Would your company benefit from an immediate Cash Injection?

When the 2009 credit crunch financial crisis struck, Ian Latham was working for Marvel Entertainment.

The CEO of Marvel was a very shrewd businessman who instructed the finance team to tighten up their credit control process to ensure that they didn't see a big increase of in bad debt their our licensees.

Ian then reviewed and upgraded the credit control process which spanned billing, payment reminder messages, escalation to the sales team, escalation to legal and then referral to collection agency. Once this process had been agreed, it was Ian's role to enforce it rigorously. It was very effective, and they had no bad debt.

A few years later, Marvel was acquired by Disney. When Disney took over Marvel’s billing and collections, bad debt started mounting very quickly. But they noticed how Marvel had no bad debt, so they hired Ian to improve their credit control process. It turned out that Disney had a significantly higher level of bad debt than Marvel, and a weaker collections process. So Ian was able to make a big positive impact on their cash flow.

Ian has subsequently implemented similar processes at Outbrain, Squint/Opera and work.life. Setting up a good, water-tight collections process that ensures your company gets paid for the work that has been done and improves cash flow.

It is Ian's experience that many companies have not established a robust collections process and this is now an area of expertise which he would be happy to help other companies with.