Stay positive! I believe state of mind is all important. It certainly doesn’t trump all business advice in tough times but helps keep things in perspective.
Remember sometimes the best opportunities are available in tough times so don’t stop looking out for them.
Remember that business should be fun, why get out of bed if you don’t feel positive and full of energy!
On top of this remember to keep a constant eye on cash and expenses – but you should be doing that anyway!

Being a freelancer is hard! Working on 13 projects at once and having to remember the names, details, timelines and status of each!

One thing I do to make it easier is use Xero as a time-tracker. Every hour I spend or part of a project I complete, I log into a new line-item in a draft invoice in Xero. This serves a double benefit – you keep track of what you’ve done and how much to bill, and your customer gets the most awesomely detailed invoice ever.

Happy you, happy client. Win win, thanks Xero (wow that was cheesey!)

1.Focus on your core business
2.Stay close to your top advisors
3.Look up all the cards you never got to in 08
4.Give away some good advice it always comes back to you
5.Give yourself a treat each week, doesn’t have to cost money just has to be fun

Wishing everyone every success for 2009/10/11

Incentivize prepayment, payment on-time or early payments.
You go to McDonalds drive-thru, you place your order then you pay. Only once you’ve paid are you allowed to move forwards to the next window to receive your “goods”. If your business allows, offering a “prepayment discount” can save a lot of time & hassle instead of chasing up late payments later on.
Remember: Its an early payment discount, not a late-payment penalty!
If you “penalize” late-payments, things get messy, customers dont feel like they’re being treated well, and will likely look elsewhere. Give them a reason to want to pay you (discount – Maybe only 2-3%) and you’ll have more money upfront, less cashflow issues, and less time mucking around chasing debtors!

AVOID BECOMING VICTIM OF A RECESSION

There is a lot of discussion right now about the recession. The scare-mongers are in full swing and stress levels are rising for the many business owners that are buying into the stories.

If a recession does in fact happen, it doesn’t need to have any affect on your business – just as long as you choose to be proactive, take responsibility for your own business and take the appropriate actions. In fact, your business can still grow.

A good example is one of our clients, Benn Milne, the owner of Vogel Motors, a medium sized motor mechanic workshop in Lower Hutt.

Ever since Benn had bought the business he had found February was the quietest month of the year.

It was a stressful month as it put a real squeeze on cash flow. Initially Benn simply believed this was just the way things were and there was nothing he could do about it.

Through being coached and learning to look at things from a different perspective, Benn identified that he was allowing himself to be a victim of circumstance – acting as if he was at the mercy of circumstances beyond his control.

With ambitious plans for his business, he wanted to change the results and no longer allow the month of the year to dictate his results.

Benn saw that if he kept doing what he had always done – he’d keep getting the results he’d always got. So, instead, he took a proactive stance and decided that if clients weren’t coming to him in February – he’d put together strategies to go out to them.

These included setting up a strategic alliance with Hell’s Pizza giving away free WOF vouchers when customers bought pizzas.

He set up promotions with parents at local schools, began approaching vehicle fleet companies directly to pitch for their work, and ran free educational workshops for women.

In my experience, in any industry and at any time, there will always be some business owners complaining about how tough the industry is at that time.

These businesses will always find people prepared to agree with them and take part in ‘pity parties’ to bemoan how unfair things are and how ‘when the economy changes’ everything will be better.

Unfortunately, such conversations rarely touch upon what they could all be doing differently to change their results.

Right now, the automotive industry is full of people complaining about the lack of new imports coming into the country and associated lack of flow-on mechanical work.

And yet in the same industry, at the same time and in the same area you are likely to see at least one other business doing very well.

Usually, what makes the difference is that business is taking proactive actions to get better results.

Benn’s original belief that he couldn’t change his results couldn’t have been more wrong. This February turned out to be the busiest month he had ever had.

If you feel that you can’t influence your current results, because of an impending recession, or for any other reason, then perhaps you could also be taking the opportunity to change your perceptions.

