Dear Boss,
They told you. They warned you many times. But as usual you knew better than them.

Your stubborn pride, ego and arrogance would not let you see the pending catastrophe that was being ushered in through letting the customers pay later than contractually agreed. How could you condone this?

Faced with such stubborn and prickly defiance, your auditors gave up trying to convince you that the business needed proper processes to manage O2C if it was to stand a hope in hell’s chance of surviving the quarter.

They did not give up though. It was incumbent on them to keep trying to convince you to do the right thing. And so they instructed one of their audit juniors to go and speak to your collections staff and find out from them how the collections operation at your business works.Then after speaking to credit controllers, monitoting and testing the current processes, the juniors went away to draw up some suggested improvements to debt management. These were proposed and discussed with your staff who saw how the collections process could be improved. Your staff even agreed the proposed changes made compelling sense. The processes were then added to and corrected then presented at the last SMT meeting. You sat through the presentation and a copy of the pack was left on the conference table for you to take away and peruse more fully at your leisure during the weekend.

But did you even care to take a peek? No.

On Monday morning something wierd occured. Something which I submit was worryingly odd especially for a businessman such as you who had all the fight, grit and determination to survive the economic downturn and succeed where your competitors failed. That audacious firestorm spirit you revealed when the auditors tried to convince you and your managers to focus correctly on collecting the monies owed, had just upped and vanished. What happened?

Your mood, actions and demeanour suggested there was not a thing to be concerned about. But I knew different. All day meanwhile, the credit department staff were anxiously waiting for an “invitation” to meet with you to discuss the collections process changes. But no message to go and join you to help start planning the survival of the business arrived. Nor ever did. It was as if the auditors had not mentioned to you that a big problem exsited with the cashflows and that the probability of a pending cash hemorrhage was looming ever closer with each passing day.

You chose to ignore the warning signs.

The name and telephone number of a Liquidator is on the pink post-it stuck to your PC screen. He is expecting your call.

Many thanks for reading and for visiting my site!

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