Would you survive if you lost your best customer?
It’s a big problem for far too many companies.
You have one, or maybe a couple of large customers that you’ve become reliant on, and built overhead around them.
But what if you lost them?
If the answer to that is something you can’t contemplate, then now is the time to do something about it.
The worst case scenario is that they go under and you lose their on-going income AND what they owe you now - would this take you down with them?
So, what to do?
If your biggest customer going bust would hurt, then make sure you have bad debt insurance on them. No it’s not cheap, but it’s a lot cheaper than you taking the bad debt hit. There are flexible ways to insure debt these days and you can even spot insure individual customers.
Rather than becoming complacent with the situation, plan to build up several other customers who would sustain you if you lost the top one.
Credit check your top customers regularly and put them on credit watch so you’ll get any updates to their credit status as they happen.
Keep close to them so you hear about any changes in their business.
Make sure they always get fantastic customer service – don’t give them a reason to leave.
Make sure your accounts team are close to theirs – they tend to talk and you can pick up on early warning signs
Think about how you would scale back costs if you lost a major customer.
Be wary of taking on new overhead just to service a single customer, unless you have a long term contract with them.