The Four-Question Test

Your biggest customer. Reliable. Pays like clockwork. Three years, never missed a beat. You’d stake the business on them.

That’s exactly the kind of customer that takes half your suppliers down with them when they collapse.

It happened with Carillion. One giant customer went under, and hundreds of businesses who trusted that relationship found out overnight they weren’t owed money any more. They were owed nothing. Unsecured creditors, right at the back of a very long queue.

Here’s the question most directors never ask. Is your biggest customer’s debt to you actually insurable? Trade credit insurers ask that question about every customer on your books, quietly, in the background, without ever telling you. The moment they decide a customer isn’t insurable any more, they already know something you don’t.

And if you’ve never checked, you’re not protected. You’re exposed, and right now you don’t even know it.

I put a four question self-assessment straight into Before The Wave for exactly this. Do you actually know your biggest customer’s financial health, or are you assuming it because they’ve always paid? Could the business survive if they didn’t pay you this quarter? Most directors have never sat down and answered that honestly, because the relationship feels solid right up until the day it isn’t.

And it’s not just the four questions. The book sets out straightforward, practical ways to protect your income and your family if the worst does happen, none of it complicated, all of it doable long before you’d ever need it.

Ask yourself those four questions this week. Wait for the news to break instead, and you’ll find out the hard way, at the worst possible time.

I’m Mark Smillie. See you tomorrow.