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Getting Paid

Written by: James Chan

Article Overview: Getting work is not automatic, and so is getting paid after you've done your work.

Getting Paid

Everybody likes to get paid. But hardly anybody likes to ask for payment.

Too often, once you finish your work, that~{!/~}s only the beginning of the struggle. This is a shocking realization for those who become entrepreneurs after years of being handed a regular paycheck. But it is nevertheless part of life. You can minimize the problem by dealing with the issue before you begin, not after you finish. Even so, I sometimes find myself, for one reason or another, making exceptions that have come back to haunt me.

One such case started with my feeling rather ebullient. Your Company, a magazine published by American Express and Time Inc. for owners of small businesses, had written an article about how I had helped one of my clients move into Asia. It ran my picture. I sounded like a miracle worker. If you can~{!/~}t believe your own publicity, at least for a few hours, why bother at all?

The day the magazine came out, I got a call from a vice-president of a local manufacturing company. He told me the article struck a chord because he had been frustrated trying to sell to China, and he had ceased to trust the agent he was using. He asked me how much I would charge to schedule a short management briefing on selling equipment in China. I quoted a number that was far less than I normally charge. The company headquarters was only 15 minutes from my house, and it is my experience that companies are more likely to hire a consultant who is nearby. Besides, the subject was one I know well, so there was little need to prepare. I also failed to demand at least partial payment in advance. I figured it was more valuable to me to get in the door.

After our conversation, I expected authorization for the job to come in a few days, and when it didn~{!/~}t arrive in a few weeks, I forgot about it. Then the telephone rang a few months later, and the vice-president told me he wanted to go ahead. By this time, I had second thoughts about the low fee, but I had made a promise, so I went ahead. The presentation was very successful. The company~{!/~}s owner, his son the vice-president, the controller and other key managers attended. They took me out to lunch, and we discussed my working for them in the future. It was a good day.

The following day, I sent an invoice for the presentation. A month went by without payment. I began to feel uncomfortable. I faxed a copy of the invoice to the company. No response. I mailed a copy of the invoice to the vice-president. Silence. I began to be angry at them for ignoring me, and at myself for waiving my policy of prepayment. I called the accounting department. The person who answered my call told me that someone would get back to me ~{!0~}at their own convenience.~{!1~} What an insult. I was not a beggar. I had done my job and done it well.

Sixty days after the talk, with no check in the mail, I was becoming both enraged and insecure. I felt that the company had decided simply not to pay me, just because I am small. Their letter of invitation was a valid contract, but perhaps they figured that the amount was too small to justify the expense of a lawsuit. This was a sum I could clearly live without, but it became an obsession merely because I interpreted their failure to pay as a conscious act of disrespect.

Finally, nearly three months after the talk, I reached the vice-president on the phone. He seemed surprised that I hadn~{!/~}t been paid, and he had the controller, who seemed to have particularly enjoyed my talk, get back to me. He asked for the amount and date of my invoice, and two days later, I had the check.
I still don~{!/~}t know what happened. It seems to have been such a small sum that it just fell through the cracks of the company~{!/~}s payment system. It wasn~{!/~}t an act of hostility toward me.

And part of the fault was mine. If I had kept to my usual policies, I would have been paid in a timely manner and never have wasted so much energy. By asking for so little, with nothing in advance, I may have devalued my services, and made myself into something too small to worry about.

But this incident reaffirmed my conviction that one of the chief jobs of the self-employed is to see that we get paid, if not quickly, at least eventually. It~{!/~}s easy to see this as dirty work, somehow beneath our dignity. But there~{!/~}s no need to be shy. Don~{!/~}t sit around, conjuring up paranoid scenarios. Clients forget sometimes. They must put out so many fires that paying you isn~{!/~}t a top priority. Sometimes you have to become one of those fires, and~{!*~}as pleasantly as you can~{!*~}make a nuisance of yourself. You have to create a situation where paying you is the easiest way out.

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Article Tags: 15 minutes, american express, asia, china, company headquarters, exceptions, few days, job, manufacturing company, miracle worker, paycheck, publicity, realization, second thoughts, small businesses, struggle, time inc, vice president



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