First, tighten up your billing process.  It’s not uncommon for a company to take as long as two weeks to get invoices out the door. If you’re a $25 million dollar company, every working day you take preparing invoices ties up almost $96,000!. Cut three or four days from your processing cycle, and you’re talking real money.

Second, offer discounts to customers who accept shorter terms. If you’re now offering 45 days, you might suggest a 3% discount to anyone who accepts 30. On a $10,000 order, that will cost you $300. But if  getting the $9700 fifteen days early helps you make a payroll or pay a vendor without drawing on your line of credit, you’re well ahead of the game. And remember that everyone else is looking for savings now. A discount policy for people who pay promptly may get you some new customers.

I was , therefore, interested to read this post on Anita Campbell’s Small Business Trends:

Large businesses and small businesses increasingly operate in a finely-balanced and symbiotic ecosystem. Each needs the other. The major shift is that big companies slowly but surely are recognizing this. Instead of the typical competitive or vendor-buyer relationship that big companies and small businesses traditionally have had, the relationships are getting much more complex and interrelated and cross-reliant. This manifests itself in innovation programs, such as Proctor & Gamble’s trail blazing www.pgconnectdevelop.com, to things as simple as big companies plowing money into websites and resource centers that have nothing to do with the product they are selling, necessarily, but focus on general advice to small businesses, such as Intuit’s Jumpup.com. The result has been an explosion of free resources available to entrepreneurs and small businesses supported by Corporate America.

As Anita says, “This is a key trend for all of us as small business owners and entrepreneurs.” Think about your relationships with much bigger customers. Are they ready to treat you like a partner rather than a desperate suitor? What are they willing to do to help you serve them better?

It might be a conversation worth having.

Isn’t it amazing what the right attitude can do?

1. There is no plan.
2. Think strengths, not weaknesses.
3. It’s not about you.
4. Persistence trumps talent.
5. Make excellent mistakes.
6. Leave an imprint.

None of this is revolutionary. You’ve probably heard it all before. But here’s why you might want to take a look at the book anyway.

1. It only takes half an hour to read.
2. The manga format reinforces what Pink said in A Whole New Mind about moving from information to conceptual thinking.
3. The manga format brings a bit of life and power to the annoying business fable genre.
4. It only takes half an hour to read.

The advice in this book will not change your life, but I walked away thinking that the whole-form plus content-was somehow interesting and provocative. And it only takes half an hour to read.

• one left the meeting with a plan to rearrange top management to make the company more responsive, quicker to market, and more innovative. “We’ve been doing things the same way for years. I feel like this is going to really open up the future for us.”
• one left the meeting with three things to do immediately to re-energize and re-engage employees. “I’ve been worrying about this for over a year. This is the first time I feel like I know what to do.”
• one left the meeting with a plan to identify, recruit, evaluate, and reward employees based on behaviors and attitudes vital to the company’s success. “This is something I’m going to put in place right now, It completely changes how I think about my business.”
• one left the meeting with an idea worth tens of thousands of dollars over the next year. “I can’t believe I never thought of this.”
  

Can you guess who’s who?

It doesn’t matter. You don’t get fresh ideas from people who are just like you. You get them from people who are different. It always matters who is in the room, but maybe not in the way you think.

When leaders work together to help each other succeed, good ideas come from surprising places.

That’s the average. But fashion retailer Barney’s has increased response to its email campaigns tenfold by 1) using simpler messages–featuring one product per email rather than 10 or 12, and 2) carefully mining existing data from its web site to target offers to the right buyers.

What if you’re not in retail? The same approach may pay off for you.

• some non-retailers may have a better sense of how to target specific offers to the right customers.
• some non-retailers may have smaller customer email lists, thus reducing costs.
• everyone can benefit from simple offers targeted to the right customers.

If you’re not using email as part of your online marketing, give it a try. You may improve your return and reduce your spend.

Read all about it in Fast Company.

“When customers are spending less across an industry, most everyone loses revenue, and most everyone reacts in the wrong way. They cut costs, they lay off people, they do anything they can think of to reduce expenses and maximize margins. That creates opportunities for me.” What will Steve do? He plans to acquire his biggest competitor, hire some new key people (who used to work for other companies), and steal customers from businesses that have weakened their positions by cutting too much.

Not all of us can afford to buy out a competitor right now. So what can we learn from Steve?

• Some of your competitors will lose customers when they close locations, cut back on customer service, reduce marketing efforts. Go get those customers!
• A lot of great people are looking for work right now. That makes it a good time to get the key people you’ve been looking for. Look to hire the people you need to grow. They’re out there now.
• Your employees are worried about how slow times will affect them. You don’t want them brooding. Re-engage your staff by put them to work devising ways to strengthen the business. Make it clear that you want to emerge from slow times stronger than ever and you need their help to do it.
  

In short, if you want to make the most of opportunities created by a slow economy, don’t think about how you’re going to survive the slowdown, focus on how you’re going to come out of it in a stronger position than ever.

Andy Clark poses an interesting problem in Natural Born Cyborgs. A guy asks a woman on the street, “do you know what time it is?” She says, “Yes, I do.” She then looks quickly at her watch and says, “It’s 10:22.”

Is the woman telling the truth when she says she knows the time? I’m inclined to agree with Clark that she is.

But here’s the problem. A teacher asks his class, “Who knows the capital of Albania?” One student says, “I do.” He gets up, excuses himself, leaves the room, walks to the library reference section, and starts opening books. Forty-five minutes later, he walks back in the room and announces, “It’s Tirana.”

Is the student telling the truth when he says he knows the capital of Albania? most people would think he’s not.

Suppose someone asked you, “Do you know the Capital of Albania?” and you said, “Yes. It’s Tirana.” We’d probably all agree that you know the capital of Albania. You have the appropriate fact stored somewhere in your brain, and you can quickly reproduce it on demand. That’s what knowing something means, isn’t it?

Sure it is. And yet, I’m still inclined to agree that the woman who needs to glance at her watch knows what time it is. With Clark, I’d argue that it’s fair to say that you know the answer to a question if you know how to locate that answer quickly, whether you you have to look inside your own brain or elsewhere.

After all, it does take time to retrieve an answer from your brain. And sometimes it takes longer than others. If I were asked, “What’s the capital of Romania?” I might have to think for a moment or two before coming up with Bucharest. These days, I might even have to think a bit longer than a moment or two. But I’d get it in the end. And I think that should count as knowing, don’t you?

So if it’s not the fact that it takes some time to retrieve the answer that determines whether someone knows something or not, can it be that you have to get it from your own brain to count it as knowledge? That just doesn’t make sense to me. I believe, like Clark, that our minds extend beyond our brains. We ought to recognize that and take advantage of it.

Jeffrey G. Peterson currently serves as vice president of Navigation and Sensors for Honeywell’s Aerospace business. The Navigation and Sensors business provides state-of-the-art guidance, navigation and positioning equipment and related services to a wide range of commercial, military and space customers worldwide.

Jeff joined Honeywell’s Sensor and Guidance Products Division in 1983. In 1989, Jeff relocated to Defense Avionics Systems in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he held a variety of sales, marketing and program management positions. Jeff was promoted to vice president of sales and marketing for Defense Avionics Systems in 1997 and was named vice president and location executive for the Albuquerque Operation in 2000. Jeff was transferred to Minneapolis, Minnesota to assume the position of vice president sales and marketing for Defense and Space Electronics Systems in 2001. In September 2005 he was named vice president of sales for Defense and Space. He was promoted to his current position in January 2008.