Mark Skelly is a director of Red Hot Business Coaching. The Red Hot Business Coaching franchise has helped many New Zealand business owners to take proactive steps towards achieving their business goals.

Think of how you can use your online-channel (website) more effectively.

A website with a better online experience can help you:

1. increase ROI from your advertising spends.
2. generate more and better qualified leads
3. increase online sales
4. increase profitability and revenue
5. give you a distinct competitive advantage.

If your website gave you 50% more than what it gives you today, what would mean for your business? Do the math, what would that be worth in terms of increased revenue.

Here’s some ideas:

1. Set some specific goals. These can be soft like “grow 50% this year”, or ambitious like “dominate my industry online”. Set some Key Performance Indicators and review them regularly. Good KPIs to start with include: unique visitors, conversion rate and web revenue.

2. Get to know what your *online* customer really wants and needs. Don’t fall into the trap of assuming what your website prospects are really looking for. This is fundamental to success. The design of your website and the content you provide is all based on what you know about your customer. Incorrect assumptions can be extremely costly.

3. Make sure you give your prospects an easy journey. You have just paid to get a visitor to your site – don’t just dump her on the home page and hope she finds what she wants. Each page needs clear simple pathways to product with minimal ‘noise’.

4. Give your visitors the support they need. Very few people will visit your site ready to buy or to make an enquiry. It’s more likely that your visitors are evaluating options. Think of these visitors as being on a decision journey and think about the questions they may have in their mind at each step.

5. Be more persuasive. Your site is there for a reason so you may as well try to push people towards the actions you want them to take. Furthermore Use clear action phrases like “Start your free appraisal” or “Add to shopping basket” that prompt for action.

Remember, most websites do a pretty poor job at satisfying online customers, so here’s your chance to stand out from the crowd!

All the best for 2009, Alan.

Let’s talk some truth here. You have a business that sells ideas: a skill some clients treat like a commodity. You know it’s not, but the way some of your competitors act, you start to understand why some people may think that. Why is it that others in the industry seem to discount their entire added value as if it were baked beans in the supermarket? It seems there are too many people willing to sacrifice today’s fee, especially in these uncertain times, in the hope that the client will pay a more realistic rate tomorrow.

What is an hourly rate? A client can get a loose creative strategy or idea from you over a coffee. Do you charge those 30 minutes at just half your hourly rate? The client would say, “That only took you 30 minutes.” Your answer would be, “Actually, that took me 30 years.”

Ideas are not things pulled randomly off shelves. They do not ship them in boxes across the world and they cannot be manufactured in China. They are wonderfully unique to you. You are indispensable on that level. If they replace you, or go somewhere else, they will never find your creative mind or way of problem-solving in anyone else. Your ability and talent today is a collection of genetics, social conditioning, inspiration, accumulated knowledge, perseverance and that little X-factor that enables you to look at a problem in an entirely different way.

GET BILLING

Some clients think creatives charge like lawyers. Some clients are stupid. Of course they do. Lawyers, accountants, mechanics, architects, art directors, copywriters, designers and most tradespeople charge for their time. The simple fact is that lawyers and accountants are just better at capturing and billing it than creative people.

Creatives are actually very philanthropic. They would love to be paid for their work, who wouldn’t? But for them, the thrill of a blank canvas (or LCD screen or paper or whiteboard) is enough for them to willingly give their ideas away just to see them become reality. They see the world, in many ways, as inherently flawed. So much of it could be done better. Why does this appliance not work as it should? Why does that look so ugly? Why am I uninspired when I try and use this thing? Surely there must be a better way of doing this chore.

TIME SLIPPING BY

And when they solve it, they just want to see it materialise. The creative never captured all the real time it took to solve the design problem. Truthfully speaking, their timesheets were filled in at the end of the month, and all those incidentals – like office supplies and photocopies – were too numerous and too frustrating to keep tabs on. Besides, surely the account manager quoted with enough buffer not to have to write down every bloody photocopy.

