He Lost Everything… Then Built a Million-Dollar Credit Repair Empire

I found a credit repair franchise back then and said, you know what? Let's just do it. I knew that I could kind of put some skills together and make it work, and so that's what I did. I figured out online how to build an email scraper. So I went in and I scraped over 600,000 emails in a week. I had that point to prove that if I'm going to be a business owner, I'm going to have to make this work one way or the other. And it worked. We started getting results very quickly. You know, we've just grown so much since then, and we contribute a lot of it to Credit Repair Cloud. So thank you.

Hey, credit heroes. Our most successful credit heroes, the ones who make a great living and change a lot of lives, they all have a few things in common. They really care about people, and they figure out how to bring in tons of clients consistently. Our guest today has had to learn that the hard way. After losing his job and investing in a business that failed, he had to start over from scratch. And what he built next has become one of the largest credit repair operations in the country. And it's fueled by partnerships that send him clients every single month. And today is here to break down 12 years of lessons so that you can build a wildly profitable business of your own. So please welcome to the podcast Joe Mallow. Hey, Joe.

Hey, guys. What's going on?

So glad you're here. Thanks for being here.

Absolutely.

And I know it was a while back, but I never got to congratulate you on your Millionaires Club award, so congratulations.

Thank you. Congratulations to my team. Thank you.

Well, you made it all happen and you hired the team. What does that accomplish mean to you?

I mean, it means. It means that what we're doing and what we have done is successful. You know, I mean, I think that being a business owner, I think a lot of people can agree that, you know, it's not reaffirming. There's not. You don't. You don't get a lot of congratulations. And so when you kind of hit certain milestones in your business, it's. It's exciting, but you just keep moving forward. But it was nice to get the award. I know we were one of the first, but, you know, you know, we've just grown so much since then, and, you know, we contribute a lot of it to Credit Repair Cloud, so thank you.

Okay, I want to know everything, but let's start with where did you grow up and where are you now?

Awesome. Yeah. So our business is in Houston. I grew up in Houston, in Texas in general. My parents were in oil and gas, so we moved everywhere. And so I established the business in Houston for the last 11 years. And then in the last year, I personally have moved to Denver to be closer to my wife's family. So. But our operation is still in Houston.

Very cool. And tell us about your life before credit.

Repair School has never been for me, and I actually used to be a mechanic, a car mechanic, and I was fascinated with that. So I wanted to work on bigger machines. And so I went to aviation school to build airplanes and fix airplanes. Got about 3/4 away through that and realized after talking to numerous people that had been in, you know, working for these big airlines for 30 years, you know, you had to work the graveyard shift at a lot of airlines, and that's obviously when the airplanes are down. So I found out really quickly, like, this isn't it. So I just called my parents, quit school, didn't know if they were going to be happy or not, but I knew that this wasn't for me, so I had to get out. So I found an ad for a car dealership, which I thought it was. A car dealership is actually a sales company that guarantees you placement at a dealership. You just got to go through sales training. And so I took that ad, and the ad said, make $10,000 a month. So obviously it grabbed my attention. I didn't have much sales experience at all at that point, but I was like, you know what? I'm attracted to the money. So let's do it. Went through the training, got placed at a Chevy dealership in Houston, started selling, and then worked my way up to Internet sales, to the finance department, to sales management. And then I ended up running the dealership at the end. And then after eight years of a lot of dedication, loyalty, working a lot of what they call Bell to Bell 99, every day they came in and just let a bunch of us of the managers go. And, you know, before then I just. Or then I found out, you know, I had no job. So I had to figure out something else. I realized in that moment, I'm not going to work from work for somebody ever again.

So what did you do next?

Back then, when I was working the car business, there wasn't as many aggressive banks as there are now. I mean, if you walk in kind of with a pulse, you know, and typically a down payment, you're going to get approved, probably not at the interest rate you want, but you're going to get approved back then it was a lot harder. And so we saw a lot of people come in and spend out hours at the dealership just to walk away with no, no new car or even a used car. And so I knew that there was a credit issue. So I started doing some searching online and saw franchises. And so I found a credit repair franchise back then and said, you know what, let's just do it. It was a small investment. I had some money. I finally got my 401k money in and said, let's go for it. So that's what I did. I, you know, they didn't. I was the easiest sale they probably ever had. I transferred money within two days and said, you know, I hope it works, and went to work.

I've never known of anybody buying into a credit repair franchise. How expensive was that? Tell me about what that process was.

It was a fun one. So it cost me 25 grand. And the way. Yeah, it was at that time, I, you know, a lot of the franchises I was finding was bigger investments and you had to have a lot of capital. And so that was just something I, I didn't have for the amount of money I made and how much I didn't save. It just, it spoke. It was pretty embarrassing at that point. So $25,000 and basically the way it works, you have to go get your own clients. They give you a small little like CRM. It was really like, looked like it was from the 80s, if the Internet was around in the 80s, but it was just old school. But they basically handled your disputes. So it was kind of like outsourcing is today. But you also had, on top of that, you had to pay per client, which was $100 per client. And that handles.

You're paying them for your business, the.

