Think for a Minute

If you could change one aspect of your business, what would it be and why? This is a standard question asked by business consultants, not to trap you into using their services but to encourage you to Think for a Minute about your business from a different perspective.
Some of the answers are obvious so let's forget about them - increased sales, more customers etc. All these would be nice and are very important to your business.
What I want you to consider is this. You have a very busy schedule running your own business, you have many varied tasks to carry out. If by changing one aspect of your business can make your business life easier - without the headaches etc which you get when things don't quite go to plan - WHAT would that Be.
Once you have decided that, there is one more question you must answer, and this is even more important than the first one. How am I going to Achieve This.
This is the first step which you can take to improving your business and you must find the time to implement that change.
Now comes the harder part. What do I do next?
Well it's not that hard really - what you have to do is put yourself in the position of being the CUSTOMER. The way things stand at the moment would you buy from your business? Write down what you think you are doing right and what you could do better. Then start working on these to improve the vision your customers get of your business.
Remember the old saying "If it isn't broken, don't try and fix it.
I hope by reading this blog I have achieved the only aim I had in writing it.
Have I got you thinking outside the box?????

Invoice Factoring - Yes or No?

In today's economic climate, many small to medium sized businesses are turning to Invoice Factoring to maintain their cash flow. Here are 4 reasons why we say the answer should be NO.
1) It is a short term solution to a long term problem. The factor will pay up to 90% of your monthly invoice total - good start, it's money in the bank fairly quickly. Alas that's where it starts to go wrong.
You immediately lose control of the process. The factor wants to first of all recover the 90% advance which he made, and more importantly make a profit for himself. He does not care how he achieves this or whether he upsets your customer or not. So you immediately start to lose customers - OK some you might not want to continue with anyway, but that's not the point - your customer base gets depleted.
2) Many of your customers will be good payers, and when they see they have to pay a factor rather than you, they will start to think there is a problem within your organisation and will start looking elsewhere for a supplier or contractor to carry out the work.Again your customer base gets depleted.
3) Any invoices which the factor fails to collect are returned to you to chase yourself, so you immediately find yourself with potential bad or doubtful debts. Your Aged Debtors Analysis is now showing invoices at least 60 days old, making them harder to collect. Also you now need to allocate resources to try and chase these up to maintain some form of equilibrium.
4) When it comes to the next month, the factor will deduct the amount of debt he did not collect from your ledger balance.That is the FULL balance (100%) So instead of 90%, you might only get 85-87%. sometimes even less so your cash flow immediately starts on a downward spiral. This trend continues month on month,
So here is the question.
Is your business strong enough financially to cope with the decrease in revenue.?
Have you got the resources to chase invoices returned by the factor?
Is your business strong enough to cope with a diminishing customer base?
Do you really want to lose control of your business's finances?
If the answer to any of these questions is NO, then your answer to using Invoice Factoring must also be NO
There are simple methods you can use to ensure YOU get PAID and get the finances your business needs. We'll tell you more in the next blog