Have you ever had a week like this?
• Your client’s “hopeful” horse in training is parked for being chronically lame
• 4 lesson cancellations in one day
• Hot sale prospect flickers into a flame-out
Each situation results in another clog in your cash flow pipeline and starts your mind racing on how you can replace the “lost” income.
For the self-employed person, sales are everything. Lost sales are lost opportunity for revenue. It’s common for all small businesses, not just horse businesses, to be stretched thin and operating with tight margins.
As the expense meter is constantly running in your business, naturally you always want the revenue meter to be flowing at a faster rate than expenses all of the time. But, wanting and getting are two different things.
So how do you deal with “lost revenue” like the disappointments mentioned above?
- Accept the fact that perfect efficiency for sales and income generation is impossible.
- Understand the circumstances of why the revenue was lost and create better systems to prevent or reduce the possibility of losing more sales for the same reason.
- Resist the temptation to dwell on the “loss” or assign blame and just move on to the next job.
In your desire to create more “billable hours” in your work day, you may find yourself in an exhausting cycle teaching more lessons or training more horses than should be attempted. The result of exhaustion is always miserable attitudes, poor performance and often in the horse business, injury. Doing anything and everything in pursuit of a buck is a flawed strategic plan. You will be as busy as a puppy chasing its tail and twice as dizzy.
My friend Len, self employed in the computer industry, told me recently that he volunteers time for good causes, takes people to lunch to share ideas and gambles his time on prospective customers that may never spend a dime with him. He does these things and loses billable hours because he understands that the growth of his business is dependent on knowing more people to make it easier to get to know even more people. He volunteers time because he enjoys it and knows that working on “work” twelve hours a day erodes the greatest reward of self employment – freedom of choice on how to allocate his time.
Expect to have days or weeks when your anticipated cash flow dries up to a trickle. Keep in mind that all business owners experience these frustrating periods. Learn from the experience and develop solutions to help reduce the chance of the revenue loss happening again.
If you need the stability of a fixed weekly paycheck, self employment is not for you; a time clock card is the solution.