The power of ‘on hold’

I currently have 31 customers who’s gardens I maintain. As I’m now 66 and a half, and a bit more, I’ve reduced down from 40 customers to 31 over time and I guess I can twiddle with those numbers if required.

Maybe it’s a semi-retirement phase I’m heading towards but reducing the numbers a little has given me just a bit more ‘me’ time and why not!

My 31 customers have always paid promptly which I thank them for! Apart from one this year.

Now I know this customer is very busy. Still eats though. Drives a car and must pay bills for that. Pays electric and phone bills or wouldn’t be able to check in and update their FB page daily. So why not pay me for the gardening I’ve done?

My gardening arrangements have always been loose and friendly, never wanting to be authoritarian about it, let’s face it, will never be more than a ‘micro business’ and if it all went wrong, well nothing much lost overall. Yet, my work, generates an invoice after maintaining each garden. And each invoice equals my income which I track and reconcile methodically so I can see at a glance who has and hasn’t paid!

I don’t mind it taking a while to pay me, folk do get busy, on holiday, forget to pay, all being genuine reasons for non payment, to a point. So I monitor carefully and after a while send a courteous reminder about the bills when they haven’t paid.

Well, with this non paying customer, April, May and June went by (courteous reminders sent) and all the work I had done there and invoices generated resulted in no payments made. I had got to the point where I thought maybe they were in hospital or even worse and no one had told me! Even with my gardening detective head on looking in their wheelie bins to notice nothing in them at all…lead me to think the worst.

Gardens grow so I knew I had to keep visiting on my regular frequency basis or would become hard work to put back as it needed to be. So through April, May and June kept their garden maintained. But following a visit at the start of July and with another invoice raised and no payments made, I just felt enough was enough!

Deciding to up the tempo and turn the ‘screw’ a bit, my email had the title “Gardening on hold” in bold type face.

And explaining, with the appropriate invoices and outstanding payments displayed in my email, that until all payments were made that I was putting gardening at their place “on hold”…..and….within one hour of me sending this email, resulted in a full payment and sincere apology!

The power of ‘on hold’ certainly worked for me and although not something I wanted to do, really had an instant effect!

time for a cup-of-T