Which leads us to the problem – creative people trying to be administrators, creative people trying to do invoicing, creative people trying to keep track of all the detail any project or job contains. Like expecting the Government to actually make tax and paperwork easy to understand, or their partners to understand why they are still working at two o’clock in the morning.

Imagine a utopia: a well-oiled machine, able to deliver everything the clients are asking of us, able to help us make the most of any financial downturn. Not just ideas, but the job on budget, on time, with a healthy profit at the end – and no one needed to work really late nights or weekends.

ACQUIRE THE TOOLS

Sound too good to be true? Thankfully, it’s not. Designers also design for other designers. There are great tools now on the market to tame the creative studio. Streamtime is for facts and figures, what Photoshop is for images. Job tracking, production scheduling and time capture has finally come of age. Making a strong, healthy profit and knowing which client that came from is instantly achievable. Knowing which staff are your greatest assets is only a keystroke away. Streamtime has answered the questions most creative companies are asking.

BEYOND THE POST-IT

The irony has been that Creatives use some of the most advanced computer hardware and software available in the world, and yet they scribble their time on a piece of paper. They can render objects in 3D in an afternoon, but have Post-it notes stuck all over their desks and screens to remind them of important dates and phone numbers. They have a slimline LCD screen and the funky office in a trendy district, but have a great big diary from somewhere out of 1982 sitting on their desk to book meetings with.

Why all these archaic tools for such cutting-edge companies? One reason is that most solutions remind them of Bill Gates or big grey dividers in a soulless office space filled with people using pocket protectors. The solutions in the past have been designed (loose use of that word) by programmers who sit in dark spaces writing code in between their next online Dungeons & Dragons session with someone located in the Ukraine. Don’t get us wrong – they have talent. We are simply meaning that the products have never felt intuitive to the creative mind. So they avoided them. And then came Streamtime. A programme that sits comfortably in a creative environment, alongside your iPhone or designer chair, a programme that both Macs and PCs love. Harmony can now be achieved.

In times like this, creative businesses can’t rest on great ideas. The company needs to be strong. Owners need to know their business inside and out. Planning for tomorrow relies on your ability to decipher yesterday and today. The seat of your pants is no longer an appropriate way to fly…

About Streamtime: Streamtime is a multi-award-winning total studio management system, designed for the advertising, interactive and design industries. Whether supporting a company of two or a multi-site organisation of hundreds, Streamtime enables complete traffic and production management, signaling an end to job bags and hand-generated invoices and timesheets. From the accounts team to designers, both at their desk and, using Streamtime’s new iPhone application, on the road, Streamtime maximises workflow, taking productivity and creativity to new levels.

How to Deal With Slow Paying Debtors. After more than 7 years of business coaching, and before that about 20 years working in Accounting, I’ve come to the conclusion that the biggest challenge for small business owners in this critical area is that they incorrectly define the problem. The problem is not “how to get slow paying debtors to pay”. The problem is that “they have slow paying debtors”. By redefining the problem, we get access to the only possible solution.

Here are the rules that I teach my clients. Rule 1- make your customers earn the right to get credit from you through “cash with order” sales while you get to know them. Rule 2- Position them correctly when you begin to give them credit. Have “rules of the game”, read them the rules and have them verbally commit to those rules as well as sign off on them. Rule 3- Sack every customer who defaults on the rules.

I agree that this takes courage, a whole lot of courage. Most businesses would go under if they took this on with the customer base that they have today. To start with, just apply these rules to all new customers. Over time, start introducing the rules to those customers that you are willing to risk losing. The smaller ones, the difficult to deal with ones etc.

Does this work? Yes it most certainly does.

