I wrote my book, ‘GET PAID!‘, after learning that 60% of small businesses fail every year, mostly because they don’t know how to ask for payment professionally.
They run out of cash. They don’t ask for payment.
They don’t ask because they’re scared that if they do, they might say the wrong thing and upset their customers.
I was the same. In my first year of business, I didn’t ask customers for payment either.
As you’d expect, because I didn’t ask, they didn’t pay.
In that first year of business, I worked almost exclusively with one very big customer (that’s not a good idea, but that’s another story).
I was so keen to keep selling to them that I didn’t want to chase up my invoices for payment and look like ‘the bad guy’.
At the same time, another company bought my customer’s business. The bank account was frozen during the process, so they couldn’t pay my invoices anyway. That was almost 90% of my business (big mistake).
If I couldn’t get payment from them, I would’ve completely run out of cash. I was inches away from closing the doors.
Almost by luck, I did get paid, and my business survived.
It was then I realised that, if my business was going to survive long term, I had to find a way to get my invoices paid on time.
The Simple 5-Step Process to Ask for Payment Professionally
So I put together a simple 5-step process based on customer service that made sure we only ask for payment professionally:
- Set your business up for collections success.
- How to feel 100% confident asking for payment.
- How to minimise problems that delay payment (the ‘Insider Secret’).
- Exactly what to say, when, and to whom to get paid fast.
- Red Flags! How to spot one and what to do so you don’t lose your money.
Because it was just customer service and admin, my part-time admin person could look after it all while I kept making the sales.
It worked brilliantly. Our customers loved the great service. They paid on time, they bought more from us, and they told their friends about us – so the business just grew and grew.
That business became very profitable, and I sold it 15 years later. I realised then that asking for payment professionally was one of the keys to its success.
Customers paying on time meant that our bank account was always full.
Having a full bank account meant I had less stress. I was able to focus on growing the business and growing the profits.
‘GET PAID!’ details the simple 5-steps system we used, so now all business owners can ask for payment professionally and get paid super-fast too.
You can download a couple of FREE chapters of my book here.
To your business success!
