Mark runs a small graphic design studio. He’s the art director, and has two full time and one part time designers on staff. Mark’s day to day tasks mostly revolve around supervising the designers, doing presentations, trouble shooting, dealing with printers and making sure projects are done on time.
His busy schedule over the last couple of months hasn’t left much time for dealing with much else.
Because of this, a lot of things have been pushed to the side. He hasn’t kept up with his books, so he’s behind in his invoicing and hasn’t paid his bills recently. He’s neglected to get back to several potential clients who have called, and frankly, he’s forgotten who they are or where he put their numbers.
He hasn ‘t done any marketing in quite a while, and Mark had a bad feeling that once he’s finished with the current jobs in house, that he’ll be hitting a dry spell…
A rush job had to be delivered to one of his best clients the next day. Mark couldn’t understand why it had been stuck at the printers for such a long time. He called the printer, and found out that his job had been pushed to the side in favor of a customer who "pays their bills on time". Mark was out of time, and even though he offered to send over the check right away, the printer couldn’t guarantee that the job could go on press for a day or so…
Mark was stressing out about this when the phone rang. It was an old client who’d requested a quote 3 weeks ago. Although he had given Mark all the details, Mark had no idea of what he did with them, and the conversation ended with the customer threatening to go elsewhere.
As he searched through the papers on his desk trying to find the info. for the quote, he came across two things. One was a notice from the IRS that he had completely forgotten about. His tardiness on this matter had already cost him about $1000 in interest and penalties, and now it was probably even more. The other was an envelope of packing slips for some jobs that had gone out last month which he hadn’t gotten around to invoicing.
The last straw occured Friday, when he started to write out the paychecks and realized that he didn’t have enough in the account to cover payroll. (if he had only done his invoicing…)
Who’s minding your store?
-Susan Martin, Business Sanity Coach