Keep your banker on your side!
Bankers are nervous; fearful for their jobs, and bad debts make them feel even more vulnerable. You can get your banker to bat for you instead of kick you into touch by giving her a really reliable Sales Forecast.
How will you prove that its really reliable?
You can if you use probability forecasting in project businesses or trend analysis in a product or service business. The free downloads on sales forecasting from http://www.bizlearn.biz will underpin you cash flow forecast by giving you a solid sales forecast to feed into your cash flow budget. Ask XERO about doing your cash flow budget, and you can then deal with your banker with confidence that you can show how reliable your forecast is.
Don’t put your reputation at risk by providing dodgy pie in the sky forecasts. If they didn’t believe that last one bankers will certainly not back you now times are tough. You need to get them on your side to survive the global credit crunch.

1 make sure you invoice as soon as the job is finished, invoice on account if a longer job, and ask for the money if not paid by due date.
2 for all new customers make sure your payment terms are clearly understood and accepted,and that you thoroughly credit check any significant new account, with reference and credit agencies
3 be very wary if any customer’s payment routine varies outwards as this could be a sign of trouble brewing
4 if you have any key suppliers ensure they are healthy or make sure you have an alternative lined up
5 if you need to buy any new assets, make sure you put this on HP finance rather use valuable working capital which you might need for other purposes.

Some great advice here on how to survive in a tight market. Without adding to the ‘How’, let me suggest ‘Why’ you should survive.

A recession is economic Darwininism at work. By *choosing* to be leaner, smarter, hungrier and more determined than your competition you can be assured a larger slice of your market when the recession draws to an inevitable close. This will happen, but the only question that matters is this: will you be around to collect the spoils of an increased relative footprint, or will your competitors be launched by your demise?

If you want to be there when conditions improve you will need to consistently plan, execute, innovate and achieve where others flounder, stall, repeat and fail. The choice is yours.

Bank Overdraft- The Opium of Small Business.

Get rid of your bank overdraft, as quickly as you can. Make your business earn more profit and use it first to get rid of your overdraft.

The problem with bank overdraft is that most small business owners use it to cover up problems with the stewardship of their businesses that should never exist in the first place. Their customers are not paying on time, they’re not sensibly managing their overheads and stock levels etc. If they cleaned this up, then the only need for borrowings would be to boost cash flows while sales are grown to a level that generates enough profit to pay the owner, pay taxes and pay all the other bills.

To be fair, most of the start-up businesses that I’ve seen start with that in mind. However as profitability increases most take the pressure off their debtors, they loosen the reins on overheads and increase stock levels. Then, because they are people, they adjust their lifestyle. Before long, the overdraft becomes a permanent part of the business Balance Sheet.

When I worked as an Accountant, I could intellectualise and philosophise for hours on the benefits of using the bank’s money. However I’ve since found that there are very few people in this world who have the discipline to properly use the potential that bank overdraft creates.

The small number of business owners that drive themselves to repay their overdraft, and then cash flow their businesses organically, are invariably the ones that accumulate the greatest wealth and stability over time.

The people you know are your greatest asset.

This includes, and in a particular order of relevance:
- The people who are part of your business. This isnt necessarily limited to employees, because many of the businesses in NZ are in the “0-1″ employee bracket.
The People include: your employees if you have any; your support network, mainly your wonderful family and friends; your suppliers; and your banker(s).
- The people to whom your goods and/or services are delivered. This is not only your customers, but it includes their customers too.
- The greater community in which you operate. This includes not only your workplace neighbours, but the business community around you – most of whom are distinctly and blissfully unaware of your existence.

How do you manage all these people, especially given the degrees of separation between you all?

Start by surrounding yourself with the best people you can, and do what you can to keep them with you. No, this doesnt just mean your employees, however these are the among the most important.
Finding, including and keeping the right people for and in your business is no simple task and should not be taken lightly.

The average small business operator doesnt have the time, or really the wherewithal to be able to effectively recruit the right people for their business.

When it comes down to it, does your average small business operator have the skills to effectively create and manage a relationship with a supplier – that is advantageous to their business not just the suppliers?

