Pay Fast. Get Paid Faster.
Everyone loves to talk about cash flow and your CFO will work hard to cast a positive light on the bottom line on your profit and loss statement. But before complex analyses of cash flow, amortization, counting your unpaid client invoices as an asset and ignoring the ones you have not paid yet comes a more fundamental philosophy that sets everything else in the right direction. Pay fast. Get paid faster.
Step 1: Pay fast
Every body loves to pat themselves on the back about how long they can string out paying bills/invoices but if that is how to need to operate your business then you already have some cracks in the foundation.
Some truths:
- You want to be valued by the businesses that consider you their client.
- No matter how good a relationship you may think you have with them nothing will break it faster than you being a lousy payer.
- Every day you don’t pay that bill you add stress to their life and their business.
- When you pay fast you become considerably more valuable to them as a client. Many good things come from that position
Step 2: Get paid even faster
To make step 1 really work for your business you need to get paid even faster than you get paid. I have grown into a bit of a fanatic on this topic with good reason. Nothing cramped my old freight business more than how long it took us to get paid by our clients. It caused us to consistently increase our borrowing from our banks and grabbed focus from and added pressure to every other aspect of our business. Here is the rule, please repeat it with me and to your customers/clients:
“We are not a bank”
Allow me to give an example with a little story…I once had lunch with a gentlemen who, at the time, was the CEO of one of the largest freight companies in the world. He had grown it to this position in roughly 5 years from a business that was similar in size to my own. Here is how he told me he set the foundation for his amazing growth.. He took a look at his list of money he was waiting to receive from his clients and how long it was taking to get paid. He set out, himself, to visit each and every customer and tell them “We are not a bank. If you want to continue to be our customer then you need to stop treating us like one. You certainly do not want to start paying us like one.” And he was willing to lose a client if they didn’t value the relationship enough to pay promptly.
The result in this fundamental shift was a huge surge in cash in the bank (See Brickyard Brick) that gave him the power and leverage to spend money on expansion, marketing, innovation and acquiring other companies that were strapped for cash.
Reset the foundation:
- Make it clear right at the start that you will run through walls for your clients but they must pay you timely.
- Send your bills out to clients right away (I am amazed at how many vendors I have to ask to send me an invoice)
- Be relentless about collecting the money that is due to you when it is due. The more you bend on this one the farther down into the hole you will slide. “They are an important customer so it is OK” will not cut it. Want to appreciate your clients more? Work with clients that keep their word and do not take advantage of you.
Pay fast. Get paid faster. “We are not a bank”
Add those principles to your business plan, projections, VC Presentations and key goals for the year. Most importantly, drive it into the core of your business. The results will be found in YOUR bank.
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Thanks for the good article. I think this is a healping article for running successful bussiness.
Some truths: a) You want to be valued by the businesses that consider you their client. b) No matter how good a relationship you may think you have with them nothing will break it faster than you being a lousy payer. c) Every day you don’t pay that bill you add stress to their life and their business. d) When you pay fast you become considerably more valuable to them as a client. Many good things come from that position.
Our policy is to wait 90 days for payment, and if they haven’t paid we take down their site and change their admin passwords. It’s a bit harsh, but we usually get paid within 24 hours of this. Clients know going in that this will happen to delinquent accounts.
Hope can get this works on the practice, there is to much useful tips to sucess.
As a freelance designer/developer this rings too true. When I started I went through months of trying to track down clients who hadn’t yet paid their last bill for a site that was now fully functional and running. They were getting full use of my services for which they haven’t paid.
My solution was to setup subdomains where I host their site where I develop, test, debug and get final approval on. Once they approve the final design I receive the last payment and they get their site. They don’t get it until that point.
I actually had one client tell me that he didn’t have the money for the last payment so I didn’t give him his site. Two months later he paid the final payment and got his site, when I asked him why he waited so long he said “I was planning on giving you the final payment in two months when I had enough money.”
Interesting read, thanks.
Sorry be a nit-picker folks, but there are a lot of spelling mistakes and grammatical errors in this article.
I figured you’d want to know so you could fix it.
Our policy is to wait 90 days for payment, and if they haven’t paid we take down their site and change their admin passwords. It’s a bit harsh, but we usually get paid within 24 hours of this. Clients know going in that this will happen to delinquent accounts.
Really instructive article.
Thx!
Thanks for the good article. I think this may help me with some difficult clients in the future ;)
You’re so right, people can really push things. I used to be quite flexible on payment, but for the last few jobs we’ve been asking for 50% up front and then they only get the site once the remaining 50% arrives. Works a treat.
Nice advice Howard but you left a few things out. At what point should you get the mafia get involved and what size of pipe wrench would you recommend?
Greg, may I suggest the Heavy-Duty Straight Pipe Wrench
It’s “Sturdy cast-iron housing and I-beam handle with full floating forged hook jaw” really works like a charm ;)
Excellent point Greg. Perhaps in addition to “We are not a bank” I should add “But we CAN treat you like a loan shark.” ;)
One thing that helped my business (web design and development) decrease payment time was including a prepaid, self-addressed (to my business) check envelope with the clients return address in the final invoice that I send them. Once less thing for them to worry about.
While it is always helpful to build in ways that help clients pay faster I have found that setting the mindset right, your and theirs, at the start is what makes the long term difference. With online banking and automated payable systems it takes seconds to make a payment. They simply have to make that task a priority because of the impact it will have on the relationship between your 2 companies.
Too many clients make paying you far less important than they should and often turn it all into a game. As soon as you join them in this game you have lost.
Barry, your idea fits my personality more. By including the payment envelope (or instructions for an online payment option), you’re subtly telling them that you want to be paid right away. Saying “we’re not a bank” might be appropriate for the freight industry, but I think you’ll get better results with more subtlety in the professional services.
Appreciate the concern Dusty. “We are not a bank” is meant to be more of a mindset than something you actually say to a client.
I brought the mentality that I learned (the hard way) at my freight business to my marketing and interactive business and it has proved invaluable.
In my experience, people do not pay poorly because they could not find an envelope to send the check in. It certainly is a nice touch but they have to WANT to pay you promptly first.