Chapter 4:Getting rougher: the counsel of experience

Getting rougher: the counsel of experience

SO MUCH for preaching. You probably didn't buy this book to hear you should tighten up your credit system, or to find out a few new tricks to collect debts yourself. Let's say you've done all that and it didn't work. Someone owes you money, and it's turning into a hard case. What next?

I'll take you through the possibilities. I'd better say that I've used the methods I'll tell you about. This isn't theory. It's experience.

My business is writing things for people. (Brochures, speeches, articles, reports, ads, marketing letters, and sometimes books.) Believe me, all kinds of people phone and ask me to do jobs. . My clients range from individuals, to some of the largest international companies. The big companies aren't always prompt payers. And the individuals -- wayward as they sometimes appear -- are often OK. Very hard to predict. And I had plenty to learn.

For this book, I also interviewed all sorts of people: debt collection agencies, private investigators, a magistrate, sheriffs, and lawyers. They were happy to help. They told me it was about time someone did a realistic book about debt collection! And they gave me an earful -- valuable information, worth a lot to me in running my own business. I'm now sharing it all with you.

In the next chapters, I talk about how to collect the difficult debts. Wild waters.

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