Starting a Small Business
Delegating Work
This is a highly debatable topic; when to do something yourself and when to pay someone else to do the work. When I first went self-employed, the local Business Link made it seem implicitly important that you should really be doing all of the various admin and accounts etc. for your own business.
Many of the newly self-employed people on my course were pretty-much petrified of the technicalities of accounting and suchlike and were anxious about it all. I can see that there is considerable benefit to a new business startup to have an understanding of the accounts and suchlike.......but is it really necessary to have to actually do the accounts personally?
I think a lot depends upon the stamina and mental attitude of the business proprietor. If, like me, evenings are times for relaxing and unwinding, then the notion of sitting in front of a pile of accounting admin is apalling. So, if not toiling into the evening, then does one eat into the normal working day with these tasks.
The biggest counter-argument to doing this is that your working day should really be about adding value in the way your business is supposed to be doing. On the whole I would have to side upon this logical argument, that if you are spending your hours on accounts then you are also missing opportunities (sometimes known as Opportunity Cost, in the vernacular of business-speak).
Of the many cafes and restaurants I've seen go bust in my time, there's one place that sticks in my mind more than any other. The owner would often have the accounts out on the tables when trade was quiet. She seemed to spend interminable amounts of time on these blasted accounts; all the while she was missing an opportunity, just to chat with the customers, find out more about their real opinions on the fare of the cafe.
Nowadays, your most loyal customers are an even more vital part of the business. You could ask them to put flyers in their workplaces or various social groups. Many of your best customers would be perfectly happy to put a link from their website or social-networking page towards your business. These are real added value benefits of your invested time. The reality is that you could find someone to do your book-keeping for about £15 to £20 per hour...they should be able to do it all much more efficiently than you could.
Nowadays it is perfectly acceptable to send invoices or receipts by email. This saves a lot of time and a bit of cost. Try whenever possible to get your customers to pay invoices straight away, cheque-on-delivery arrangement.
Paypal is another very good immediate form of accepting payments; it may cost about 4 percent of the transaction value, but it is often very convenient for your customers to pay this way....and of course they can use their credit cards for this purpose.
Chasing up non payers of invoices is a laborious and slightly unpleasent task which can take inordinate amounts of your prescious time. It is far easier to somehow or another just make sure the customer pays immediately. You can always try to offer some incentive for this, a bit extra free.
One of the advantages of having a retail type business is that you tend to take your payments directly, there and then, in the till; this is of significant benefit.
If your customer is simply not going to pay on delivery, then I hope that your business is not selling things that have actually cost you much money (as a percentage of the sale value), as these are issues that kill a lot of businesses. Sometimes they are known as Cash-Flow problems or Credit-Control problems, but all in all the problem is easier avoided entirely rather than to dealt with afterwards.