The original Di Pacci coffee cart, 15 years ago
As Michael has grown his coffee empire, he’s learned many lessons along the way. Like many businesses, one of his biggest challenges has always been cash flow. “It's obviously easier when you’re just small. But once you get to a certain stage, weekly income is important when you’ve got 30 staff. So if your orders are going out and no-one’s paying them, then you're gonna get to a point where you can't pay your own bills and your own staff. Then you're going to go under.”
Di Pacci HQ in Roselands
No matter the size of the business, getting money out of customers continues to be a challenge. “We have a customer now that owes us about $12,000. We never had a problem with [her paying] before. Then my accounts lady went on holidays for six weeks and no one took notice that she wasn't paying. When she got back she owed nine invoices for $12,000 or $13,000 and we can’t get it out of her.”
When we asked him what his advice would be for other customers, he said “Start with Ordermentum straight away!” Since rolling out Ordermentum and switching payments from invoicing to paying by credit card/direct debit, the business has been able to grow because there’s money coming in constantly.
“I can see money every morning when I wake up - I see Ordermentum in my bank account. I know tonight when I go to sleep, that when I wake up in the morning there will be a payment from Ordermentum coming in.”
Initially, Michael was nervous to force a change in how his customers paid. “We were a bit hesitant at the start, we thought ‘how are we going to tell people to give us their credit card numbers, they’re going to think it's rude.’ But then we decided the ones that didn't want to hand them over were probably the ones that were gonna give us trouble so we don't want them anyway.”