Have you ever made excuses for not paying a vendor on time? You weren’t happy with the work. You had other priorities that were more important. Your paying them was dependent upon you being paid by a late paying client.

Late paying clients really piss you off, don’t they? It’s so disrespectful to not have the terms of payment met when you turned in stellar work, isn’t it? And because your client is paying you late, you are paying your vendors late…

But you have no right to be pissed off at the late paying client, because you are them. Everything you resent about them your vendor resents about you.

This is about something much deeper than accounts payable issues.

The speed with which you pay your bills says a lot to your vendors about you and your integrity. It says even more about the health of your business. If you are just starting out and on a shoestring budget that’s one thing, but if you’re years into building your business and you still can’t pay your vendors on time, you have big problems.

Cash flow is not your problem. It is the symptom of your problems. You are not selling enough, you aren’t generating enough opportunities to sell, you’re not charging enough, or you’re not running a business scalable enough to be profitable. Whatever it is, you need to make fixing it your number one focus because it will not change magically on its own. It won’t even change if you commit to working harder because sheer hard work doesn’t mean you’ll make more money. You need to turn a clear eye on what is really wrong with your business, make systemic changes, and then work harder than you’ve ever worked in your life.

You cannot continue to pay your vendors late and pretend that your business is ok. They know it isn’t, and they’ll get tired of waiting for you to fix it. You’ll become a lower and lower priority for them until, one day, they’ll just stop working with you.

You already know your business isn’t ok. You know you’re kidding yourself – that your outward pretense of success on social media and to your friends is utter rubbish. It is a ticking time bomb until the day you decide to look clearly at what the real problems are and create a strategy to change.

If you’d like to receive updates for new posts please subscribe here:

Photo credit: It’s a deal – here’s the money via photopin (license).