers were upset with the condition. We explained that we just took over the account and would get the stores into compliance. As we started showing up to these locations they were in a very poor state. Overgrown weeds, garbage everywhere, trees and bushes overgrown. We had our crews spend extra weekend hours to clean up the stores, when we started submitting invoices, they were rejected. As we started submitting invoices for weekly maintenance, they were also rejected. I began to contact their invoicing department, they just passed me on to supervisors. After 6 weeks of rejected invoices, I told the supervisor we wanted to give 10 days' notice, we were told that we were bound by a contract and that if we backed out, any money owed us would be used to pay another company to come to perform the maintenance. So we continued hoping that promises of payment would be kept. We just got deeper and deeper. On August 18th we gave our 10 day notice, 3 days later they sent us a termination letter. Now they owe us over 20K and say they owe us nothing because they have to get someone else to perform the maintenance. They terminated the contract, and then waited weeks to find another landscape company. Wouldn't they have had to pay the maintenance for the 3 weeks that they had no landscaper? Why does that come out of our money? For 3 months we paid out of our pocket to maintain 18 Walgreens, Why?