Are Debtors Costing You Money?

 

A business can have great profitability as traditionally measured, but also have simultaneously great cash flow problems and this is often the prime reason for business failure. We find it interesting that many businesses with cash flow problems devote a lot of energy to increasing sales but pay little attention to the other factors impacting on cash flow such as waste, rostering inefficiencies, stock control and debtor control.

 

Debtors are those customers who owe you money and debtor control is of critical importance in running a business. Greater effort to increase sales often results in more liberal credit arrangements being extended to customers, leading to increased cash flow problems when sales increase. Businesses that achieve increased sales but at the same time increase their overdraft, would be aware of this problem. It seems counter-intuitive but sadly it is often true.

 

While your debtors are an asset, the greater the time these debtors take to pay you, the greater is the likelihood of you having ongoing cash flow problems. The bottom line is that effective debtor control needs to be viewed as fundamental to business success.

 

Many people do not enjoy involvement in debtor control because it has unpleasant connotations. If it is integrated into you regular customer contact program however it can add to the quality of the customer relationship and increase the likelihood of regular prompt payments. If you are not already doing so, you can make a start by:

 

• Ensuring that you have the facility to run and interrogate debtor reports regularly.
• Being disciplined in designating times and responsibilities for debtor control.
• Designing a debtor contact strategy that takes into consideration the amount owed, the period the debt has been outstanding, the value of the client, the form of contact and the person responsible for making contact.
• Designing customer contact scripts to ensure that all issues are covered and that the required message is conveyed.

Try this strategy – You may still have a section of your invoices devoted to notification of outstanding amounts over 30, 60, 90 and even 120+ days. What you are doing is building in an extended credit facility by signalling to your customers that it is OK not to pay immediately because you will tolerate late payment. If they never get a call from you before 90 days then you can be sure that they will be using their available funds to pay those creditors who are more systematic and assertive in ensuring that overdue accounts are addressed appropriately.

 

First insert a ‘due by’ date and remove the 30 day, 60 day etc columns on your invoices. Replace them with a single overdue or outstanding column. Match this strategy with a client notification and contact process when overdue amounts exceed 30 days. You already have an investment in your debtors, you may need to invest more effort into ensuring that your asset is realised within your set terms of trade.

ARE YOU TOO BUSY TO PLAN FOR SUCCESS?

 

Clients often tell us that they are too busy working in the business to be able to concentrate on all of these areas. Planning is absolutely essential however, because it is this vital process that focuses you to work on the future success of your business rather than in it.

 

The development of winning strategies and their implementation requires effective planning and analysis to understand where your business is now, where you want it to be in the future, and how you are going to achieve your goals.

 

The Productivity Coach can assist you by facilitating the development of a highly focused one page action plan. Although simple, the process is very powerful and it produces winning results.

 

We are creating the opportunity for business owners and managers to work in groups so that they can develop and test their plan, strategies and ideas with their peers. This is an extremely powerful and empowering process for the network members.

 

The planning process requires an understanding of the competitive advantage that your business currently has, or needs to develop. Your competitive advantage will then drive your marketing strategy while your operations, innovation, finance and human resources strategies all need to be aligned to the unique value you are offering your customers.

 

The essential task of examining your major issues and challenges, setting measurable goals, and giving priority to those issues which will have the greatest impact on your customers and your business is now made easer.  You will develop winning strategies to achieve your goals.

How To Be More Productive

In terms of productivity, there are many contributing factors that help people produce consistent excellent results. James explains some of them in this short video.

Committed to YOUR Personal Productivity,

James is a productivity coach specializing in working with people who are procrastinators and those who want results quickly. His ability to get brilliant results with his clients is quite amazing…

The Productivity Coach

Extraordinary Results for Professional and Personal Freedom

To Find Out the “5 Secrets of REALLY Successful People” go to…

The Productivity Coach

P:      0421 210444

Dealing With Stress

Have you ever met anyone who is rational when they are angry?

I certainly haven’t and to be honest, I must admit to succumbing to the red mist once or twice in my life

The reason for this is simple, yet complex. It is to do with the way our brains are built.

Apparently, our brains make up around 2% of our weight but use up approximately 20% of the energy consumed by our body, and this doesn’t change no matter what we are doing. It’s the same whether we are active or sleeping, happy or sad.

Of that 20%, a small proportion is used for our working memory and conscious mind and the rest is used for the unconscious stuff, like regulating bodily functions, emotions, automatic tasks, habits and so on.

A problem arises when we get stressed.

When our brain senses a threat, as in fear, anger, stress etc. it allocates more resources to that emotion because it’s function is for our survival, to protect us as an individual and as a species.

Now, this increased demand does not increase the 20% of our bodies energy resources I mentioned earlier, it robs Peter to pay Paul and our working memory suffers, and onfortunately, rationality does too..

We go into survival mode.

The ramifications of this insight are significant because most of us go through life in modern society with stress levels that are way too high.

Do you think that this just might have an effect on our ability to think and act clearly?

