Banks are notorious for offering you money when you don’t need it, but demanding it back when you do.
If you add to that the growing propensity of customers to pay on the last day of the grace period . . . or later, then you’ll know that even the healthiest businesses can find themselves in dire straits before they know it.
How did we get into this mess?
To a certain extent, it doesn’t matter.
But for the record, we can still remember when the banks were bailed out. Some thought they were too big to fail. (Pride goes before a fall.)
Others preached ethics, but went for big profits instead.And still others decided that the laws applied to everyone else, though not to them.
But probably the most frustrating thing to come out of the financial debacle is the fact that when the government handed over the billions of dollars required to keep them from going bankrupt, they made no attempt to hold these same companies accountable for the way they spent that money.
And so instead of providing financial support to businesses, they simply paid themselves the bonuses that they couldn’t have afforded beforehand.Whatever the causes were, it’s businesses like yours that have been left to suffer.
I remember someone telling me that he was property rich, but cash poor. And I imagine that you could be in the same situation. You have the plant and equipment, you have people with the skills you need, and you even have a relatively full order book. But, your cash flow could do with some help.
There’s just too much time between when you send out your invoices and when you get paid for them. Cash flow is an indispensable part of any successful business. And shutting it off in a firm can have the same effect as staunching the flow of blood in the body. Neither can survive for very long.
Factoring is one means that you have available to fight back. And I use the term “fight” for a reason. Business is something of a war.
Some will argue certainly it always has been and always will be. But I don’t think that’s the case at all. There is still a lot of collaboration and cooperation going on to this day, and social media may help to make it even more so.
But there is something of a fight involved, especially when it comes to getting the money you need to keep yourself going. The war, however, seems to be against the whims of your bank and economic pressures, rather than that of your customers.
In case you’re unfamiliar with the term, factoring is nothing more than a means through which you can obtain cash quickly via your invoices. It’s not a loan. It’s a sale.
You sell your invoices at a bit of a discount to another company. That company pays you cash for them, and then you’re able to put that money directly into your business.
And by doing so, you can keep your cash flow going.