I was listening to on of Brendon Sinclairs podcasts over on Tailored Podcast a few minutes ago and he was interviewing a web developer who is running a very successfull small business.

His philosophy is:

You will never make a fortune selling your own time but you will make one selling other people’s time”

It’s certainly something to think about isn’t it?

Actually, from a small business or even home office point of view the whole podcast is worth listening to. Follow the link and look for #35 Brendon Sinclair’s Business Mix – 15 May ‘06 – Secrets of a Successful Web Development Business.

If you run a small business or home office how easy is it for your customers to do business with you?

Is the buying process easy or do you make your customers jump through hoops?

Can you customers contact your business or are you hard to find?

Are you out there in the market place or do you hide away and wonder why no one finds you?

One blogger in Melbourne learned some important lessons from an umbrella salesman yesterday.

Every small business could learn something from this umbrella salesman.

Silly me had my mobile phone switched off all day because I forgot to turn it on this morning – a fairly rare occurrence but it does happen.

When I turned back on tonight there were a number of messages including a rather terse:

“Hello this is xxxx from xxxx Design call me about your overdue account.”

So it was my turn to call back and leave a message.

“Hello, this is Stuart, you called me this afternoon about an account you say is overdue. The only business we have done with you was some business cards months ago. Unfortunately we paid cash when we picked up the cards and you subsequently mailed us a receipt so please check your records.

“We were about to order some more work from you but now we won’t. We’ll take our business elsewhere.”

And we we really did intend to order more work including the artwork for a major decal job on a car. And we really do now intend to take our business elsewhere.

In those intervening months between getting the receipt in the mail and getting the phone call we had heard not one peep from them. There were no gentle reminders mailed to us even though they had our mailing address. There were no gentle reminders phoned to us absolutely dead silence until months later they suddenly think we didn’t pay the account so they’re going to get tough.

No small business goes through life without running into a problem with unpaid bills. Sometimes you’re going to run into professional debtors and you will really have to get tough with them to get your money.

Sometimes you will have customers who will genuinely forget to pay and you need to gently remind them.

Sometimes your accounts are going to be screwed up and you are going to demand payment from people who have already paid.

Knowing how to handle the situation in each instance is going to mean the difference between keeping and losing business and when you’re the new kid on the graphic designer block that already has some very established and respected designers and you live and work in a town of just 50,000 souls you’re going to want to keep as many customers as you can.

Grrrrr