The best way to ensure you get paid promptly by a big firm is to send the invoice on time to the right person at the right place, and make sure it contains all the details which are needed to get it through their payment system. When you have people problems, it's a reflection on the effectiveness of your leadership. All businesses have similar concerns and responsibilities, including marketing, research, development, purchasing, production, management, accounting, human resources, and customer service. Can you imagine a football team winning games without calling plays before every down?
Do you set high expectations or tolerate mediocrity?
Common
stockholders elect a
board of directors to oversee the company's management, and are usually paid a dividend if the company is profitable. Businesspeople
averse to theory
may thrive in business as long as the parameters familiar to them remain in place. More
weighty, however, appear
the objections against profit-sharing, which seem to have had sufficient force to cause the failure of a number of ventures in this direction. In
the Bon March??
in Paris, the employers determined that something must be done more than was done in other stores so that every visitor would remember the place with pleasure and come again.
Don't spend all your time planning
They
aim for the
edges of the triangle. As
your business grows,
you work more hours. You
may have sold
a lot of products in a week, but unless you have actually received the money for them it is not going to hold much sway with the man on the doorstep who needs to be paid for the raw materials or equipment he is delivering, and nor is it going to pay that outstanding electricity bill. If
nothing else, crafting
a backup plan is a good idea should something happen that is out of your control.
Is Customer Relationship Management the main function of your business?
A
credit check will
look at their financial position and see whether they have failed to pay others in the past, among other things. But
most never achieve
their goals and dreams. We
have argued that
the task of management in the interactive context hinges on making sense of a complex and ambiguous context, constructing narratives, interacting, developing and assembling complex solutions with external counterparts. Would
you go to
Starbucks if the lattes weren't consistent every time, from store to store?
Avoid the specific liabilities that your company may face
Replace
yourself with operational
and organizational systems. Not
so any longer.
How
would you like
to get your bank statement sent out differently every month, or to have your favorite restaurant make your favorite meal too spicy, too bland, or too salty, depending who cooked it that night? (Current
liabilities are things
like accounts payable to suppliers and short-term loans due in less than a year.) The higher the amount of net working capital you require, the greater your financing needs are likely to be.
People who succeed have momentum
Successful
business owners who
move from a micromanaging role into a leadership one can build successful companies. These
are the qualities
that proprietors are yearning for--nay, actually groaning for, but which are hard to find in the average man. Have
a workroom in
connection with your store. Top-down
models can be
predictable and efficient, but also can become locked into outmoded habits.