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Selling services or product in your small business obviously is the primary cash flow driver. With your small business, it is important to be realistic of where you are at and who you can afford in the beginning stages. As a small business entrepreneur, you are your own best salesperson in selling your small business service or product. Don’t hire first; become adept at selling. Hiring sales professionals comes later in the process. As a small business consultant and small business coach, I have confirmed through numerous engagements, how successful entrepreneurs have the courage to act first, hire later.

I can tell you from real life experience – avoid the pompous “talker” types with the ‘corporate resume’ – they won’t help you, at least starting out in the first few years. At Creative Business Solutions, we thought that, to help us immediately increase our sales, we would hire a vice-president type from a multimillion dollar services company, with an ostensible track record in generating revenue, and offer that individual whatever it took – including stock options. We hired “Steve” (not his real name). Steve had worked for the “large” firm out of Atlanta, said he was familiar with the small business operation, but then negotiated with us weekly travel expenses back and forth before he even made the move to Texas! The skinny was that Steve was accustomed to existing accounts to manage, secretaries, company cars and a cell phone account – the antithesis of our CBS small business reality! I cringe at the memories of our company in effect coming to standstill as we waited for Steve to ramp up sales. To add insult to injury, he disappeared around the holiday season without an update, and called us from Atlanta to tell us he had decided to resign. You see, in some cases (not all); these “smooth talkers” will be using your job offer as a cushion until the next big offer comes along. This way, they don’t have to step up to the plate to perform – they just use their status and resume - procuring work at executive salaries. I touch on factors to evaluate when building teams under a later chapter.

Thankfully, my intuition kicked in a few months before, and I inserted myself back into a solution selling mode, adding three new accounts while ‘waiting’ on him to build his sales plan. This lesson unfortunately was repeated for us several times over the next few years as we struggled to see the lesson in our ways. It goes back to my first comment on trusting your power. If you are paying others to trust their judgment, why don’t you trust your own wisdom?

I learned very quickly that clients entrusted me to their care – I decided to make the most of this, and up sell any opportunity I could find. I was able to quickly close projects, and realized we could make do without the ‘ready for prime time’ players.

In the beginning at least, you have the fire, the drive, the passion to make your business succeed and you are your own best salesperson. You are your business. If you can’t articulate and solution sells your business, perhaps you should not be in the business.

Your initial team

We looked for people with the right attitude to become part of a small family – an initial team. Those we hired were for the most part, light on experience, but had a yearn to learn, were primarily recent college graduates , and willing to work at a cheap price in return for future advancement. These people were malleable as to the context they could work in, the tasks they could be assigned, and invariably were more than happy to do extra tasks to help us with our operation. Once we achieved significant recurring revenue we hired supervisors with the big company experience. So, hire only what you can afford; build their expertise to make them a foundation for others to learn from and to grow from.

If you are a start-up or early stage small business, don’t wait for financing possibilities. Whether you are spending weeks perfecting your copious small business plan in order to then fill out more reams of paper for SBA submission and approval, OR you are preparing your executive summary for venture capital, OR spending inordinate amounts of your precious time at angel investor meetings, OR even flying to Vegas for the weekend to get a ‘high interest’ loan, you are initially wasting your best chance to get your small business started by acting. Successful entrepreneurs act first; plan as they go. As an entrepreneur, small business coach and small business consultant , I have seen that cash flow and cash strategies become critical to early stage small business longevity and survival.

Acting is doing; it’s testing your product or service; it’s quickly validating (more likely disprove) the hypothetical projections you have been forced to do, often better served by using a Ouija board. It is challenging at best, but certainly possible to Act first, AND build your company at the same time, by self financing strategies. It’s known in entrepreneurial circles as bootstrapping (symbolic of pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps). Cash Flow goes hand in hand with the concept of bootstrapping, and is my subject of discussion today. Bootstrapping is focusing on cash as a priority.

Total cash, including cash on hand (including monies received) divided by your burn rate (cost of operation) determines how many months your business can exist without folding or without receiving an outside cash injection. Your focus must be on cash flow at this point in your business - cash is king.

Since the likelihood of a cash injection is not as likely, focus on creating an environment where cash is in the bank AND cash is more than reasonably expected to be received based on actual billing, i.e., creating cash flow. At CBS , my professional services company, I quickly prioritized cash flow strategies to create billing and payment terms favorable to us , not the client. Here is how I started:

We implemented short payment terms as a condition of doing business – by negotiating price or rate discounts in return for terms of net 15; this way you are assured at least you can pay your bills with monies received in a 30 day cycle.

With every project or service we performed, we secured a recurring revenue contract for support and maintenance. At American Airlines, in addition to delivering my first small project to deliver an Applicant Tracking application, as part of the proposal, I inserted a support and maintenance agreement for twelve months, renewable automatically annually upon review by the client, in which I offered several hours of 24/7 phone (and in some cases on site) support for a set fee, payable upon acceptance of the contract, in monthly installments. This greatly assisted us in paying our recurring expenses, including payroll.

We included a request for retainer before initiating the actual service – We asked for 10% down on projects (which enabled us to receive steady in flows of cash). You can justify this if you can convince your client that they can delay the last payment of the contract until everything is accepted. This way, both parties put ‘skin in the game’. We also offered a 2% discount for early payment. Approximately 25% of our clients saw an advantage to this.

Try these strategies and tweak them to your requirements.

Next week: More Bootstrapping strategies

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