Can you feel it? The pressure of 30 June is starting to squeeze business people everywhere. Cut a cost here, put in extra overtime there. Anything that can be done is being done to achieve that oh-so-close commercial target by end-of-financial-year.
Or is it?
Entrepreneurs naturally look to new opportunities, and while we’re often focused on what we can do to create more business before year end, most of us fail to do something obvious which can turn June into a bumper month.
Experts estimate that running a basic debt recovery campaign in June can recoup up to 80% of your outstanding invoices.
For the average small business in Queensland, that represents an extra $10,000 to your bottom line in a single month. What’s more, demands for payment are usually more effective in June than any time of year.
According to Angela McDonald, a Brisbane-based director of debt management firm Optimum Recoveries , debt collection services are not just for big companies.
“Implementing an in-house campaign is absolutely better than not following up at all,” she said, “but more and more small business owners are choosing to outsource to professional collection agencies, in order to recover debts from a few hundred dollars to tens of thousands.”
With Australia lagging the rest of the world in terms of late payments (even South African and Mexican firms pay faster), it is perhaps unsurprising that small business billers are turning to outsourcing their debt recovery.
I asked Angela for five things the average Queensland business can learn from how her company manages the B2B debt recovery process.