THE 7 HABITS of
Highly Indebted People I spend all my time trying to get clients their money. Inevitably sometimes you exhaust all avenues and cannot recover their money. This is very frustrating and can leave you feeling deflated. You ask yourself, “Where is the justice”? The most common thing I hear is business owners saying that “I did the work and I am entitled to every cent”. That’s not quite true in my view. One of the duties of a business owner is to mitigate and manage risk. Yet all too often business owners commit their companies to too much work, for too great a value, for very poor quality clients, under non-existent terms. If you do that you can hardly complain about entitlements and justice. The fact is that there are scumbags in the business world who will take your work and run. If you make it easy then you carry some of the responsibility.
When you find yourself with no way of getting your money, I advise you to learn from the episode by asking yourself 7 important questions:
I had a bad feeling about it. Why did I do the work anyway? So often one’s 6th sense knows a scumbag when they see one. Pay attention to that inner voice and if it telling you that something is not right with your client/prospect then do further investigations before contracting with them or doing work. An early indicator is if your client is shy about giving you contact details, addresses, ABN’s and so on. Believe it or not, I have had clients do $20 000+ worth of work on the strength of a first name and a mobile phone number!
I hardly had any details about my client. Why didn’t I background the client properly? Once I had a client that was owed a five figure sum only to find that his client was run out of a rented townhouse. Before doing work you should be doing several searches and checks on your prospect. Check ABN’s, addresses, and contact details; especially the usual place of business. If it’s a residential apartment then tread carefully. Also Google the company name you are dealing with. Get an ASIC extract and see who the directors are and where they are. Find out who you are dealing with.
