Pre-Pay

Years ago when I started  working at Cullman Electric co-op we had a lot of customers that just couldn't pay their bills on time. We at the co-op spent endless hours cutting people off and then reconnecting them when the bill was paid. An inconvenience for both parties. Some people get embarrassed about this, but the truth is that there are a lot of today's population that just can't make ends meet on what they make while trying to provide the expensive necessities in life. Then companies started offering pre-pay options. For these companies I thought how nice of them to work with the working public to meet them half way on providing a service along with a payment option. Then the co-op announced that they were going to offer a pre-pay option. I was not in any kind of business class when this started and my first thought was that this will never work. At that time I did not realize that in order to be good in business you have to develop a plan to work with your paying customers. If you can't get paid for your services, you won't be in business long. Yet new technology and smart business people came up with a great pre-pay payment option that really helps the customers keep their bills paid on their terms. I was proven wrong, and after getting into business management classes, learning what I have I realize that I was looking at this from the wrong side. If your going to be successful in business today, you need a good product, a fair price, good service, and sometimes depending on the type of business, have a payment option available.