Dont be afraid to acknowledge that the skills needed to find the right people – employees, suppliers, customers – to be part of the business arent necessarily inside your business.

Help is available and it is a worthwhile investment to release your time back into your business while someone else helps you in non-core areas.

Most of you would readily pay your accountant to do your books, your lawyer to draft your contracts, but wouldnt engage a skilled expert to help with your business relationships. Maybe someone else here can answer – Why?

Don’t panic. Plan what you need to do and execute.

Most importantly, understand what your customers want an tell them what you are doing. The cost of acquiring a customer may be higher when there are fewer potential targets in the market but if you stop marketing even your loyal customers will forget about you.

Leverage every touch-point to communicate and cross sell. There is no better time to get good marketing practices in place than during an economic downturn. When an uptick occurs that will pay off.

Be brave and keep moving; animals caught in the headlights end up as road kill.

Read my full article on this at http://www.workingthree.com/articles/

Top 5 IT Tips for the New Year:
1. Keep your equipment cool
We get more failed Desktop Computers, Backup Drives, and Laptops through December till March, then any other time of the year. What kills computers? Heat.

2. Online Backups are easy
Backing up your computer is obviously important. But regularly changing the backup drive (or USB Thumb Drive) can be a pain. Having your important documents backed up on a schedule to Online Storage is both easy and cheap. (Call 0800 GETITHERE, press 2 for Jamie, and we can set it up over the phone).

3. Lease your computer equipment; don’t buy it!
Your working capital, and cash-flow is important. You can lease any computer equipment, including servers, laptops, desktops and cell phones.
It takes around 10 minutes to get finance approved, and you can have your new hardware, your Microsoft Office, all the setup done, backups, antivirus, and then split it over a 24 or 36 month lease. It makes it very affordable, and when the lease is up, you can replace your equipment with new gear for the same price, or buy the equipment.

4. The right printer can make your small business look BIG
There IS a big difference between the printers you can get from places like Harvey Norman, and Dick Smith, and Business Level Resellers (like Get IT Here Ltd). A good quality, networked colour laserjet printer can’t be purchased for less than $1000 dollars, but they make a huge difference in the quality and presentation of documents. And the economy is obvious, our printer has printed over 13,000 colour pages for presentations, and still hasn’t had its toner cartridges changed.

5. Throw away your CRT Screens(The Big old monitors)
Those big screens you got with your older computers actually cost you in electricity bills each year, what a new LCD monitor costs to buy new. Eg: a basic 19″ widescreen is under 300 dollars.

Computers are designed to make our lives easier, they make my life easier. We can have them make your life easier too.

Jamie

Use the downtime over the holidays to ask yourself three questions.

1) How have I done this year?
2) What can I do better?
3) Where do I want the business to be in a years time?

Talk to friends, family, colleagues about it. Use the time wisely to get some high level thinking done that you don’t otherwise have time for.

In the boom times prices were at a premium. Now there are plenty of opportunities to negotiate better deals with suppliers, new hires, partners and banks.

Your competition is also having a rough time. Take advantage of that. Use their weakness to lure away their customers with something better.

Be inventive. Offer new products/services or create new packages from existing products/services. Having something new to offer as an excuse to get in front of people and generate some buzz.

Adapt quicker by listening more closely to your customers. Listening serves many purposes – it gives you a good reason to get in touch with many people, you learn a lot, and you demonstrate that you’re taking care of your customers. Help your customers succeed. Their success is your success.

After spending 15 or so years juggling a dozen or so businesses, a handful or two of advisory and formal board positions, a couple of kids (not to mention a wife ) and a bunch of voluntary commitments I’ve come to the conclusion that diversity (no pun intended)and balance are all-important. Anyway – a few tips from me….

