Tag Archives: Entrepreneur

How To Stop Attracting Deadbeat Clients – Purple Clover

In this business advice post for Purple Clover, I share three strategies for consultants, freelancers, and entrepreneurs to get clients who pay:

A Bureau of Labor statistic shows that by 2020, 40% of the workforce will be temporary. You probably already know someone who is a consultant or freelancer, and you may be one yourself. When you earn your salary project-by-project, it is critical that you get paid what you are owed in a timely manner. If you’re finding it difficult to collect, here are three strategies to follow:

Make collection a part of the process from the beginning.

Ask for a deposit. Charge a registration fee. The easiest way to avoid late payments is to make payment the first step in working with you. If you need to get started before money changes hands, ask early and ask often about getting paid. If you work onsite at the client’s office, ask to meet with accounts payable when you’re introduced to everyone else. Don’t wait till the end of a project before collecting on your fee.

Read two more strategies at Purple Clover: How To Stop Attracting Deadbeat Clients.

You Already Know How to Grow Your Business: 7 Key Insights From Your Own Data

This business coaching post originally appears as a guest blog for Practice Pay Solutions eUniversity:

As an entrepreneur, you face many decisions that do not have clear-cut answers.

Should you discount your prices and under what circumstances? Should you say Yes to a client that is less-than-ideal? Should you pursue the big client with a long sales cycle or the small client with a lower purchase point?

Many decisions ideally depend on your particular business situation.  It might make sense to discount to test a lower price point but not if your business brands itself as a premium service. It might make sense to say Yes to less-than-ideal clients if it means that you sustain your business long enough to build your ideal client base (but you will have less time and energy for ideal clients that do come along). It might make sense to prioritize the big clients with long sales cycles but you might run out of cash (yet, if you prioritize the small clients you might have cash and then be hard-pressed to grow your revenues).

If the best answer for YOU is that it depends on your business, then key answers are revealed when you get to know your business. Here are 7 insights you can get by looking at your business data:

1. Burn rate
Your burn rate is your average monthly costs. Unless you have a day job or spouse to cover your living expenses, you should include living expenses in your burn rate. Along with your cash position, knowing your burn rate allows you to calculate how long you can wait for your first sale. You might not be able to wait for the big clients initially until you build a larger cash position.

2. Time to sell by client
If you are already in business, look at past sales and how long it takes for you to land clients. Maybe that big client isn’t that slow to close relative to your average sale, and it’s worth waiting.

3. Time to collect
Calculate the time from when you make a sale to when you collect the revenue. Compare this to your current cash needs. This tells you how long it takes for sales to convert to cash. If it’s longer than you’d like, you might offer an early-pay discount

4. Cumulative revenues by date
If you order your sales by date and see how your revenues accumulate over time, you can see what months, quarters or seasons are better for sales. Plan your sales and marketing according to the rhythms of your own business. Save your operations, finance and back office projects for the slow season. Save your discounts for the slow season.

5. Revenues by client
Know what each client contributes to your total sales. If a single client accounts for the majority of revenues, you are exposed to that client and may want to prioritize diversifying your client base. If that client is less-than-ideal, you might want to let them go, but only when you can absorb the loss with new business.

6. Cumulative revenues by client
If you order your clients by how much they purchase, from largest to smallest, you can calculate what percentage of cumulative revenues each subsequent client contributes. Many businesses find that their top-grossing clients account for a disproportionately high share of the overall revenue (Pareto’s Principle says that 80% of income is generated by just 20% of a population, and this 80/20 phenomenon has been noticed in other population measures). If 80% of your revenue is generated by 20% of your clients, then you might want to rethink how you manage these relationships – how you define who is ideal, how you dole out discounts or other incentives, how you spend your time.

7. Year over year calculations
How do the above measures look year-over-year? Are your key clients getting more dominant or are you diversifying? Is there really a seasonal pattern to your business or were the fluctuations more ad hoc? Are you improving your collections, shrinking your sales cycle, and otherwise improving how you run your business in a way that benefits your bottom line?

Getting to know your own business data is one way you can make better decisions about pricing, time management, client service and overall business strategy. I cover two more ways you can make better business decisions in my upcoming webinar for Practice Pay Solutions on July 30:  Revenue Now Or Later: What Opportunities to Pursue and When

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What Is The Better Metric: Feelings Or Numbers

What gets measured gets managed – Peter Drucker

I’m with Drucker on this one so I track things quantitatively:

  • revenues by client;
  • revenues by date (lots of businesses have seasons);
  • revenues by type of offering (sometimes ideas don’t do as well as you think they will!);
  • revenues by historical comparison (it’s helpful to understand exactly how you’re growing);
  • costs – whether recurring or one-time;
  • costs – whether fixed or variable.

On the personal side, I track my spending and my time (so I know whether or not I exercise as much as I intend to!).

…people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. – Maya Angelou

That said, sometimes feelings are the better metric. I’m not as good at this one, so I think of this quote often. If you prove a point but at the expense of the other person’s feelings, you probably still won’t get anywhere.

Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts. —  Albert Einstein 

Einstein has it exactly right. There is no one suitable metric for everything. You have to run the numbers and understand your data. But not everything can be boiled down to numbers, nor should it.

What do you measure in your business and in your personal life? How do you measure it?

Favorite Takeaways From The Inside Edge Small Business Conference

I had the good fortune of attending a fascinating business conference organized by The Corporate Agent. Inside Edge 2013 (April 17-20) focused on how small businesses could effectively pitch and win business with big corporations. There is too much to summarize from the 4-day event but here were some of my favorite takeaways:

As entrepreneurs we aren’t reward on our efforts. Our results are our rewards. – Angelique Rewers, The Corporate Agent

Sometimes improving your results is not about what you need to do; it’s what you need to STOP doing – Angelique Rewers, The Corporate Agent

The only person who can stop, limit or restrict your success is you – Angelique Rewers, The Corporate Agent

Knowledge not acted on is useless trivia – Larry Broughton

Representation, Observation, Interaction = ROI of LinkedIn – JD Gershbein, Owlish Communications

Be flexible about how you do things, but be inflexible about why you do things – Scott Robley, Infusionsoft

Successful businesses quit survival marketing – Scott Robley, Infusionsoft

Branding is not a logo, tagline, name, design, message, marketing, social media, or website. Branding is a desired perception. – Re Perez, Branding For The People

You don’t own your brand; you shape it – Re Perez, Branding For The People

Great marketers don’t make stuff. They make meaning – Seth Godin

People buy people. Who you are is always more important than what you do – Eiji Morishita, Genius Marketing Academy

Make the pie bigger. Be the tide that lifts all boats – Eiji Morishita, Genius Marketing Academy

Don’t confuse business with charity. Serve clients who can afford you. Give to those who can’t – Eiji Morishita, Genius Marketing Academy

Content isn’t King. Insight is King – Angelique Rewers, The Corporate Agent

It was so nice getting away from the daily grind of the business to think more broadly, get inspired, and meet new people. An added bonus was staying in an ultra-luxurious resort (and yes, I made time for a spa treatment). There was the requisite swag bag, including a treat from one of my favorite boutiques, Pink Olive.

While I’m climbing my way back after four days away, it’s a worthwhile investment. What investment or conference do you have on tap to forward your business in 2013?