just a lot of different things. That means that your milestone, you know, the scope creep, for example, the client suddenly decides they want to have more space, they want to have more things put into the project, that milestone that you had set to do, the billing has now just moved further away. Imagine that you're working with a client, and you've already got 30 days, 60 days on your invoice anyway, and you had a milestone set for the first two months. And then that two months gets pushed out to three or four months. And then you bill, and you've got 60 days, and then the client takes an additional 30 days to pay you. Oh my goodness, you know, you've gone fly off the year without getting paid for a project that you're been cash flowing. That does not make sense. It's not very healthy. I think milestone billing should and can be avoided easier than you might think. I know, there are some businesses I've interviewed before in the past to make it work. And they're very, very aggressive with making sure that things are getting done. And, you know, they're doing stuff which has got a lot of control. But even those businesses, you know, offer, I'll ask them more questions. And then I asked I should show, okay, milestone billing, I think is very, very difficult. And you're asking for late payments, you're asking for just your own inability to be able to invoice which will come up from that. And number seven is implement a client bonus. Now, we released this as a podcast a little while back. One of our clients at Business of Architecture, Mark Elster from ame had a wonderful mechanism in his contract, which he called the client bonus, which was essentially a small percentage of their total fee. Actually, I think it was quite a big percentage, it was about 1/15 of their total fee was put aside into an escrow account, every time the client made a payment. And the idea was that the if the client behaved themselves and satisfied all of the conditions of the completion bonus than they would be entitled to receive that money back at the end of the project. One of the things that was included here was late payments, so the client wouldn't pay late. Another one was allowing the architect to take photographs and published the the marketing collateral in magazines, which is often was quite a quite a big problem for many architects. And Mark was saying, basically, at the end of the project, if the client had done all of these things, then that money would be returned. And it was a very, very powerful mechanism. Again, you got to be a good negotiator to be able to get this stuff implemented into your contracts. Okay, I've heard plenty of people who have listened to that and go, Wow, what a great idea and then never been able to implement it. Because they don't know how to negotiate it. They don't know how to word it. They don't know how to bring it up as a conversation with a client. Okay, so again, really so much of the collection so much of the avoiding payments becomes easier, with good solid negotiation skills under your belt. subscription billing. So this is one thing that we do with all of our clients a Business of Architecture, we train them in subscription billing, which is a form of flat billing, if you like, except there's a little bit more nuance to it, and you can adapt it to mitigate your risk over stages where you might be doing a lot more input if you don't want it to be completely flat all the way through. But essentially, what this is, is, let's, let's imagine, just for the purposes of getting the idea across, you've got a fixed fee, and you've got a fixed amount of time. And you split that fixed fee, equally across the amount of time that you're going to be doing the project. Okay? It's not always as simple as that. Okay, and the actual subscription method of it means that you can create all sorts of new ones, and you can charge higher on for a portion over a phase and charge lower at different phases, you can, you can make an ebb and flow, and you can do all the other things that we were talking about with it. But ultimately, it's a form of flat billing, which just means that the client knows exactly what they're going to be paying every single month, and you get them to pay at the beginning of the month, rather than the end of the month. And if they don't pay, then you don't do the work that you were scheduled to do. It's as simple as that. Number nine, here, it helps for you to define an escalation process. Okay, so you actually map out, what does it look like in terms of reminders, we're going to remind a client every, you know, for the first seven days, or actually, the seven days leading up to an invoice, we send them out reminders, and you can spend some time wording, what those emails are gonna look like. And it can be very cheery and happy and inspirational. And then, after we've emailed the invoice, we're going to have reminders that are going to happen every two days. And again, you can word the emails, then you've got your period where it now becomes officially overdue. What's the first email look like? What is the second email look like? What does the third email look like, and you can start to escalate it. Okay. And at some point, there's going to be a bit where, let's say, after 10 days, you stop work, if you haven't received any money, and you'll be applying interest at that point. Great. And then let's say after 20 days, 30 days, whatever it is that you think is appropriate, when your escalation process, then that's when you have to resort to legal action, okay, but it's good for you just to map it out. Okay. And in most cases, you'll end up kind of adapting the escalation process to suit whatever particular client is that you're working with. Because sometimes you've got a better relationship with them. Sometimes they're in really good communication with you. And if they're in good communication with you, then you can hold them accountable to getting a payment structure in place with dates, times, and how much money is going to hit your bank account. Okay, so that's really what you're what you're doing when someone's late, you know, with the payment for the main wrestle that you have to have with them now is to put a structure in place for them to pay you back a payment structure. And that means having dates and times and amounts. Okay, that's the thing that people are most slippery with. So we'll often hear people ring up a developer, yeah, I'll pay you on Tuesday, or pay your pay you at end of the month, in month comes around and nothing's happened. Okay, so we got to get people to agree to certain dates and times, and then you've got to be on the ball with holding them to account. The worst is when clients are suddenly ghost. Okay, and when goes clients ghosts, that's when we're going to have to get much more serious with the actions that we take an escalator into, into legal threats. And then to actually go into court, we're going to call this number 10. The worst thing that you can do is avoid avoiding is do nothing. And again, as I said, at the beginning of the podcast, this is really something that's chronic. And I understand these are uncomfortable conversations. And we don't want to rock the boat, we don't want to upset the client. But the reality of it is, is that the client has already rocked the boat, they've already upset the relationship by not carrying out the agreement that you had in contract to pay you. Okay, they've already rocked the relationship, and you deserve your money because you've done your work. You know, it's different. If there's a bit of if there's pushback with what the billing is or something like that, then you've got to sit down with them and explain and, you know, if there's, you know, discrepancies or whatever, then great, then you got to have a conversation about it. But in many times, just avoiding picking up the phone or softening it with treating it like oh, it's a savings account is doing a lot of damage and is not going to be very helpful. So avoid avoiding and then the fine One thing I'll say here on avoiding late payments is just be aware of where your leverage points are with the client. Alright? So be very cognizant of when you're going to release drawings of when you're going to do submittals. Okay, so you might want to be designing your final payments, just before you submit any information. And the client by refusing to pay you or being late with a payment, then means that you don't submit the drawings for approvals. Okay? There are things that you can do on projects when they were late payments, like put liens on buildings and things like that. But there's usually very short windows of time for you to be able to do it to make it kind of practical, but just be aware of each phase of work. Where are your leverage points, okay, so you can, again, being a good negotiator, and salesperson, you can hammer up the final presentation or the concept presentation or the the big reveal, if you like for one of your presentations. And you can postpone it if the client hasn't paid you before the before the event. Okay? Again, you got to have these this payment structure agreed upon, in your in your meetings, you can talk about it, you can talk about what the what the key, the key dates are. Or if you're going you're doing the subscription billing,