Tag: Business Tips

I have found that by creating policies that we state in our standard letter of agreement for every customer that we do business with, that we have improved our cash flow and nearly stopped bad debts. With a bit of forethought you can create scenarios where you are not required to provide services for clients that receive credit card declines or routinely do not pay on time.

Although these recommendations will not work for every business, these have worked for mine.

1. All clients pay in advance for the month for blogging and Google AdWords services. We have found that once AdWords services have been provided or blogs installed that the client, in some cases, does not feel compelled to pay if they have run into money problems. The services that we provide are not tangible (hold in your hand products) and so our payment in a financial dry period may be deferred. While not to our liking, this is the reality of the situation and why we now request payment up front.
2. When a client has received a credit card decline for services, we immediately stop services. We have found by continuing services hoping the situation will be resolved we have sometimes allowed the client to dig a deeper debt hole. By stopping immediately we lessen our potential debt damage and push the client to resolve the issue quickly.
3. Once a client has had a credit card declined but then paid, we move them from paying on the 10th of the month, if they are an auto-billing client, to payment or at least credit card authorization on the 27th of the month prior to us starting services on the 1st. If their credit card is not declined for three months, we move them back to paying on the 10th.
4. Self pay clients who consistently pay late are requested to move to auto-billing services. If the problem continues, we will stop providing services as it is too time consuming to chase a payment from one client. Sometimes a phone call and discussion on helping us to keep our prices low is in order or sensitivity to a personal situation and adjustment in writing frequency is in order, but we do not write without payment regardless of the circumstance.

These policies have been crafted over years of experience working with blogging and AdWords clients. Although our model may not work for you, we have seen our slow payers really drop off, our bad debts move to almost zero, and our monthly cash flow become more dependable.

I need a phone conferencing resource for a client project that I am just getting ready to start up on, but I don’t want to pay a lot of money and I am not sure how often I will use the service. I found one that suited my needs to a T and it may be a benefit to you as well.

First, I didn’t really need a toll free line, although with the service I selected you can pay $.07 a minute for calls from all participants and get a toll free number if you want. For me, with nearly everyone having unlimited national calls on their phones or low cost long distance, having a toll free number for all participants was not a really big need.

What I did need was a way to not have the issues of trying to use three way calling from my Verizon phone service; which is too hard to set up. I wanted a call in number and a participant ID for callers.

This is what I found from research on the Web:

1. I liked this service for $.10 a minute toll free conference calls www.ConferenceCall.com.

2. I liked this service for my free toll conference calls www.InstantConference.com. In fact, this is the one I chose to start out with due to the ease of use.

I have tested www.InstantConference.com already and the calls are very clear. The information on how to use the service is really easy and they even send a log of the call times via email.

So, if you are like me and you hate free three way calling as it seems someone is always dropped from a call or it is hard to set up to get everyone on together, you may want to consider this free conference call service.

P.S. I am not being paid to write this post for either of these two companies. I found them and researched them on my own and just wanted to share their services with you as you may benefit from them as well.

If you are a small business owner like me, you need to keep your prices low to garner business and yet keep your overhead low to make more profit. So, what can you automate or farm out to others in order to have the time to do what you do best – sell your services?

For me, it was automating much of my accounting as this was a huge time drain for me. By purchasing accounting software I made billing customers faster and more accurate.

My next step was to automate my credit card billing process. By integrating my credit card billing into my accounting software I cut multiple steps of having to manually log payments.

I then looked very carefully at the simple, no thought process, tasks that I perform daily that seem to take up time and I have trained an assistant to do them affordably. Sometimes paying a flat rate to do a task can work, especially when it is with your own children. For me, I have my kids check off that my writers have turned in their blogs and done their tweets. That way I can focus only on the problems or late items that need my personal action. My kids make summer time money and I get more time to sell jobs.

I also decided that I needed to train a helper. Not everyone needs this, but if you can find someone competent you can train a person to do some of the repetitive tasks you do daily or weekly. For me, I use a helper to add blogs that customers write themselves to their blog control panel and add links that I have selected and written up in advance to social bookmarking services. I don’t let me helper do things that really require sophisticated knowledge or decisions that the client is really paying ME for, but for the mundane tasks that are a part of certain service offerings I try to use my helper.

By really reviewing what you can move off your daily queue, you can allow yourself more time to follow-up with leads, have more time to really talk to and service existing clients and prospects, and time to have a vision for your own business.

When you are so inundated with daily tasks you have no brain power left to create new services, position your own business where it needs to be on the Web, or to look for new ways to serve your existing clientèle. So, what can you automate to get back to what you love, which is why you started your own business in the first place? Let me know what you have automated by leaving a comment below.