Tag: Business Tips

If you have been in business as long as I have (since 2001), you’ve had customers who are slow payers and no payers. But, in reality most customers do really want to pay you on time, some just need a little help being more timely than others.

I have found as my business has grown that my tolerance for slow payers has rapidly diminished. Slow payers directly affect my own pay check, as a small business owner. So, what do you do to help slow payers be on-time payers? For me, I changed several of my billing procedures. This is what I have done:

1. Added online credit card payments both with Sage Payments (integrated with my accounting software) and PayPal.
2. Instituted a policy that self credit card payers had to pay for services earlier than automatic credit card payers (where we process the card for them).
3. Added in our contract we don’t provide services until we have payment in advance.
4. Really policed my payment dates. Stopped services if we did not get payment in our contracted due dates.
5. Sent gentle reminders before the payment deadline to all self paying clients.
6. Gave more payment options.

In fact on number 6, I am getting ready to do just that with Pay Pal’s new enhanced recurring payment options. You can read more about this service we are now enacting in this link in the previous sentence. This new program allows you to give your client’s more flexibility in how they can pay. You can schedule monthly payments at different amounts, create monthly repeating subscription-type payments, and even installment payments. You and the client can also decide a monthly spend up to amount so you can bill automatically variable amounts each month.

For me, getting customers to pay on time is still about giving them options. However, chasing around your payments does take time and adds to your overhead. For my business, I am also instituting a new program – if you don’t pay on time two months in a row, you will now have to choose one of Pay Pal’s enhanced recurring payment programs or we will simply consider that we are not a good business match for you.

Slow payers and no- payers can really affect your bottom line and create an atmosphere where you are forced to raise your fees to all customers, as your overhead increases to cover the time you spend to collect payments from slow payers. So, help customers to help themselves (by keeping your own prices low) by offering more payment options.

P.S. PayPal did not pay me to write this post, I am signed up and will be using their new payment program and thought it was excellent for my own business use and wanted to share the details with you as well.

I have just returned from a week long vacation with my family to the Grand Canyon and for the first time ran into some real email and communication problems. In this world of global communication we can easily forget that remote locations are still using dial up connections or that hotel Internet connections can be excruciatingly slow when everyone is checking their email at the same time.

On this last vacation I found my Verizon Internet enabled phone and IMAP email account at Live.com indispensable. I found that having and online email account was a life saver and that you can just not count on being able to download your email when you travel.

Although I did intensive technology planning for my trip – making sure my hotel had high speed Internet, I never bargained that my connection speed would be so slow and that it would be incredibly difficult to work online. As I am getting ready to leave for Russia at the end of July, I am now planning again to be out of the office and work globally.

This is my action plan for stateside travel next time:

1. Get a Verizon wireless card for my laptop. Then I have my own connection.
2. Make sure all email accounts I use have online access – in case I can’t download my mail.

I did find that this last trip that my Google Voice account was a terrific asset. I was able to receive my messages when I wanted them, could screen callers to answer when it was convenient to me, and received transcriptions of calls via SMS to my mobile email account.

Sometimes even when you have planned in advance being away from your home computer network can be problematic, what I learned was to be self reliant.

Yes you can operate your business profitably even in a tight economy. The key is to understand your customers and to understand your marketplace. I have found that doing a market analysis is something that is well worth the time and effort before you consider raising your prices.

Several years ago when we restructured our blogging program, I did a market analysis. I priced out seven different blogging firms to identify what they offered, how they offered their services, and what their price structure was. What I found out was that our own services were so far below the market average that we had real room to not only pay our writers more, but to make a sideline business a core business for our firm.

Our approach has always been to offer great service but at an affordable price; one typically below the market average and when I restructured our blogging services I maintained this same model. Although we have had a few price changes and word count changes over the years, we have continued to show strong growth in this sector of our business.

Most recently one adjustment we have made is to move our older blog clients to blogging prices at a higher rate if they were not purchasing writing services for a minimum of three days a week. In this case, several clients have chosen to move back to a three day a week schedule instead of staying at the two day a week schedule at a slightly higher per post rate. Not only does this help the writer with more income and increased productivity, but helps to cover our overhead costs to monitor and manage client blogs with increased income.

By making sure that you provide great value and responsive service and are still priced below your competition you can increase your pricing to improve your own business profitability. Just make sure that you understand your marketplace and have differentiated your services clearly for the consumer so that your desire to improve profitability doesn’t end up chasing away new customers.