The first risk was that I gave two unestablished prospective customers payment terms. One was family (and nobody fucks you quite like family) and the other was a man of the cloth who was referred to me by trusted congregates of my church. I should have seen it coming. I pondered the situation, paced the floor a while, even consulted my wife on the family one. The second one just seemed to come so easy, especially when I had just done it already... I guess some of you who are a bit more 'spiritual' would say "slippery slope," but the bottom line is that I bought into it and now I am not only absent two-thirds of the payment for one invoice, but now I have a whole one that may never see a penny.
Some may say, "...But hey, you're a service business, you got their equipment right?" Contrary to my father-in-law's after-the-fact opinion (as if anybody actually asked him), I gave the 'family' equipment back on the first of what was to be three payments. The second one was up last week. I called this family member this morning, rousing them from their slumber, and I got some lame excuse that they were out of town last week and so forth. Okay, well, grace and mercy start with a phone call... Just not from the payee back to the payer... I tried to teach my wife this as far as paying bills. It's always better to call somebody who you owe money to, and say "It's coming" than to wait until they call you... Always... Because by the time they're calling you, their expenses are their priority, not your excuses about why you can't pay them.
So by the time I had waited three months for the second potential customer to finally surrender his laptop, his hard drive had not one single solitary chance in hell of being recovered. I tried to call, though [dozens of times], to try to break the news. I finally bit the bullet, got them a new drive and even got the recovery disc (called about that, too) to bring it back to factory specs. Gave him a good rate, thought he was one of the 'good guys,' but alas when I finally caught up to him the words "Oh, I can't pay that... Can I give you half this week and half next week?" seemed to almost lure me into some false sense of complacency like the sirens of ancient Greece. I almost immediately said, "Sure! No problem..."
Then I started to ponder. That bone in my ass that I had trained over the past decade or so that warned me when something just wasn't right started to twitch and tingle. I called a few church leaders and found out something that I found ironically biblical, yet heartbreaking and true. Everyone I talked to said that they really didn't know the guy. So over the weekend, in expectation of the first of two payments (and like an idiot I was going to be handing the unit back to him), nothing happened. I went the extra mile, tracked the guy down -- I didn't know where he lived, all I had was his laptop, a name and a phone number -- to his house, but nobody was home. Called until I was blue in the face, pissed and screaming, stomping around the house... It started to upset my wife. I had to calm down. Now, I'm wondering if this laptop is hot... Skepticism begins to creep in.
On the other two clients, I didn't do anything as suicidal as I did above, but I did over-reach in both my time and inventory. It's a fair statement that when you're in business for yourself, you are better off getting five singles rather than one home run. Five easy jobs can pay off quicker than one big job, but I bit off two in-field doubles this weekend and it put me in quite a pinch. One was a laptop that appears (now) to have a class-action suit attached to it, which is ironic seeing as the client is a lawyer... The other is a fellow professional business man that lives an hour north of here, and it wasn't so much that I put myself in a pinch, but I didn't evaluate my time correctly and now because I had to cut my own appointment short (for the sake of my wife and my sanity) now I have to make a return trek today if I plan on getting a check for services rendered. It is really screwing up my whole day.
The good news is that we purchased a dish washer... The bad news is that it isn't here yet, we have no place set aside to actually put it, and if the next 48 hours or so don't start looking up a little bit, this whole week could be a bust instead of a blessing.
So the moral of the story is :
Never give anybody credit terms in a non-credit economy, especially family. Barter if you have to, but if they can't afford to pay their bills to you, imagine where they're at with all their other creditors and shudder! If you do go ahead with it, be prepared to take the loss... You can't depend on them to make a payment, in this life or the next.
Regardless of the weather, your other half's priorities are ten times more important that your own, no matter how illogical they eventually pan out to be, so pad weekends and evenings accordingly instead of planning to spend the day at a client's house, no matter how well you know them.
Now I guess I have to get my happy ass back to work...
