When You Deliver The News Makes All The Difference

I’ve noticed how much of a difference you can make in how a business runs simply by knowing when it is the most appropriate to deliver the news. As a rule of thumb, always deliver the bad news on Fridays and the good news on Tuesdays. Your business will run that much more smoothly!

Delivering the bad news on Friday lets people have the weekend to digest it. And announcing the good news on Tuesday has a lasting effect throughout the week. Don’t deliver anything on Mondays though – it gets lost with all the other stuff people have to deal with at the beginning of the week.

A great application of this principle is knowing when to invoice your clients!

Invoice your clients on Fridays – this strategy has made our invoicing process much simpler! In the early days, we used to invoice our clients manually based on the progress of their project without any specific rule. One week I was particularly busy, and I kept postponing the annoying task of generating invoices and sending them out – until Friday evening arrived and I found myself staying late at night to sending out a bunch of invoices one by one. That’s how I realized the huge difference that you can make simply by choosing the best day to deliver the news!

Nobody likes to receive an invoice, regardless of the amount, or of the service or product that you are getting for that invoice. But when you receive your invoice on Friday, you just care less. It’s almost the weekend. And you have 2 full days to wind down and get used to the idea that you have an invoice to pay.

What it meant for us is a significant drop in unnecessary phone calls, emails, questions, etc. No more clients calling us to ask about their invoice, no more “aah ok, I just wanted to make sure…”, or “that makes sense, I just didn’t remember exactly…”. In short that meant less hassle for us and more time to focus on what we do – delivering the best web design solutions!

If you pay attention, you’ll realize that we’re not the only ones to have understood this concept – it seems to be widely used! If you can think of an example, please share it in the comments below! (Here’s a hint: it’s used by landlords and politicians.)