I hate it when clients don’t pay
It’s a common problem known to all self-employed people: Dealing with clients that don’t pay. Or at least don’t pay on time and need reminder after reminder and almost threat of legal action before they cough up.
It’s a pain on more levels than one. It’s a pain itself not getting paid and thus not being able to pay all your bills. It’s a pain having to keep records of debitors and spend time on sending reminders etc.
But the biggest pain is perhaps the pain of seeing all the time wasted in trying to get paid. Time that could have been spent better on other things. And time which essentially only adds incremental cost to the already defunct relationship.
Sadly, there is no easy solution for this issue. Of course you could always ditch the client and hire someone to get the money home. But that’s not a pragmatic solution in my book. Instead I think the solution is to rigorously manage your client portfolio, so you can eventually manage the non-payers out.
2 comments
It’s really a killer in the relationship with the customer when the money doesn’t show up for the work delivered…
I’ve sometimes considered blogging about customers that doesn’t pay as a desparate solution. It won’t improve the relationship for sure, but the customer will feel an considerably increase pressure.
Apart from that, moving away from lousy paying customers is good strategy.
I have considered the blogging approach as well, but then I remember the saying that when you point one finger at someone, four others point back at you. And so I don’t do it.
Instead I’m thinking hard about setting up penalty interests and getting a good lawyer on board (I know a few, I wouldn’t want to get a call from ;-))
What really kills me here is the underlying message that by not paying the client obviously don’t value our relationship the way I do. And being a very network oriented person who strive to be on good terms with people thats a hard one to take.
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