One of the great myths about trucking and other service businesses is the idea that if you are profitable, you are doing all right. A healthy balance sheet is good, but having enough cash on hand to run your business is absolutely essential.

In trucking, where you must sometimes wait as long as two months between a completed haul and payment, building up adequate cash flow can be challenging. Here are six ways to quickly generate enough working capital to operate and expand your company:

When Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, he became an instant celebrity. The idea of recording and reproducing sounds on a grooved cylinder was so startling that some people thought Edison was a magician. Others called him the greatest inventor in the world. He was just 30 years old.

At RTS Financial, we love to receive feedback from our customers about our factoring solutions. We have found that this kind of ongoing dialogue with customers is the best way to make sure we continue to provide the best financial services in the industry. Below are accounts from three different customers about their experiences with RTS Financial. While these are just three perspectives, their stories are similar to those of hundreds of business owners we work with on a daily basis:

Any roustabout or hotshot driver can tell you that everything moves faster in the boom-or-bust oilfield industry. Everything, it seems, but the payment cycles.

Companies that serve oil rigs in Texas, North Dakota or Pennsylvania must wait as long as 60 to 90 days to receive payments from their customers. That length of time can make it nearly impossible to build up cash flow, especially for start-up trucking fleets hauling water or sand to well sites.

Few entrepreneurs start their own companies because they love managing human resources. However, many become buried in the details of workforce management as their companies grow.

Small businesses with a headcount of 10 to 100 employees often find themselves in human resources limbo. They lack the time to address HR issues and also lack the resources to create an HR department.

From North Dakota’s Bakken to the Permian Basin in West Texas, times are tough for the oil business.

After more than four years of explosive growth, plummeting oil prices put the brakes on shale drilling in 2015. At the end of the year, the number of oil rigs operating in North Dakota dropped to 62, which is 71% fewer than the number of active rigs at the same time in 2014. Nationwide, the number of inland oil rigs totalled 684 at the end of December 2015, a 62% decline from 2014.