Thursday, March 04, 2004
If you go to the "The Passion of the Christ" website you'll find that they noblely market little trinkets. Things like "witness pins" and coffee mugs and t-shirts. I haven't seen the movie yet but it's good to note that Mel keeps the high ground and won't sell out his uncompromising vision of the gospels (though it's just one vision, remember the bible has a number of differing views of the crucifixion within Gospels) by hawking anything less than the finest quality doo dads. I mean he wouldn't sell engaved ball point pens or license plates holders. Or would he?
Todays work related rant falls under the category of "Essential to the business but a constant pain in the ass". Collections. I'd be making a lot more money if my collections ran %100. But of course that's every small businesses dream. In truth it's often a nightmare. I hate just chasing invoices. Sometimes it's a good account that falls behind. You don't want to cut them off because you want to keep them as a client. So you call everyday, harassing the accounting people, charging finance charges, and still you get the run around. It's because the courier service is the lowest on the food chain. Our invoice will be pushed to the bottom of the pile until it absolutely can't be avoided. Problem is that I've already paid out in commission half that invoice. Bad debtors often just go out and get another service that's excited to have their business. It's all vicious but a part of the business cycle. In truth we haven't lost much money on bad invoices. After the dot com melt down we did lose money on a couple of businesses that declared bankruptcy. But surprisingly it wasn't too bad. Often a company like the Gap, which we do alot of business with, is slow paying simply because the bureaucracy is so thick that it takes payments a long time to get processed. In %90 of the cases no one is trying to screw you over, but best intentions without any cash are still worthless.
Todays work related rant falls under the category of "Essential to the business but a constant pain in the ass". Collections. I'd be making a lot more money if my collections ran %100. But of course that's every small businesses dream. In truth it's often a nightmare. I hate just chasing invoices. Sometimes it's a good account that falls behind. You don't want to cut them off because you want to keep them as a client. So you call everyday, harassing the accounting people, charging finance charges, and still you get the run around. It's because the courier service is the lowest on the food chain. Our invoice will be pushed to the bottom of the pile until it absolutely can't be avoided. Problem is that I've already paid out in commission half that invoice. Bad debtors often just go out and get another service that's excited to have their business. It's all vicious but a part of the business cycle. In truth we haven't lost much money on bad invoices. After the dot com melt down we did lose money on a couple of businesses that declared bankruptcy. But surprisingly it wasn't too bad. Often a company like the Gap, which we do alot of business with, is slow paying simply because the bureaucracy is so thick that it takes payments a long time to get processed. In %90 of the cases no one is trying to screw you over, but best intentions without any cash are still worthless.
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