Dealing with the pressures of life can be made alot easier by using someone who understands and is skilled in helping people move forward in life. More and more people are starting to realise that having a coach is a great way to achieve this.

Why not you?

Committed to YOUR Personal Productivity,

James is a productivity coach specializing in working with people who are procrastinators and those who want results quickly. His ability to get brilliant results with his clients is quite amazing…

The Productivity Coach

Extraordinary Results for Professional and Personal Freedom

To Find Out the “5 Secrets of REALLY Successful People” go to…

The Productivity Coach

P:      0421 210444

Tips to Stop Procrastination

You Already Know WHAT To Do

Procrastination isn’t so much a matter of poor organization as it is a psychological block:

Trust me, procrastination is not a time-management problem. It’s a complex problem involving personality, situations and motivation.

Here are three psychologically sound tips to help procrastinators overcome this problem.

1. Just get started. Don’t waste time over-planning and over-thinking; research shows that once you actually begin a task, your perceptions of that task change. And making even a little progress boosts your well-being, which in turn gives you more motivation to work.

2. Suck it up. It is a distastesful task? It is difficult? Would you rather be doing something — anything! — else? Tough. You need to just plunge in and deal with it. It’s a  hard-nosed approach but necessary with procrastinators, who tend to avoid dealing with the negative emotions associated with unpleasant tasks.

Don’t Give in

Don’t “give in to feeling good” such that you focus on short-term mood repair. Keep your focus on long-term progress on your goal.

Brutal Honesty

3. Be honest with yourself. Stop the self-deception. You might argue that you’ll feel more like doing it tomorrow, that you work better under pressure, or that it can wait. As Pychyl notes, you won’t, you don’t, and it can’t. Instead of giving in, recognize these thoughts as red flags that signal your desire to procrastinate and go back to tips 1 and 2.

Action First, Feelings Follow

One can liken procrastinators to 3-year-old’s who don’t want to do something, arguing, “I don’t feel like it. I need to feel better in order to act. First, I need to feel better.” Wrong, he says; in fact, your feelings will follow your behaviors, so progress on that task will actually improve your mood.

While tips aren’t a sure-fire recipe for success — after all, tips are only useful if you follow them — I think these three could really make a dent in your procrastination habit.

Committed to YOUR Personal Productivity,

James is a productivity coach specializing in working with people who are procrastinators and those who want results quickly. His ability to get brilliant results with his clients is quite amazing…

“Fast Tracking YOUR SUCCESS… SuccessFULL Living!”

To Find Out the “5 Secrets of REALLY Successful People” go to…

The Productivity Coach

P: 0421 210 444

Neural Maps

Neural Maps

In terms of productivity, developing new attitudes, behaviours and habits are not only desirable, they are essential.

They are necessary because without them you won’t be able to function effectively. Most routine things you do are done on “autopilot”, like driving your car, cleaning your teeth, doing your job etc.

As a human being you (along with everyone else) constantly:

•    Make connections in your brain

•    Divide things into pair of opposites (such as good, bad, right wrong)

•    Look for coincidences

•    Compare & contrast

•    Differentiate

•    Make meaning out of the connections you make

What you are doing is making new neural pathways in your brain and strengthening existing ones. These maps show up in areas such as skills, habits, opinions and beliefs.

Sadly, as I see it, most people seem to live their whole lives unconsciously, totally conditioned by family, peers, marketers, advertisers and propaganda. They don’t have an original thought; everything they think is thrown up habitually by their subconscious minds, some of it dysfunctional.

Does Intelligence Matter?

But no matter how much you improve the processing power of your “human computer” there is still the matter of the “data set” with which it views the world.

Put another way, the data on your “human hard drive” determines to a large extent how you interpret “new data.”

Or simpler still: depending on your experience of life up to this point, how you react to new experiences can differ radically.

For example, a man having been rejected by a woman may perceive that moment as humorous or devastating.

A woman may perceive the apparent sexual advances of a man as threatening or flattering.

A speaker may perceive laughter as his audience laughing with him – or at him.

Why?

Same stimuli + different perceptual instruments + unique neural map = different data”

“Neural map” refers to our best understanding of neuroscience to date: neural networking.

The human mind can be viewed as a complex network of data and connections between those data. (Warning: colossal understatement follows.)

In relation to your well-being, the data matters and the connections matter.

These connections are a complex web of different sensations, feelings and beliefs and actions.

Which neural maps may be hindering your productivity?

Why not create new, more empowering ones?

If you liked this article, why not share it via your favourite social media site by clicking on one of the links below?

How to Reduce Stress

What Causes Stress?

We’ve all heard of common solutions to relieving stress. Things like meditation, breathing, diet, exercise and positive thinking all come readily to mind.

Bridging the gap between our western attitude to life focussed on material wealth and an eastern or traditional approach to life centred on our beingness for me is a real key.

Our society today promotes the myth that striving to be more, producing more and having more will ultimately solve our problems and make us happy.

Anything less we are led to believe makes us a failure. Add to that the information overload we all suffer from, it’s no wonder many people suffer from stress, depression, frustration and addictions.

