They had allowed their biggest customer to get away with late or missed payments for so long that they were owed over £30,000.  They had not paid the rent for months either.

When their invoice factoring company pulled the plug on them, they went bust from lack of cashflow.  It was a slow and lingering death that caused a great deal of distress for all involved. 

Sometimes the quickest way to improve things in your business is to look for the symptoms of what's wrong.  Sloppy practice around invoicing is a serious illness for a business during a tough economy.  Collect your cash while you can – don't be the last one to ask for money!

Here's a quick check-list of some symptoms to check if your business is suffering from invoice-itus…

1. You often forget to send out an invoice, so you allow your customers to pay late, even when you've delivered your service or products.
    
2. You make lots of mistakes on invoices, which lets customers argue with you for a while, keeping cash that should be in your bank.
    
3. You feel embarrassed when chasing payments, so you are always the last person your customer pays.
    
4. You are constantly running with low cashflow, even though sales are OK, but you don't know how to change things.
    
5. You stick your head in the sand and hope it'll all be OK, too embarrassed to ask for help, you'll let it get worse before shouting "Help!".

The worst thing that you can do is wait for it to get worse before you ask for help.  No matter how bad it feels right now, it won't get any better until you start to do something different.

If you recognise any of these symptoms in your business, a free consultation with your business coach, the "profits doctor", might be the smartest move you can make…

In sports, it's the same too, with top performers in all fields operating with their own coach to help them achieve to their full potential.  In the UK business coaching and mentoring are gradually gaining ground as the smart way to grow your business and achieve success faster. 

When a child learns to walk, every time they fall over, a little bit of learning happens.  Apparently the average baby falls over around 150-200 times before they get the hang of walking. 

Imagine if you didn't give up on cold-calling until you'd done 200 hours!  Imagine if you wrote 200 different adverts before giving up on advertising as "not working".  How different would your results be if you learnt from every mistake?  You may have heard yourself that the most successful people don't just get a lucky break, they have tried more things and failed a lot more than most ordinary achievers will ever do.

Business coaching is all about trying new ways to deal with familiar problems.  A mentor will help you to look at a situation in new ways, try out new strategies and then look at the result as feedback, rather than failure.  Everything in life is about making adjustments based on feedback and a coach helps you to change your thinking, so that failure becomes feedback, not a grim and grey ghost that haunts you and stops you from changing for the better.

Coaching Turns Mediocrity Into Success

Here's an example.  One of my coaching clients had a retail business with a big inventory of stock that wasn't moving.  Some of it was over 7 years old and was just clutter in the stockroom.  She held a sale every year but had not managed to shift the old stuff, only newer, more fashionable items at discounted sale prices. 

You can probably imagine how she felt when I suggested that a special "by invitation only" sale might get a different result.  Years of poor results from sales meant she didn't believe it could work.  "We've done sales before, that won't make much difference".  As her mentor, I helped her to see the subtle, but important, differences in the approach this time around.

The sale became the best event, in turns of profit, that the shop had ever done.  Many of the old items, which we affectionately called heirlooms, sold that night.  Lots of new stock sold without any discount at all.  Over the next month, all the remaining "heirloom" items sold out, clearing space and making revenue to buy more up to date stock.

A carefully crafted invitation letter to existing clients only (i.e. people who buy, not just tyre-kickers) filled the shop with 40 eager customers at the official sale opening time of 6pm.  Her sales staff were rushed off their feet the whole time and when they looked at the figures, they took a week's sales in a little over 3 hours.  The official closing time for the sale was 9pm, but they couldn't close the doors until the last customer left at 9.30pm.  This experience was a turning point for my client and helped her to embrace lots of other new ways of thinking about her business, rather than worrying about failure.

Whether you choose to call it coaching or mentoring, UK businesses are waking up to it.  It makes compelling TV viewing, from the original Troubleshooter series with Sir John Harvey Jones that inspired me to become a coach, through to "Badger or Bust" and all the other business programs now showing on UK  channels.  There is a healthy and growing interest in using an independent third party to help you look at your business through new eyes, bring new ideas and hold you accountable to making it happen.

Business Coaching with Guaranteed Results…

If you think your business would benefit from a fresh pair of eyes looking at it, send me a note to ask about my unique New Guaranteed Results Or Your Money Back coaching programme…