How Startups Make Sure They Get Paid

I need to ask you a sensitive question. How many times have you gotten screwed out of fair payment for your product or service? If the answer is more than “zero,” then you’ve probably made sure it’ll never happen again. Right?

Or have you?

Chances are, there might still be gaping holes in your payment strategy.

The best entrepreneurs I know are some of the nicest people I’ve ever met. But even the most generous among them will come at someone with a baseball bat if they try to weasel out of payment for goods or services rendered.

This is one part of the game where we have to be tough as nails. Fortunately however, there are several steps we can take along the way that are merely grit-teeth tough before we need to go baseball-bat tough. And like with most of the advice I give you, it’s a situation where the more we do up front, the less painful it’ll be down the road.

So let’s talk about making sure we get paid. Fool us once, shame on them, fool us twice, we’ll see them in court.

First: B2B vs. B2C

There are several functional differences in payment between a business-to-business model and a business-to-consumer model, most of them having to do with method of billing, method of payment, and method of delivery.