Late payment haunts small businesses
THOSE with salaried jobs might wonder why small business owners bang on about late payments. “You get paid eventually, don’t you?” is the often fairly unsympathetic response I get to the issue.
My reply to them is this. ‘Imagine your salary wasn’t paid into your bank at the end of the month. What would you do? And, at the end of the following month, the same thing happens. How would you handle your finances?’ Because that’s the reality of not being paid in a timely manner. The knock-on effects permeate every area of your life, and you spend unnecessary time trying to sort out the consequences.
That is the result of not being paid.
Until I started my own small business some 11 years ago, I never understood the maxim ‘cash is king’. I do now. So it’s perhaps not surprising that the Forum of Private Business (FPB) reports that poor cash flow is the ‘key issue’ among members