Book Review: The Guide to Getting Paid by Michelle Dunn
By Robert G Lasher
Collecting money, especially from people with serious financial difficulties, is a skilled and complex art form. It is a practiced, disciplined set of communications and negotiating skills requiring a backbone of steel, helped by an empathetic heart. A creative thinking, results oriented problem solver who does not mind thinking "outside the box" can turn what seems like an irresolvable mess into a workable, profitable solution.
As big banks and auto companies get bailed out, and people across the country walk away from under water mortgages without apparent consequences, as whole countries, including the USA, toy with the idea of defaulting on their financial obligations, the risk of extending credit anywhere, under any terms is becoming higher and higher. If you own a business, large or small, and you offer credit to promote increased sales, you need to be out front on this. The survival of your business depends on it.
One way to get out front would be to read Michelle Dunn's new book, The Guide to Getting Paid, and do what she says to do.
As Michelle points out, most people do not borrow money with the intent to default (though some do), but in our world, things happen: People lose their jobs; people get sick; people get divorced; people borrow too much; people spend money on lots of stuff they don't need.
There are lots of good reasons to read The Guide to Getting Paid by Michelle Dunn:
* It will tell you how and why to create your own written credit policy.
* It will tell you how to create an easy to use, written credit application that, used effectively and consistently, can increase your likelihood of getting paid.
* It will give you direct immediately usable advice on how to optimize collections of your accounts receivable.
* It will give you a fairly good summary of the Fair Debt Collections Practices Act, when it applies and when it does not.
* It will tell you what to say and do to handle those particularly difficult accounts.
* It will tell you how to hire a collection agency, when this is really appropriate, and give you strategies for making the most of this opportunity. It also tells you what documentation you must have to maximize the agency's effectiveness (yours too).
All of these benefits are great, but for me, the best part of the book is when Michelle shares a bit of her personal story, how as a single mother of small children, recently divorced from an abusive marriage, with significant personal credit issues of her own starts a business: a collection agency, and persistently but politely, skillfully turns her difficult circumstances into a profitable, thriving business. She tells in fairly explicit detail what she did to work her own way out of a pretty challenging situation. It is one of those stories that she did not really have to tell, but it's an "I've walked a mile in your shoes story" that makes the whole book all the more meaningful. It will give you part of the courage you might need to keep at it when everyone else (and even your own heart, perhaps) is telling you to quit.
It is difficult to be critical of a book one genuinely likes, but here goes: As I read this book, I thought "There are two Michelle Dunns." One writes passionately about her direct personal experience in a compelling and very readable way. The other somewhat awkwardly gets the legal and technical stuff in there. These details are very important. You would ignore them at significant peril. But, there must be a way to make this a little less dry.
Also, Michelle could benefit from a very scrupulous editor. I went through my copy and highlighted every unnecessary word. I changed every "utilize" to "use"; and other such picky editorial details. The book may have been written with the idea that people might pick it up and start reading it at various entry points based on their specific needs at the time. That said, there is a substantial amount of redundancy concerning having a written credit policy, a written credit application, and similar very important credit and collections necessities. Emphasis can be helpful, but if the intent was multiple entry points, I should have been warned in the forward, which I always read. Finally, the name of the game in every business is cash flow. Ultimately, that's what this book is really about. The specific words "cash flow" do not appear until page 39. Page 1 would be better.
Michelle Dunn is clearly a very competent credit and collections professional, and she writes, in clear language, exactly what you need to do to get paid. There might be other resources out there to help the entrepreneur turn customers' promises into cash, but this is by far the best I have seen.
Robert G Lasher is a financial consultant who owns his own firm, Lasher and Associates, based in Newark, DE. His specialty is bank credit risk management and loan review. He has worked for several banks and is currently employed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
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