1) Embrace advice – get yourself an advisory board. NZTE will help fund them and they’re absolutely one of the most valuable things you can do

2) Set your own personal goals. Until you do that you have no way of knowing if your business goals are aligned with where you personally want to be

3) Once you’ve set personal goals grab your advisers and get away from the business – think about what your business does, its core competencies and weaknesses and its realistic potential. Then decide on 3-5 high level strategies for getting t where you want to be

4) Sweat the small stuff – details matter, a $100 creditor may be small in the scheme of things but $100 may just be the difference between sink and swim. Don’t pass off your responsibility to others – as a business owner you have an obligation to understand accounting, tax, law etc etc. Tools like Xero help, but they’re tools and don’t replace an understanding of the basics

5) Don’t sweat the big stuff – shit happens, accept it. Being in business has stresses and sometimes the unavoidable will happen. If every major setback made you want to leap off the nearest cliff they’d be few people left and no businesses. Life’s too short to blow business problems way out of proportion.

And seeing that others have taken the opportunity to push their own gig – check out http://www.bizchat.co.nz an online community for small businesses in New Zealand – a place to ask questions, get advice, find information and generally have conversations with your fellow business people.

Ensuring one’s business is as tight and efficient as possible, in order to ensure you have the best prospects of maintaining and expanding your operation, is obviously key to dealing with all the suggested areas for tips.

Another area to focus on is creating an environment where new opportunities can be taken advantage of.

But in order to be well-positioned in both respects, one also needs to be uncommonly effective right now when to comes to cash management. Just as banks are tightening their terms and conditions around lending facilities, so should businesses be tightening the way they go about administering their own lines of credit.

Obviously, then, the more cash one extracts from operating a business, the better one is positioned for deal with any trading difficulties, or indeed to seize new opportunities for expansion. But how does one stay on top of it?

In order to ensure you’re in charge of the situation, it’s probably never been so vital to maintain a cash flow forecast. Ideally, this should be updated on a daily basis, projecting out at least 90 days. Once a company has been working with the model for a short period, however, it needs to be projected out for the full coming 12 months. Though this will not guarantee the cash outcomes, it will provide a reliable indication of cash trends over the coming turbulent months.

Based on this information, one can plan, and implement, changes that may reduce or delay the cash outflow while improving the cash inflow.

Where surpluses are achievable, the trick is to take this cash and create a buffer that can then be drawn on if the business starts to experience a few hits.

Even if the picture starts to look bleaker than that — if the data point to an unhappier outcome should all the predicted negative impacts occur — this exercise at least allows one to plan for a worst-case scenario in which you won’t lose the shirt off your back.

Here are some other pointers for enhancing that all-important cash flow:

Active debtor management. When you take on a client, ensure the terms of trade include payment terms. Make sure you include a clause that allows you to add the costs of collection to the outstanding debt. And follow up debtors promptly after the due date. Most businesses with cash flow issues, in my experience, tend to have old debtors who have not been satisfactorily chased for payment.

Retain key staff. This may sound almost counterintuitive in tough trading times. Actually, not. It costs more, not less, to replace crucial staff members. Studies suggest that the cost to your business in taking this course could be at least the equivalent to one full year of the employee’s salary.

Review all existing costs. Do these outlays produce revenue — which is to say, cash — for the business? Look for scenarios that will allow you to reduce costs quickly if there is a sudden dip in sales.

Know your margins. Really know them. It’s only through understanding the costs required to deliver your goods and services, after all, that you are able to validate the operation. One also needs to be mindful here of overheads that aren’t directly related to the specific production of those activities. Refocusing the business accordingly will increase its efficiency.

Among the other issues to be considering right now is the improving exchange rate and its possible benefits for new exporting. This is an area that needs thorough planning and preparation, of course, but not underestimating the effort involved shouldn’t be an excuse for not striking if the iron looks hot. Here again careful cash planning is essential to any success.

As a business owner, one needs to have the correct legal structures in place to ensure one has protected as much wealth as possible. Yes, this could mean additional costs — in the short term. But the protection afforded by using the appropriate structures has never been more applicable than in the current environment.

Dark clouds, silver linings. It comes down to this. Understand the cash drivers. Work to maximise the outcomes that enhance your business.

