Winning Business and Loyal Clients in Factoring Accounts Receivable
# II - Carpe Diem!
Advice Desk
In the second in a series of articles aimed at assisting you in winning business and loyal clients, Mark Mandula, Principal, Vice President, United Capital Funding, offers his guidance from the viewpoint of an experienced business finance professional based in the US.

Tampa Bay Office:
United Capital Funding Corporation
146 Second Street N.
Suite #200
 St. Petersburg, FL 33701
727-894-8232

I will try to make my observations from around thirty years of hands-on experience in the financial services industry. Much of this experience has been from the “school of hard knocks!”. My comments are geared to any professional in the financial services industry, and this could be an asset based lender, factor, a broker looking for a funding source, or a professional who may be considering this as a career.

My goal in these series of articles is to challenge you to think about how best market your business financial services to your clients, and to encourage to step back a moment from the “day to day” grind and think outside the box. I believe I will have succeeded if you are able to use one idea or more in your business that allows you to better serve your clients.

As a quick recap, I discussed in the first article a series of ideas, attempting to answer the following question, “Is your firm a Service Focused Firm?” In order to address this question, ideas and practical applications for use daily in your organization were presented. Finally, the following questions were introduced at the end of the first article, to stimulate thinking and analysis of the organization. These questions were:

Question 1. Are all your factoring clients treated with respect, even the ones you don’t like? What picture does the client/prospect form in his or her mind of you?

Question 2. Do we constantly fret, gripe, and complain about client turnover? Don’t we realize that the most profitable invoice factoring client is the one that we already serve?

Question 3. Have you ever asked, really asked, what your clients think of you, your business funding services and level of professionalism?

Question 4. Here are some ways to objectively assess your performance. Ask these questions about yourself, and all levels of your organization. Do we/ I, always act in a professional manner? Again, what picture does the financing client/prospect form in their mind? Does our client/prospect know who I am or we are? Do we treat them as special, unique? Do they remember my name? Are we genuinely concerned about their best interest?

We concluded the first article with the following statement, “We must have each of our clients answer positively to these questions. It is with this perspective that we will start the next article in this series: “Carpe Diem”.

Carpe Diem
All organizations need to have a well-defined, focused purpose for their existence. In addition, all effective marketing strategies require a written plan in order to be successful.

Each year our firm adopts a theme for our marketing efforts. This theme becomes the focus of all of our marketing strategies and initiatives. It also is used in all communications with our clients, prospects, partners and others whom we deal with.

Our current marketing theme, and the focus of this article, is “Carpe Diem”. This is, of course, the most famous of Horace’s odes. Horace used agricultural metaphors to urge us to embrace the pleasures available to us in everyday life, instead of relying on remote aspirations for the future. Hence his immortal motto, CARPE DIEM, or “pluck the day”. As you may recall, the 1989 movie Dead Poets Society, starring Robin Williams, Robert Sean Leonard and Ethan Hawke, did much to resurrect this obscure Latin phrase. The central theme of the movie was, “Live life to the fullest, get the most out of each day”.

I believe that all human beings strive to follow this motto, in their daily lives and business affairs. I believe that if you took an informal poll of people, most or all would say that this is what they want from their lives. I think it would be unlikely, or the exception to the rule, that people would respond to this question with statements like; “I want to be mediocre”, or “I want to strive to be #2”. Even if they truly felt this way, I also think most would not be willing to admit it in public!

By nature, I believe we want our lives to be full. All you have to do is turn on the television, surf the internet or drive on the highway and observe the billboard advertisements to know that advertisers all over the world understand this. Think a minute about some of the most common and widely copied advertising slogans used today. Nike’s famous campaign of “Just Do It” would be the best example of this.

Unfortunately, as financial entrepreneurs running and managing our businesses 24/7, we too often get caught up in the day to day details of life, dead lines, mortgage payments, etc. that we just never make time to “Seize the Day!”. As the lyrics in Bob Seger’s 1980 hit song Against the Wind go, “Well those drifter’s days are past, I’ve got so much more to think about, deadlines and commitments, what to leave in, what to leave out…”

Although all of us want more fulfillment from every single day, it always seems to be just beyond our grasp. In owning, operating and managing our factoring business, I have concluded through much trial and error that in order to succeed, we must be an efficient and effective ‘servant’ for our clients.

Unfortunately, many believe that the word ‘servant’ has a negative connotation. I use the word servant using the following definition, “a person working in the service of another.”

In order to serve well, I have found that our business needs to focus on a very narrow menu of professional services, invoice factoring, and do this very, very well. This focused or “niche” approach, I believe is the most important element to survive in a very competitive industry such as the one we compete in - the specialized financial services industry.

As part of this focused approach, our Strategic Marketing Plan must be consistent with our financial and operational initiatives. For purposes of this discussion, I define “Strategic Marketing” in the following manner: “the management process responsible for anticipating, identifying and satisfying client requirements profitably.” All three components of the process; anticipating [planning ahead]; identifying [sorting out the preferred client to serve]; and satisfying [ensuring that we offer the highest quality services, consistently] must be in place in order to achieve the stated objective: Profit.

If you have a desire to research this issue of focusing your business to achieve client satisfaction and profitability, I would strongly encourage you to read as many of the 35 books written by Peter F. Drucker. Drucker, who recently died at the age of 96, is considered by experts in the world of business and academia as the founding father of the study of management. His works have been translated into more than twenty languages.

Drucker published his first book, The End of Economic Man, in 1939. He served as a regular columnist for the Wall Street Journal from 1975 to 1995 and throughout his career, consulted with dozens of organizations ranging from the world’s largest corporations to entrepreneurial startups and various government and nonprofit agencies. If you have not read Drucker’s writing, you should.

I have posted several of Drucker’s quotes near my desk, in an effort to ensure that I follow his excellent advice on how to “focus”. Odd as it sounds; it has really worked to for me, and causes me to think about how to better serve our clients profitably with a focused approach.

Several ideas run through most of Drucker’s writings, including: