I’ve spent the past week doing final layout for the May 2009 Horizons Magazine.  Although most of the articles and ads are placed months in advance, final layout week is not just a heavy 10 days of design tweaking, it is a constant flurry of mail and email revisions and phone calls for payment.  I’ve got a simple policy: an ad goes in when it is paid for.  Period, end of story.  The result of that is that no one ever owes me money.  It keeps everyone honest and out of debt.  I’ve got several friends and clients and advertisers who all extend credit to each other, and they are always in an uproar because of who owes what.  It’s been going on for years.  There’s always an underlying tension and judgment (why is she here at this dinner with a new $80 handbag when she owes me $100?)  It just causes more problems than it solves, so I just don’t do it.

I’m not a savvy business woman by any means.  I always worked for someone else, in my former career as a criminal defense paralegal.  I didn’t know about things like being eligible for a small business loan when we first began the magazine 17 years ago.  If advertisers didn’t pay before we went to press, we couldn’t pay the printer, period.  So either they paid or we just made the magazine smaller and only included who did pay.  I didn’t know there was any other way to do it.  I wasn’t someone who saved up money and had it waiting in the bank for me to invest in a business.  I didn’t read books or articles about how to begin and manage a business.  For that matter, I didn’t know anything about publishing or design and layout either, and never got a chance to get any formal training, to this day.  I could use a Photoshop class for sure.

Sometimes I would get a notice in the mail about an upcoming conference for publishers and I’d think, “I should attend one of these“.  Yet I’d be too busy publishing to get to a conference.  This was way before you could research everything on the internet.  We’re talking back in the dinosaur days when only computer geeks knew about email and the world wide web.  I’m sure I could have learned many good things by attending the conferences but, well, the truth is that things were working well enough and I saw no reason to do anything differently.

Plus this was when the “business” of putting on conferences as a business was newly emerging, so there was one a month for everything you could imagine.  I’m sure one thing they would have suggested is having a business plan and using contracts.  I never even thought about a business plan, and I decided early on that to get the discounted contract price, advertisers would simply pay in advance.

With me coming from a legal background, I knew all too well that contracts are broken all the time.  So I just decided I don’t do contracts and it’s a choice I stand by.  Most of the business owners I do readings for are owed so much money on their contracts, that is their biggest source of worry.  And it is their feelings of resistance relative to that issue that hinders other good things from coming into their lives, and from seeing their way out of it.

Yet, even knowing this, they continue to enter into contracts and extend credit.  Because that is how they were told it must be done.  That is how they believe it works.  They can’t imagine it working any other way.  “I will lose my customers if I make them pay as they go.”  Well, no, you will just find another set of customers that pay as they go – from the gitgo.  Yes, you will lose the people who aren’t paying you anyway.  But that frees up time and space for new people who have different financial habits and beliefs.

Yes, your business may even have to change and morph with the times to keep a steady flow of the kind of clientele you want.  This will not be a problem because, as you go along, you will get guidance as to what direction to explore next, and which way to go.  I never planned on being a publisher or psychic reader as a profession.  Heck, I wanted to be Della Street.  It was only when I tired of being Della Street that I began listening more closely to inner guidance, and began following it to a new career.

Had someone asked, “Do you want to publish a monthly magazine for a living?  Do you want to be a professional psychic and do readings all day?”  I would have said no.  Those ideas just didn’t ring my bell as far as future careers.  I fell in to the magazine by helping out a couple of friends with some computer work, and quickly discovered how fun it was.  I fell into the readings when my mom suggested I work for Psychic Friends Network, which I did for 4+ years.  It was easy money, earned from home.  Both careers I just fell into, with no planning and no forethought.

So in business I’ve learned to keep it easy and the right clientele will flow to me.  If I lose some customers along the way as I make administrative decisions about policy changes, well, those aren’t my customers anymore.  They left to make way for new ones who are more in harmony with what I offer now.  Having said that, our polices haven’t changed from the beginning, and I firmly believe my success is due to me just not doing the contract/credit dance.  Period.

I’m not surprised that I’ve seen no decline in ad sales, and my readings are booked through August.  It’s amazing what freedom one simple decision can make.  And freedom is the word for it.  Freedom to work my own schedule at a job I love.  Freedom to spend time in my own gardens and watch the wildlife at play as I work.  Freedom to play in the yard during the day and study the  cardinals’ nesting habits.

Which reminds me, today should be the day.  Today is 13 days since I saw the first egg, and I believe it is hatched under the mama cardinal right now.  She was on the nest yesterday without a break.  I’ve upped the outlay of black oil sunflower seeds, and started overfeeding the cats and squirting them with the garden hose when I see them in the backyard, to keep them in the front yard or the woods.  I can hardly wait until daylight so I can watch her a bit more.  They’ll be flying by the end of the month.

Have a good Saturday.  I’m back to work!

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