Vision The Game Changer for Effective Leadership

I think for the first decade of running my company, it was hard telling people what I do, and I was always making excuses for it. They were judging us based on what we did for a living. Meanwhile, we had, like, the nicest people in the world working in our office. You know, my goal was to make sure that we give people a different side of what negative stereotype that they had immediately, without even knowing anything about us. You know, there's some bag collection agencies out there just like every industry. It just happens to be that some people do hate collection agencies.

So, Chad, whenever someone asks me what I'm up to at Restart, what, what we're building with this little company of ours, I always start by telling them your story. And the way the story always starts is my partner, Chad. He's based in Columbus, and he owned a collection agency for 25 years. And the moment the words collection agency comes out of my mouth, I often notice the slightest change in expression on the face of whoever I'm speaking to. It's as if I've introduced something taboo into the conversation. So I'm curious to know, first of all, if you've noticed that, too, whenever you speak with someone about your past and about the work that you did running a collection agency. And I also am curious to know why, in your opinion, the debt collection industry has such a bad reputation.

Yeah, I mean, if you felt that way, imagine how I felt. I think for the first decade of running my company, it was hard telling people what I do, and I was always making excuses for it. Right. But from day one of starting my company, I set out to try to build the kind of company that I wanted to work in. And thank God we were able to flip that entire mindset, at least internally. And then with all the people that our company touched. Because I set out this big dream early on to change the perception of collections. You know, my goal was to make sure that we give people a different side of what negative stereotype that they had Immediately, without even knowing anything about us, they were judging us based on what we did for a living. Meanwhile, we had, like, the nicest people in the world working in our office. But, you know, there's some bad collection agencies out there just like every industry. It just happens to be that people do hate collection agencies. I mean, we always joke because people don't.

Why, though? Why? And you say bad collection agencies, what makes them bad?

Look, it's a tough situation, man. I mean, I had grown the company up to about, I don't know, over 10,000 clients, and we had about 80 to 100,000 people every month put in collections, hospitals, doctors, dentists, you name it, businesses. And it's a tough situation. People are dealing with financial hardship. They experience sudden job loss, and then they're hearing from a collector who wants to collect money from them and threaten them. And so, you know, it's like the last thing you want to deal with. Not only from a perspective of, like, being the debtor, but being treated like a debtor and then making that collection call. It's just a tough job. And I think people just don't want to get a collection call. And I think the numbers are staggering in America right now. I think they say, you know, like, the 30 to 40% of the people have heard from a collection agency at some point. You know, people come delinquent for lots of reasons. You moved, you didn't know the bill came. You didn't know your insurance was supposed to pay, and it didn't. So it got crossed in the middle. Like, there's a whole bunch of reasons, and there's a lot of people who can't afford to pay their bills, and then there's a percentage of the people who don't want to pay their bills. So you got a whole. You got a lot going on in the industry, but you get caught in that maze and, you know, it can crush your credit for a long time. Seven years on your credit report, that has a huge impact on your finances. Long term. People don't even understand how it works. And, you know, you got collection agencies that are selling the debt, and then it goes from one collector to another collector. They hear from that person, then it can go to an attorney. So it's just the whole industry just kind of doesn't have such a good feeling about it. So that's why. Right.

Okay, so take me back to the beginning. I know that part of what you want to do with this show and with a lot of the content you're producing is to speak to young people in college who are maybe confused about what they want to do, whatever stage they're at. And you started this business when you were in college. I understand. Take me back to that time. How did you get involved in the collection agency that you started working for? I imagine that most people in college, you know, don't dream of working in a collection agency.

Right. Yeah. It's an interesting story. And I think entrepreneurs will benefit from this as well, because, you know, what we ended up being able to do as a company and as a team was really special. And it was a long journey. So back in college, it was my junior year, going into my senior year, I needed a summer job. And one of my friends hooked me up with her dad, who was the CEO of a collection agency in Cleveland, Ohio. I basically got thrown onto the phones after a couple hours being trained, and I just attacked it hard. You know, I think anything worth going after requires a lot of hard work. And I found out who made the most calls in the office, and I set out to go to beat that person. And by the end of the summer, I was crushing it. And a CEO asked me if I wanted to do something with him in Columbus, Ohio, and I said, sure. And the day before I came back to Columbus, he handed me a sales book. We went out on the road. We walked into a few dental offices. He made the gals at the front desk laugh and smile. And the next thing I know, we had a couple clients. And he said, go back to Columbus and do that. So that's what I did. I went back to Columbus. I had no clue what I was doing. I mean, I can tell you I didn't learn anything at Ohio State, but I learned more on the first day. Going out on the road, walking into offices and getting thrown out of people's offices with, hey, no solicitation. Right. And it was a hard gig. I had to walk into an office and sell the person at the front desk. Meanwhile, the patients were sitting in the waiting room, and I'm talking about collections. And these are the people that are probably going to be in collections. It was hard. I mean, it was really hard.

So when you started, when he kind of threw you just out there and said, start your own collection agency in Columbus, what was that like for you? Were you just kind of wearing every hat at first and doing every possible job that needed to be done?

Yeah. So for the first six months, I just. I pounded hard. I used to go. I had made so many cold calls. I'd go to class in the morning and I'd put on a suit. At noon, I'd hit the road. In the afternoon, I would go collect business cards. And from every medical building I could possibly find, I would go home, probably 4 o', clock, call all of them up, try to land appointments. And my goal was to let probably about two to three appointments every day that I can go out on. And I was trying to sell them to use our collection agency. When I graduated, after about six months, I had about 100 clients. And then when I graduated, we started a separate company in Columbus. And that's when I started to hire a team. And that's, that's really when everything kind of really started. I had to go build a company at that point, and he offered me the opportunity to be a partner with him. He ran the company in Cleveland, I ran the one in Columbus. And we grew it together. And within five years, it just blew up. I mean, we had an office full of people and I was hiring entry level folks, I was training them, I was doing the collections, I was doing the customer service. I was doing everything, every single thing until I could elevate and then delegate something off to someone that I hired. So I was getting a dose of pretty much everything you could possibly deal with in a startup company. And thank God I had a mentor. So I had someone guiding me about how to treat people and how to deal with some of the problems and challenges that we were up against.