Entrepreneurs-Journey.com

I see this a bit. Some people or cultures have dificulty in valuing knowledge based services, and in some case will not pay if they can get away with it. I would seek a % deposit up front (I get 50% most times), or get a contract signed before you release work.

99% payment is pretty good though. Note also that bad debts are a tax deduction, for what its worth. So include them in your revenes, and write them off in your expenses (as long as they are legitimate).

Thanks for your posts, I enjoy the read.

Peter

Commodoties Trading?

How much of your business comes from word-of-mouth? Perhaps you could extend credit to people who are referred by paying clients, and be stricter with the rest.

I noticed that the two bad debts you listed had hotmail email accounts. Perhaps you could only extend credit to people with ‘proper’ email accounts? It gives you a bit more confidence that you know who you’re dealing with (and some course of action to make a claim if need be) and it might give your customers a bit more of an incentive to pay their debts if they are not completely anonymous.

As a freelance copywriter, I require a 50% deposit before starting a project for any new client. It weeds out the “tire kickers” and potential ripoffs. I’ve never had a legitimate business walk away in a huff. They understand: business is business.

Besides, it forces the prospect to make a commitment — emotional and financial– to your service. If no payment is required in advance, some folks figure, “Why not get what I can, for as long as I can?”

But it was the title of your post that caught my eye, Yaro. Recently a member of an online writers group posted a message to the group, promoting a supposedly lucrative business that “doesn’t required any clients.”

Most of the group, including me, was outraged by what was no doubt a teaser come-on for some expensive information product.

So tell me, Yaro — and your readers, too. Can you think of ANY businesses that don’t require customers or clients?

I can’t think of any. Sooner or later, somebody HAS to write a check. As the old saying goes, “Nothing happens until somebody buys something.”

Tom

I agree that a contract up front would at least let them know that it is not “free”.

Also, I think you should check with a lawyer before posting the deadbeats on your website, just to make sure they can’t sue you for slander or something…”I was going to pay, just have not gotten around to it yet…!” or some such excuse.

If the quality of your editing work is on par with the quality of your writing here, perhaps those deadbeats were justified in withholding payment. For example:

…listing the names (if they are the real names) of the clients that have committed….

That should be “who have committed.”

I don’t expect this page will have much of an affect….

That should be “effect.”

Etc., etc., etc.

I’ve worked with Yaro on numerous projects proofing copy for my clients. He has earned my repeat business.

Yaro is quick to respond to inquiries, pays attention to the details, and his editors are top-notch.

Silvio, BetterEdit is worth every penny, try their services and I think you will agree.

If the quality of your editing work is on par with the quality of your writing here, perhaps those deadbeats were justified in withholding payment.

Response: Yes ideally as the owner of an editing and proofreading business it would be nice if I had the same skills as my editors do, but I don’t. That’s why I have skilled and experienced editors do the work, not me.

What a great reply to a post that was meant to provoke!

Of course, if the poster has taken the time to familiarise him or herself with the content of your blog, then they would have known that their comments were irrelevant.

It goes back to what you were saying in your post Yaro,

‘perhaps I had overestimated the abilities of our clients to read the text on our website’!

This obviously applies to at least one visitor to this blog too!

Unfortunately the internet has bred a whole new group of people who would never dream of being dishonest in the ‘real’ world but have somehow found themselves being able to scam and scheme as they hide behind the virtual world of a computer.

It’s not unreasonable to ask for a % of the payment up front but it’s understandable that an ‘honesty’ policy is introduced in a new site in order to entice new business.

Proceed with caution, and expect a few losses from time to time and everything will work out just fine.

Hey Yaro, In the spirit of turning a negative into a positive…I bet if you took the idea of your bad credit list page, with the people who defrauded you on it, and sprinkled a little web 2.0 collaboration dust on it, you could have pretty good business idea where you ended up with a wikipedia style dictionary of fraudsters with IP addresses and ’signatures’ or warning clues. Could be a very valuable service.

There’s an internet storm center, why not an internet fraud center? Just a thought.

The “fraudster warning site” could be potentially useful, but the potential for abuse seems high.

There would need to be a verification procedure so that every complaint isn’t immediately accepted as fact.

That sort of thing costs money, so the monetization model would have to be good to fund it.

A variation might be to have a “feedback site” based loosely on eBay’s feedback system, but useable for all types of internet transactions. You give your unique id when you buy or sell and leave comments based on your experience. In othe words, the users do the work for you.

Monetization could come from advertising revenue.

Perhaps such a site exists already - does anyone know of one?

One of the simplest, easiest ways to own your own business without any clients is to have an affiliate business. Promote other people’s stuff and let the affiliate merchant do all the postage and handling and messing around with clients. Works for me! I’ve been earning a very good living from my affiliate business full-time since 1998.

There is a site called ‘notgoodenough.org’ that reports bad service from a business and charges lots of money so businesses can respond to the public complaints. I love the idea of a reverse lookup where we can ban/list information about bad customers!

I have had more than I can count. So much so that I basically turned my successful company totally around and stopped dealing with customers (mostly).

I spent the last 3-6 months asking myself “How can I get away from customers and lousy staff”.

The answer was - develop a product for yourself, and let customers subscribe/buy it (or not) at their discretion. Make it such a simple product, sell it for so low a price, that it becomes disposable. Then you can make no guarantees.

I have also found that this is more fun - because you can iterate on a product over and over and make it better over time without having to deal with servicing a customer’s every whim.

I thought long and hard about a business/product like that, and have since started a new venture with a partner to build a product that scratches my itch. I figure if *I* have that itch, then others will to!

The link is in my name

I must agree that some parts of the world do not value knowledge based services. I myself am a Management Consultants and as a result very few clients value my service and find it hard justifying to themselves the fee that I request.

In reference to a post above…commodity trading has no clients…YES.

But get the wrong broker and you’ll wish for the days of trying to convince the head of Campbells Soup why that jingle in his head is a really carppy idea!

kevin