Hey. Pick Up the Phone.
There’s a big difference between illiquidity and insolvency, but the former can feel pretty stressful when there’s a bill to be paid and nothing but assets that aren’t cash on the balance sheet. “Can I pay you with this inventory I haven’t sold yet?” is not something your suppliers want to hear.
So it was at one of our companies that was cash poor with $1M of bills to pay and several million of AR on the balance sheet. In other words, the money was there, but it wasn’t in cash, so we were on the verge of a crisis. Yet by the end of the week, we’d paid our bills and stacked more than $1M on the balance sheet.
What happened? We picked up the phone.
As it turns out, when we were told that the company had done everything to collect its overdue receivables, “everything” including everything but picking up the phone to call the people who owed us money. We had texted them, emailed them, slacked them, emailed them again, and complained loudly to others in the office that we hadn’t been paid yet. Shocker, none of that worked.
In an era when someone can communicate at length without ever actually having to talk to someone else, I think we’ve lost sight of the power of conversation. My experience is that if you need to persuade, cajole, convince, ask, tell, flatter, or correct, it’s all better done over the phone or in person. And in our line of work, we see the power of a phone call over and over again.
Why has actually talking to people gotten so hard? Heck if I know. But we’re all guilty of it. Just pull up your cell phone and compare the last time you texted someone to the last time you actually talked to them.
Or compare the number of texts you’ve sent to the number of phone calls you’ve made. Sure, you might argue that texts are shorter and more efficient, but sometimes we should value quality over quantity. Think about the value of calling someone and saying “Hey, I was just thinking of you” and hanging up. That’d probably make their day.
I think a new best practice is if someone you haven’t talked to in a long time texts you, instead of texting them back, call them back immediately and have a real conversation. I bet both of you will be glad you did.
Have a great weekend.
– By Tim Hanson