This was a pretty short chapter that consisted of about seven pages. A lot of the material had to do about making sure that you collect the money that is owed to you. One example that was used was definitely intriguing. Essentially, there was a guy that was owed tens of thousands of dollars from a customer. Turns out, the customer was his church. Therefore, he was not inclined to collect on the bill as it didn’t seem right.
The company was doing bad financially too because of things like this. Eventually, this company acquired the help of Cloutier’s business and what they did was they drove down to the church and collected every penny that was owed to the company. Apparently the pastor apologized and all too and this made everyone in the company so amazed that they were able to collect the funds. As a result of that, it gave the business the cash flow to grow successfully.
Afterwards he talks a bit about you having to rely on your success based on your profits opposed to how much you have in the bank. Example, you can give yourself a false sense of security if it looks like you have say $800,000 in the bank to tell yourself that you are doing great when really you haven’t factor in things such as vendor debt or the tax you will have to pay on that at the end of the year.
But bottom line, the emphasis is that you are in business to make money and that your cash flow must be there. If your cashflow is not matching say your expenses then you have to be ruthless in cutting expenses. I think the main thing that is still sticking to my mind from this chapter is that church example as it is not uncommon for people not to want to collect because the person is say your friend or that it just doesn’t feel right to request for a payment. True enough it is usually a big reason that a business goes under too.