Chad Silverstein started a collection agency at Ohio State in 1997, built it into a self-managed company over 15 years, then launched Restart in 2013. Instead of just collecting debts, Restart helped debtors find jobs and rebranded collectors as consultants with their own revenue share, filling the office with thank-you letters from grateful customers.
Questions this video answers
1997
Ohio State (on campus, 14th Avenue)
2010
2013
Chapters
It's a pretty cool story. I'm not sure I know much about the background of the story, so I'll just share a little piece of my story for people who don't know me and never heard my story. So I started a collection agency in 1997 when I was in college going to Ohio State on campus on 14th Avenue and worked at a collection agency during my senior year. And I just worked really hard. And the owner of the company in Cleveland offered me an opportunity to work with him when I graduated from osu. And when I graduated I said, yeah, I'll do it. So I started hitting the pound, the pavement. I went into doctor's offices and got them to use our collection agency. And slowly but surely I found myself having hundreds of clients. And we opened up a first office and it just took off. It took off and I tried to build the kind of company that I wanted to work in every day. And I tried to build it with no managers. That lasted for about 15 years. Self managed company. And I just did leadership training. I had the Dale Carnegie organization come in. I was just. I did my own courses and classes for my employees. Then I hired them to come in and everybody graduated. And then I brought Bill to lead in 2010 and that, that changed everything. I bought out my partner in 2013 and I started another company called Restart. And this was my, My Arthur story. So we were the only collection agency in the country that was helping people get jobs so they can get out of debt. And recruiting at a collection agency was tough because no one wanted to come in being collectors. So I call people consultants and I gave them their own book of business and I told them they would make a percentage of whatever they made the company. So I basically turned them into entrepreneurs and gave them a cut of what they could produce. And that was very different than what was going on in the collection industry at the time. And I just figured out what everybody was doing and I tried to do everything the opposite. So I created the exact opposite of what every other collection agency was doing. And then we started helping people that we were collecting from get jobs. And then once we started finding success with that, I ended up, long story short, one of my scorecards on my opus was all the love letters that we get from debtors that would tell us that we changed their perception of collections. And I ended up wallpapering my entire office with these letters from consumers who said that we changed their perception of collections and that if they ever end up being in collections, they want to hear from us. And I had an office full of employees that were just on fire. We used to practice, build to lead twice a month. And I just was doing leadership training pretty much in my company. It was just. We had a lot of fun, and I didn't feel like I was running a collection agency. That was just what we did. And we didn't let that define who we were. And we changed a lot of people's lives. And so I don't know how many lives we touched on. I know that there were a lot. I know Bill Sleet did a lot of helping along the way, for sure. And together we transformed. And it's the bumper sticker, the tagline of bill to lead, transform, always together. And we certainly did that. And it was fun. And so now I'm trying to do it a different way in this community. What are you doing? What are you aiming at? Trust me, I never thought I could do anything at a collection agency. I heard every employee say they don't want to be a collector. And my response was then don't be one and find what you love to do within this crazy culture that we built. And I had people doing all kinds of crazy things, figuring out how to help people get out of debt, give them financial advice. I had people who were taken a liking to the emotional aspect of knowing that calling as agencies and these call centers was just a nightmare. So they were so kind to them and killed them with kindness. And they produced big numbers. Big numbers. When you treat people that way, we didn't give people a reason to sue us. We gave people a reason to want to pay us. And it was powerful. So what could you find in your culture and your job and your niche, your sport that you love and that you can gravitate even more to and make it more distinctly yours so that you can rise to another level performing and just crush it and let that be the fire that gets you out of bed every day to get you going. That's cool. And that's worth fighting for. Hopefully you can find that. That's our aim.