A quick look at health statistics, mental and physical will readily confirm these assertions.

What is Success?

So how do you measure this thing called success? I think before we can measure it we need to define it. It means different things to different people. One of my favourite definitions is:

Progressive Realisation of Worthwhile Pre-Determined Personal Goals.

Coming from this perspective, the enjoyment is in what you do on the way to the achieving of the goal. In a way, the actual goal becomes secondary to the unspoken real goal which is self actualisation.

How do you know when you’ve made it? We are conditioned, it appears, to always view ourselves as somehow inadequate, not quite making the grade, and so we continue to strive to improve ourselves, to work even harder in order to get better results, accumulate wealth, material possessions or even enlightenment.

It’s struggle that we are sure to lose. But every day we repeat the same pattern, unconsciously striving for whatever it is we think will make us complete.

The reality is, you’ll never make it, you ARE it. You just aren’t aware of it yet.

Be Happy Anyway

It’s a big trap most fall into and in this respect we are like Sisyphus who, in ancient Greek mythology, was doomed forever in Hades to push a rock up a hill. He would nearly make it to the top when the effort would overtake him so he and the rock would roll all the way down to the bottom. He’d then have to start the whole futile exercise over again, with inevitably the same result.

It is all too easy to get caught up in and overwhelmed by the demands we put on ourselves that it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that “Things” don’t make us happy.

Now, please understand there is absolutely nothing wrong with setting goals for anything. We , as human beings thrive on it. It’s the dysfunctional subconscious patterns, habits and beliefs that distort the whole process.

Why not be fundamentally happy anyway, BEFORE and DURING your quest, rather than putting unrealistic and impossible to meet conditions on yourself and those around you? Your sense of self worth stays with you regardless of what happens.

If you liked this article, why not share it via your favourite social media site by clicking on one of the links below?

Committed to YOUR Personal Productivity,

James is a productivity coach specializing in working with people who are procrastinators and those who want results quickly. His ability to get brilliant results with his clients is quite amazing…

“Fast Tracking YOUR SUCCESS… SuccessFULL Living!”

To Find Out the “5 Secrets of REALLY Successful People” go to…

The Productivity Coach

P: 0421 210 444

Conditioning and Productivity

I was thinking the other day on the different factors that help people produce consistently good results on a day to day basis so I created the following video to explain in simple terms how this happens and more importantly, what to do about it.

 

Committed to YOUR Personal Productivity,

James is a productivity coach specializing in working with people who are procrastinators and those who want results quickly. His ability to get brilliant results with his clients is quite amazing…

“Fast Tracking YOUR SUCCESS… SuccessFULL Living!”

To Find Out the “5 Secrets of REALLY Successful People” go to…

The Productivity Coach

P: 0421 210 444

Perseverance and Productivity

Hi, I’ve often pondered on the tiny difference there can be between winning and losing, especially in sport. This video demonstrates in a very clear and motivating way how small differences can have a huge effect on outcomes.

If you want to get that little bit more from yourself, call James on

0421 210 444 NOW!

If the video doesn’t appear above, please click on the Post Title at the top to see it

Committed to YOUR Personal Productivity,

James is a productivity coach specializing in working with people who are procrastinators and those who want results quickly. His ability to get brilliant results with his clients is quite amazing…

“Fast Tracking YOUR SUCCESS… SuccessFULL Living!”

To Find Out the “5 Secrets of REALLY Successful People” go to…

The Productivity Coach

P: 0421 210 444

Why We All Need A Coach

The one critical reason why we all need a coach is that sometimes our perception of a situation is skewed and one dimensional. We all could do with someone to assist us to obtain a more balanced perspective in life.

It can be like riding a tobbogan down a hill in the snow again and again. There are many ways to get to the bottom but if you keep going down the same path you’ll make deep tracks that make you go faster but seriously limit your ability to change direction.

You get comfortably stuck in a rut.

If that rut is your life then the tracks that cause your problems are your fears, beliefs and habits.

Counter-Productive Belief

For a long time I ran my business with the belief that I should really look after my customers.

“Nothing wrong with that” I hear you saying to yourself. Perfectly true. But it wasn’t until someone helped me see what I couldn’t. That yes, I was looking after my customers but I wasn’t looking after me. There was an awful lot I was doing at my expense while thinking I was doing the right thing.

I was unable to see both sides of the equation.

Once seen from this new perspective and acted upon, it made a huge difference in terms of profit and self confidence.

Sport and Life

Having a coach to help you with your goals, beliefs and to develop empowering habits really does make sense. How many top sports people do you know that don’t have a coach? I’m certainly not aware of any.

You are participating in the most important game of all, your life.

Make the most of it.

Committed to YOUR Personal Productivity,

James is a productivity coach specializing in working with people who are procrastinators and those who want results quickly. His ability to get brilliant results with his clients is quite amazing…

“Fast Tracking YOUR SUCCESS… SuccessFULL Living!”

To Find Out the “5 Secrets of REALLY Successful People” go to…

The Productivity Coach

P: 0421 210 444

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