The sad tale of little Pietie

Little Pietie is a supplier of mine and has been for years. Poor little Pietie has been letting his delivery to my company slip somewhat over the last few months and the warnings and offers of help didn't seem to improve the situation.

Little Pietie has just learnt that consistently late delivery leads to delayed payment of invoices.

You shouldn't want to run your company like a bastard, but you do need to be strict and apply business rules to your management. I've always been a good and regular payer to my suppliers which generally elicits the best out of them - treat each other well and all that. However little Pietie pushed me too far. I was tracking the number of combined days he was late on delivery and that's how many days he is now going to wait to be paid.

Small business live and die on cash flow. If you don't deliver consistently then you can't expect to be paid consistently. No matter how many companies I look at, it's always the ones that falter on their delivery that suffer from cash flow problems. Poor work management equals poor delivery equals cash flow problems. Start at the source and fix your delivery and the cash flow will sort itself out.