Biz911

I love gardening and landscaping.  It gives me time to clear my head and come back to work better focused for the weekly challenges.  This weekend was especially hectic, because alternative periods of high heat and excessive rain had delayed most of our vegetable seeding and planting.  Our family had gotten well past the deadline for putting in most of our stuff, so we had to bear down and get it done.  Time and tide just don’t let you wait.

When it comes down to it, we’d get little done without deadlines.  It often takes external events or someone else to push us.  A lot of cash-strapped business owners don’t seek help until it’s too late.  They don’t act at an early stage to do the right things at the right times to prevail.  As troubles build up, they become increasingly frustrated, hoping that their ship will stay afloat.  And of course it won’t do this on its own.

A big frustration in our business is being called in to help resolve tough business issues at a very late stage, when the options are far fewer than they might have been just a month or two before.  If there’s ever a need for urgency, it’s when collectors are calling and suits are being filed.  It’s not too smart to get into denial and then be forced to act at the eleventh hour to try to avoid an immediate default judgment.

Collectors want to create a sense of urgency, don’t they?  Their success in doing so will determine if they succeed or fail.  And a suit filing by an attorney really gets your attention.  As a business owner, you have to adopt the same sense of urgency as the other side.  If not, there’s not much sense in trying to stay in business.

Are you concerned about diminishing revenues and mounting debt load and don’t know where to turn?  Get professional help.  We will help you to set up measurable debt reduction and top line revenue goals – with specific deadlines – to get you back on track.

The real estate entrepreneur had come to realize that she was in a real bind, for which there seemed few positive outcomes.  She felt boxed in from all sides and was behind in payments to several lenders.  Her income was way less than planned and the price of her main asset had declined.

The lenders knew her situation and her plans for recovery in fine detail.  They had gotten the information in writing.  But they were showing little cooperation in her need for business debt relief at this stage and simply demanded to get paid, immediately.  Precisely how these funds were to materialize was of no interest to them.

A lender will obviously expect to get paid according to the terms of its contract.  No doubt about it.  It will only accept a compromised settlement when it knows that it cannot be repaid in full.  We believe that, with adequate information, the lenders will come to this realization and we will be able to cut the necessary deals, once we have the ability to do so.

The client is smart.  She has that upbeat, resilient quality so typical of a true entrepreneur.  She understands that where she is now is no reflection on where she will be in twelve months, or five years.

It’s all in the head.  Rather than going to pieces, she is proactively looking at new strategies to bring in cash and is open to doing anything possible to minimize the damage to herself and her creditors.  Given the lessons learned in this situation, she is poised to join the legion of successful business owners who have gone through adversity in their way to wealth-building success.

As with so many other of our clients facing financial challenges, it is extremely satisfying for us to be able to support her in this endeavor.

We can only get what we want in life by catering to the needs of others.  Most of us learn this as we grow up.  It’s a basic concept that we have to constantly bear in mind, in our personal lives and as business owners.  After all, if our marketing and negotiating strategies are all about us, we’re in for deep disappointment.

As turnaround management specialists we often see the impact of troubled companies screwing up their chances for business debt relief and recovery by failing to consider the needs of their creditors.  Many of us have personal experience of being stung by those who have failed to pay us as agreed.  In the absence of any communication from the debtor firm, and after wondering what’s going on, the next question might be whether or not other creditors are being paid ahead of us.  And then we really start to get ticked off.

The fact is, if nobody at the debtor firm tells us what’s going on, who will?  If we don’t get voluntary feedback, or answers to our correspondence or telephone calls, we are likely to come to our own conclusions.  And these will paint a pretty poor picture of the situation and the individuals concerned.

It can come as a pleasant surprise to a creditor if its late-paying contact takes the time to level with them as to why the account is delinquent.  Candor tends to build relationships, not ruin them.  We are not catering to the creditor’s primary need to get paid when we act as straight-shooters, but at least we are doing the right thing to explain why the situation does not currently permit full payment.

It may be human nature to want to avoid unpleasant tasks, but an honest appraisal of your situation, shared with your creditor, can open the door to a settlement on revised terms, to meet your priorities.

As with effective sales and marketing practices, success in business debt reduction negotiations is fundamentally concerned with catering to your target audience’s needs.  If more business people would understand this, there would be a lot less need for collectors, lawyers and expensive litigation.