“la parole exportée”

One good rule of business that I’ve learned over the years is that you should take good care of your hard-earned money. Your clients won’t have more confidence in your services if you allow them to pay you only when you remind them of it. And in these times of economic uncertainty, I’ve decided to become even more proactive in this field.

For one good reason: we self-employed workers cannot count on State leniency (unless of course you’re prepared to go and plead your case, box of tissues in hand; but you need to be in a real pickle to do that, or to have a talent for bursting into tears at the right time: that can work if you’re female and the employee is male, I don’t know of other combinations that work). But in France, in the normal course of affairs, whether you are paying income tax, VAT, retirement, sickness and welfare contributions, business tax, local rates, miss a payment by 1 day, and you get a 10% fine. Been there, done that. So I know. Unless you are one of those businesses that you hear about on TV or the radio, that are allowed to owe the State huge amounts of money. I don’t envy them, but there sure is a double standard.

But now comes a time to be extra-cautious. I have a very simple Excel spreadsheet where I keep track of the bills I issue, and I’ve decided to go one step further. Outstanding bills are now highlighted in bright red, to remind me to send e-mail reminders on Monday, the first day of the month. And another one soon after, if they don’t respond with a definite date of payment.

Bills that are due some time in December are now highlighted in yellow. Some of them will get paid on the dot, because these clients have systems in place, and they pay on the day that they promised to pay. So I’m not really worried about these.

Client solvency is going to take on a lot of importance in the coming months. I don’t use credit, and if I do have to use my personal credit cards to fund some of my business, the interest doesn’t get expensed. I pay that out of my personal pocket, not out of my business.

So being a little more pushy may sound reckless. It isn’t. I can tell a prospective bad client miles away. For that reason, I suffered only 2 bad debts in the course of 30 years. One I didn’t see coming, because I trusted the person at the head of the business. This proves that I was wrong, because I never collected my money (the State, again, has priority over all the other creditors). The other debt was fixed through a simple and inexpensive first-level court procedure. Of course, I’m not counting delayed payments, some of which were due to red tape. One accountant had a really nice excuse, he had got married. I don’t know if he spent all those weeks honeymooning, but I duly congratulated him and asked for the payment, and got it promptly.

If my clients expect me to turn up and perform at their conferences, or to deliver a translation on the day that we agreed upon (set most of the time to accommodate their needs), they must be expected to pay on time, not lose my bills, not tell me lies.

If there can be no trust between us, we can’t do any business. It’s a simple as that.

But I’m always on the lookout for new ideas and strategies. Do you have systems in place to cope with this in the coming months?

I feel definitely out of step today.

If I was into the French TV market, I might be on duty, waiting for sensational news from Mumbai. Interpreting words of death, injury, fire, unrest…

But I’m glad I’m not, because I don’t feel like doing that. I’ve often been asked why I refuse to work for television. I have several, some very personal, reasons for that, but today, my answer would be a clear No. I don’t want to be part of it.

I would very much rather sit at a negotiation table, helping warring parties to try to reconcile their views, come to an understanding, than take part in spreading more doom and gloom. I am not criticizing the work of reporters, who are doing their job in extremely dangerous conditions. But I have chosen to do a different job.

On a barely different level, I came across a bewildering article in the New York Times today, about French Huguenots who fled religious intolerance and settled in Florida even before the Pilgrim Fathers came to New England on the Mayflower. Well… Politics has a lot to answer for, in the treatment of History.

This being said, I have lots of thanks to give, the first and foremost being that I’ve had the luck to be born in a time and space of peace and prosperity. We in the West are so often tempted to take this for granted.

One comment our clients almost systematically make about our work is: ‘You’re doing a wonderful job! How do you manage to translate our jargon?’, ‘It must be so difficult’…

Well it’s reassuring to see that other professions are also finding their jargon difficult at times.

This piece found on NPR is an example of it. It was on yesterday’s edition of All Things Considered and it was about financial jargon.

Next time I interpret for someone speaking of RFS or DDGS or IPCC or UNFCCC (CCNUCC in French…) I’ll remember ‘Aunt Millie’. From now on, she’ll be my guardian angel, and my source of inspiration.