Credit Matters Newsletters

Credit Matters is now a Bronze Supporter of the IMA. The IMA is the professional organisation supporting the debt collection industry.

We have also added a new article in our Members Area in the Experts Exchange feature. Dean Kaplan and myself have co-authored a new article titled "There Is No Such Thing As A Debt Collection Call."

If you would like to participate and co-author an article with an emphasis on a financial risk management topic, please contact Kim. We are dedicated to providing new information to our Members and always interested in learning more about how to create and operate a better business.

Advertising via Credit Matters

If you are interested in reaching a wider group of business prospects, contact Kim to see what we can do for you. There are many different opportunities to advertise your business. However Credit Matters offers one of the few opportunities to reach a broad marketplace of customers with financial risk management requirements.

Attached this month are brochures from Vesna Grubacevic advertising her new book, CreditorWatch with news about their new products and services, and the list of courses available from Investigator Upgrade.

Today we live in the age of entitlement where it seems debtors are starting to act as though they are entitled to amend their finance contracts once they have received a financial benefit.

In business we see this entitlement expectation when customers expect to be given credit facilities irrespective of their previous payment history. Alternatively, customers sign trading agreements, accept the suppliers' goods or services. Once having accepted the goods and services, the customer acts as if they are entitled to change the terms previously agreed upon.

Legislators are also encouraging these attitudes by creating legislation which further supports customers in to believing they have entitlements which are not also extended to suppliers.

Your conundrum in this environment is to find a way of doing business which allows you, the supplier, to counter this customer entitlement culture to protect your business interests. 

It is a wise business owner and manager who can think and act positively whilst looking for and managing the world of business risks. In other words, they have the capacity to worry about the ramifications of their actions in a world which suggests there are diminishing opportunities and yet also remain optimistic in the face of adversity.

Never before has the balancing of these two viewpoints been more important. It is easy to suggest the great depression of the 1930's saw similar risks as experienced today. However during the Great Depression, the commercial world imploded. In addition, there were very few other positive options at that time. For instance, most people lived in restrictive lifestyles according their place in society, a lack of choice in financial service providers and often lacked the means and opportunities to start a business.

Today's business environment is very much different from that of the 1930's. The entrepreneur and the established business person may see fewer obvious opportunities in their chosen field of business. Furthermore they are likely to see comments about how the world's business economy is contracting, whilst also noting the banks seem to have stopped lending to any business without security. 

However today, unlike the 1930's, people are able to live by many different life-styles, have access to new technology, customers' needs and desires have expanded, plus there are many new sources of business funding.

Consequently there are numerous options to start or reengineer your business to make money in this current environment. The critical factor in today's world is to have ALL the facts on what it takes to operate a business. This is where the ability to understand the negatives alongside the positives of operating a business, becomes so valuable.

Another way of looking at the issue of the positives and negatives which currently exist for the entrepreneur or businessperson is to reinterpret the accounting adage, "for every positive, there must be a negative." If we reverse the saying to "for every negative, there must be a positive" new possibilities become available for investigation. This means whilst your competitors are dwelling on the negatives, you can review the same negatives and seek positive business opportunities.

Continuing this thought process, you can also draw on Edward de Bono's "Six Thinking Hats." This concept put forward the idea where different thinking assists groups to plan in a more balanced manner. As a result a more effective outcome to the problem being reviewed can be achieved rather than reviewing a problem from a limited perspective.

The Six Thinking Hats concept works well in a larger organisation if there is a genuine attempt to work through the process and all the participants' professional opinions are respected. 

In the micro and small to medium enterprise the range of a suitable group of employees which could approach a concept in the same fashion might not available. The solution for the business owner and manager of a smaller business is to have access to a wide range of respected mentors and advisors.

There is nothing worse than to have a worthy business proposition and have it fail because the risks involved were not properly addressed. Equally disappointing is to discourage businesspeople from having a go despite identifying the negatives and risks involved. Too often naysayers promote a negative proposition which suggests the risk proposition is deemed to be stronger than the possibility of success. There always has been and always will be risks in operating a business. However the risks need not stop anybody doing business if these risks are acknowledged upfront and managed throughout the life of the business.

The business owners and managers who embrace the concepts of opportunity and risk in a balanced manner will always continue to have a greater chance of being successful. Of course there will be on occasion, those unexpected catastrophic events which nobody can anticipate in the normal course of business. The truth is obvious in many markets today. Proving your business can manage risk is one of the key points of difference when bidding for new business.