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| Small Business – What to do Next? It’s important for every small business to keep the cash flowing.
Wednesday afternoon we finished a huge order for a client and it was great to wrap it all up, send off the last instalment to the client, back up the files and just sit back and take a deep breath. Yesterday we took much of the day off. Toni isn’t well and I really needed to get her out of the house for a while so we had lunch down by the beach and just sat in the café enjoying the sun. Today we’re back into the work thing. There are several big orders pending and more on the way and even though a lot of that work has been farmed out to our writers we still have a lot of that work to cover ourselves. It certainly would have been good to take even more time off than just one day but this is a small business and one of the important tricks to surviving is keeping the cash flowing. Too many small businesses have a cash flow chart that looks like a mountain range. There are towering peaks as payment for orders come in and deep wide valleys as the cash disappears and the business looks for new orders. And that happens because a lot of people stop looking for new orders while they are processing the work they have on hand. Instead of those peaks and valleys a small business should be trying to even out its cash flow and be aiming for a graph that looks more like smooth and steadily rising incline. The way to do that is to keep on searching for new orders even while you are working on others. I know people who get an order in and before they start working on it they take their phone off the hook, ignore their incoming emails and even turn work away. They don’t want to be distracted; they don’t see that by shutting themselves away like that they are virtually destroying their business. Sure they may get the job done but what happens at the end. What do they do next? Sadly you will often see those people appearing on industry message boards crying for work because they have nothing to go on with and so they have no money coming in. At the very time their doors should be open and they should be looking for work they’ve put up the shutters and disappeared and it comes back to bite them. A recurring client base is important for just about any small business but clients aren’t going to come to you if they can’t get in touch with you. They want to talk to you now, not when you’re ready to talk to them. So you have
to be available for them when they want you but not only that, you have
to keep on looking for work even though you may have plenty of work on
hand. Be hungry for it and never be left wondering what to do next. 2 Sep 2005 |
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