Small Business Blog

Ladies, have you ever had one of those “Calgon take me away” days?

This is a day when the kids are all sick and home from school, so you end up staying home with them. While the thermometer confirms they can’t go to school, they somehow have enough energy to fight with each other about who’s turn it is to watch TV. So, instead of having an opportunity to make the best of a bad situation and get caught up on paperwork, you spend all day refereeing the home version of Ultimate Fighting Championship.

As you’re sending one to a neutral corner to give a warning to the other about illegal blows to the back of the head, you notice the dog chewing up your new shoes, which pushes your blood from a simmer to a rolling boil.

Without thinking, you begin chasing the dog, wildly swinging a broom handle, hoping to connect a solid blow when the dog knocks over the lamp, which breaks upon impact.

Remembering the words of your therapist, you stop, count to 10 and then count to 10 again before you begin cleaning up the broken shards of lamp.

The sweet voice of your youngest exclaims, “Mommy, the dog just threw up on your new rug.”

Just when you can’t imagine how anything else could possibly go wrong, your husband calls to say, “Hey honey, they guys and I are going to go out after work and catch some guy time. That’s not a problem is it?”

This time the counting backward from 10 is more representative of a detonator on a bomb than a relaxation technique.

Years ago while living in Tulsa, Oklahoma,  I learned an important lesson about timing requests.

Visiting with a client about their use of a line of credit, they told me one of the first years in business they didn’t realize how short on cash they would become during the slow winter season. To help solve this, they went to their bank and asked for an increase of their line of credit so they could survive until business picked back up in the spring time.

As you can imagine, or perhaps have experienced, presenting an anorexic version of financial statements, the bank had no choice but to decline the request.

Scraping every penny together, they managed to last until the contracts picked up again in the spring and they had a very successful summer. When fall came and their work began to slow down, they walked back into the same bank and asked for an increase in their line of credit. The banker checked their now fat and meaty financial statements, realizing they had a cash balance in their checking account of over $2 million, according to my client, the bank nearly tripped over themselves to offer a larger line of credit.

What was the difference? Why could six months make that much of a difference in the response given? The answer is timing. Timing your request for something like an increased line of credit can mean the difference of being laughed out of the bank and laughing all the way to the bank.

To ensure you have the right timing, here are a two key points to consider:

1.) Have you assessed the temperature of the water?

Men, I think we can all agree that if the husband would have started the above conversation by asking how his wife’s day was going, he could have let his wife vent for a few minutes and calm her down enough to realize this isn’t the right time to go out with the guys. Not only was her blood boiling, but so was the water the husband was about to jump into. Similarly, for a business, if the status of your financial statements is not looking so great, it might not be the perfect time to ask a bank for money. If possible, delay your request until the water is nice and comfy.

2.) Have you correctly anticipated the future?

I’m sure most women reading this are rolling their eyes thinking, “What a dumb husband! He should have known better than to ask for guy time when he knew I was home with sick kids all day.” Most men are thinking, “How was I supposed to know she was having a bad day?” The fact of the matter is the frustration could have been avoided all together if the husband had the foresight to predict what potential problems could arise from a day at home with sick kids.

Predicting what is going to happen with your business is just as important.

If your business is seasonal, that shouldn’t be something that surprises you. If you’ve just landed the biggest contract of your life, you shouldn’t be surprised when cash for payroll becomes tight. You should anticipate this and be in the bank asking for the credit before you realize you can’t make payroll this Friday.

While I’ve never actually seen a banker chase a client through their office with a broom handle, this scenario paints the important picture that timing is a crucial component to getting the answer you want.

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