In the 1941 classic film ‘The Maltese Falcon,’ a cop looks at the titular object, a statuette of a bird, and asks Humphrey Bogart’s character, Spade, “What’s that?”
“The stuff that dreams are made of,” says Spade, as he stares off into the distance. It’s a famous line, taken loosely from a line in William Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest.’ In the context of the film it essentially means that the bird statuette, which is discovered to be a worthless forgery, in the end, is essentially an illusion. It represents a lot of wishful thinking on the part of people who wanted to get rich quick, and who had dreams of big piles of money that disappeared like a dream upon waking.
There’s a lesson here for retail business owners. All too often, their big plans for tomorrow end up being nothing more than ‘the stuff that dreams are made of,’ and those illusions tend to fade under the pressure of the hard, day-to-day challenges of running a retail business.
And yet, dreams aren’t just illusions – after all, we wouldn’t have very many small businesses if the entrepreneurs who brought them to life didn’t have big dreams at some point. Every person deserves to have a huge, crazy, kind of irresponsible dream. Something they think about late at night in the back of their mind. And retail business owners deserve to dream about achieving greater financial success through new and innovative means that outpace the competition. For example…
A Dream of Consumer Finance Success
Nearly every business owner dreams of greater retail revenue, and one way they dream of attaining that revenue is through a highly effective and smoothly-functioning consumer finance program. After all, it’s not hard to see how a first-class consumer finance program could raise revenue in a serious way: if more customers take advantage of financing options, you close more deals and keep more dollars from walking out the door.
Unfortunately, there are a few obstacles that get in the way of bringing this dream to life. First off all, creating a business and team culture where offering financing is natural and inherent to your sales pitch takes some serious time and effort. Secondly, the financing process can be derailed by inefficient application processing, which wastes both the customer’s time and your own. Finally, a lack of reporting may make it hard to adjust and improve your financing program on the fly.
Making the Dream a Reality
To keep your dream of a revenue-driving retail consumer finance program from being nothing more than an illusion, you need to find a practical solution to those common finance problems. That’s where FormPiper comes in. As a complete solution for automating and streamlining consumer financing, FormPiper makes things easy for you through convenient managed or self-managed services, efficient application processing that allows you to transmit data to multiple application forms with single click of a button and robust reporting through a single, convenient dashboard.
By leveraging FormPiper to its fullest potential and making your consumer finance program a true priority, instead of an afterthought, you will be well on your way to getting your consumer finance dreams out of your head and into reality, where they can start putting money back in your pocket.