Survival Tips for 2009

1. If you aren’t on Xero, then change sooner rather than later! Xero will provide greater visibility on the business and will allow all Directors to stay in touch with the company finances.
2. Stay positive and focus on growth or innovation. During times like these we need to have ideas and use staff and key contacts to offer suggestions and leads.
3. Get sustainable! Sustainability is a huge growth industry and will continue to grow and offer opportunities despite the economic outlook.

A practice that I have implemented early on : billing on site. On the last visit at my customer, and before I head out the door, my bill is ready (it usually is ready before I get there, and calls for minor tweaking that will take a minute), printed on site, or emailed to their inbox using a wifi connection. Since my fees are due upon reception –it is clearly stated and understood from the time my bid was chosen – more often then otherwise, they welcome this initiative and they insist on paying me on the spot. And I head for the bank!

We all know that keeping a customer is easier, and more cost effective then spending on publicity to find new ones. So I use the down time to pamper my current customers. Inquiring about their own situation, reconnecting with points of contact, etc.

When new customers fail to materialize, I focus on my current customers. I am in an extraordinary position to know and analyze their needs. I get proactive, and try to find ways to sell them my services in a way that will help them get through their own hard time. At times surprising them with skills they may not know I had. Often times, your customers may not know the full array of services that you can offer. That gets me more work, but also shows them that I care and am concerned with their own struggle to get through tough times. If I identified a need and it’s a job that I can’t do, I’ll research for them who could do it, and I might recommend someone I know and can vouch for. There is a bond there, and trust, and both are nurtured.

When business is not as busy, and once I’ve done all my homework (advertising, marketing, networking, and other key ‘ings’), I see free time as a blessing, not a curse. I use free time to :
- get on top of things (all those pesky chores and tasks that are constantly postponed when you are busy and are a one person operation).
- catch up on trade magazines or websites, blogs;
- researching issues in specific fields that are of interest to me;
- brush up on some laws that affect my business;
- research my customers (they may have branched out in other things and I was not aware of that);
- explore features of software that I use often, so I can get more productive when I am working and under pressure;
- find new ways to streamline my operations;
- revisit all existing material (forms for bids, contracts, fliers, etc.);
- educate myself about areas I may not be as competent as I wish I was;
- go through your virtual rolodex : purge, update, and renew contact;
And in the end, it all contributes to improving the quality of the services I render.

Recession has already had a serious impact on my business. But by having made my business as lean as possible, keeping overhead to the very lowest, I am hopeful I will ride this wave, and I feel energized by the fact that I have TIME to do all the stuff I never have time for. I use that spare time not for extra leisure time. Nop. All that time is used with in mind to improve my overall future performance as a consultant. I truly see this as an opportunity for strategic repositioning, and finding new directions.
Good luck to everyone. And thank you Xero team for this post in your blog. I got some great tips from previous replies.

TOP TIPS FOR 2009

1. Ask for payment. It’s surprising how many people don’t actually ask for the money.

2. Have a written contract — your Terms of Trade — in place.

3. Use a third party for the right reasons. Your third party should be a normal part of your debtor management process rather than the collection means of last resort.

4. Take action early. When an account comes overdue move your company up the debtor’s priority list. The squeakiest wheel gets the most oil.

5. Always ask for a full name when you first sign up a new client. We recommend you have some sort of form to capture these details.

You are unable to list debtors as defaulters unless a full name is given. If you don’t have a full name, it turns the big stick of the threat of an adverse credit rating into an ineffective twig.

Professional, unethical debtors are aware of listing requirements and will take full advantage of the fact that their full names are not known.

6. Use your diary or electronic calendar in Outlook to remind yourself to follow upon payments.

7. Register your interest in goods you sell on the Personal Properties Securities Register.

8. Keep records of debtor contacts. Whilst they need to be persistently and consistently recorded they don’t need to be flash and fancy. They should be simple and practical enough for you to use every day.