Franchise, and then you pay $100 per client. Wow. Yeah. So you got three rounds of credit repair. That was it. And so when a client wasn't satisfied, like they washed their hands on everything, they didn't really build a platform for you to be successful. It was just learn how to do it. There wasn't really any training, but I knew from the car business knowledge that I had around just credit in general, I knew that I could kind of put some skills together and make it work. And so that's, that's what I did.

And then what happened with that business?

So I, it's, it's funny, I, the one benefit I got out of it is right before I bought the franchise, I actually went in and built a scraper. I knew, I figured out Online how to build an email scraper. So I went in and I scraped over 600,000 emails in a week for mortgage lenders, car dealerships and I built an email that was just told my story. Like here's what I did. This is what I saw in the business. I saw a lot of people walking away without a loan. And so, and then I just catered it to the industry and said like I know that for like the mortgage industry. I just say like I know that you guys get a lot of turndowns. You know, I would love to help them. I even told them that I had used a credit repair company which I had really old school while I was in the car business. And so I kind of had an idea of how that process actually worked. And so I just you know, said like, can I help your clients? And so then I built a, like I just used Microsoft Word to build like this automated email that just went out to all of them and I set it up incorrectly and it literally sent out like over 100,000 emails overnight because I was trying to sending out in small batches and I was using the, the domain of the franchise. And so what happened was is because they, their domain was so seasoned, I was able to send all the emails out. No, none of them went to span that I know of. And I woke up in the morning a little bit later than I normally did and I already had credit reports from lenders sitting in my email box. And I just like light bulb went off and said this is how I'm going to get my clients. And so I said I hope the credit repair process and the results come because I got a lot of people. And so the funny thing was is they didn't have like credit card processing. We had to take cashier's checks or money orders. And so I was having people mail cashiers checks or money orders or I would meet people in Houston. This is, I was doing nationwide at this point. So I had to have people mail their cashiers checks or money orders in. If I was local. People were like ah, this is a little sketchy, can I meet you? I would meet them, they'd hand me cash and so I had to figure out like how. So I tried to send cash in. The franchise wouldn't take it. So I had to like create money. It was just, it was wild. It was like so inefficient. But it taught me like this is not how I want to run a business. Like if this company is not efficient, this franchise not model seems like it was Just put together overnight. One thing they did, they didn't have any issues with me doing is creating my own brand. So I built the ASAP credit repair brand while I was still operating under their brand. And luckily I did because I started to establish this brand very quickly, Started doing all the things I want to do on marketing. And we just got a random email on a Friday afternoon. My email actually went to spam. So I never got it until one of my account managers called me and said, hey, the franchise has gone bankrupt. And so they had over 300 franchise owners that a lot of them were so, like, lost that they just like, they lost their franchise fees and they had to shut down their business. So it was very unfortunate for them.

Wow. And then you had to take over all the operations yourself. How did you start to learn credit repair?

I just, I just dug the one thing I know is like, I know how to focus on one thing and get it done. So, like, literally long nights. Luckily, I wasn't married and wasn't in a relationship, so I just stayed up late, went to bed late, woke up early. I was really excited. I knew that there, like, I had already burnt all the boats. I knew that there was no turning back. I also knew that I had made so much money in the car business and I had a great salary, that it was, you know, I had a point to prove that if I'm going to be a business owner, I'm going to have to make this work one way or the other. So I just went in and started research and I started looking for solutions and I actually found you guys and you guys had, you know, that was the early stages of credit repair clock because I remember there was some training in there that I kind of went through. But I just started studying the law. Man, I just wanted to know.

You.

Know, I wasn't very smart when it came to, like, learning these laws and understanding them, but I tried to understand as much as I could. And I just, you know, I just decided it was very scary to say, let's send out a dispute letter. And I don't know what to do. So I kind of put together my ideas and. And it worked. I mean, we started getting results very quickly. We had to, you know, do everything by hand until we started to enroll in credit repair cloud. And that simplified the process for us in the beginning.

How were you getting most of the clients? Was it from those affiliates that you reached out to before?

It was 100% affiliates. If I was not spending time on onboarding somebody and enrolling them in the services or doing a consultation. I literally was marketing. And so that scraper was literally like a game changer for me because it literally opened that door. And so many people were sympathetic to my emails. You know, if I sent that email today, I'd probably get a lot of, you know, screw offs. Leave me alone. Just because that, that, you know, email marketing still does work. It's still very, it can be very efficient, but it's also saturated. And so back then it's like nobody was reaching out these loan officers. And so I really kind of got my foot in the door early. And so like I was very grateful to get a lot of clients. It was just the friction that I found in the business, you know, with payments and having to collect payments and having to manage the business. It's it, it brought a lot of adversity throughout the entire process. But for me, you know, it was just solve a problem and get back to marketing. So. And like organic building my business organically is what, you know, I did for a very long time until we started running actual Facebook ads.

I was curious to touch on the affiliate side for a sec. You kind of started going down that road. You have this whole story of reaching out to all these affiliates in the early days and that worked amazing in the past. I'm curious, like, if you were to rebuild your business from today with like no ads and trying to get those affiliates today, what would you do from the ground?

I would do the same thing. I think it's harder today just because, because the market is the mortgage loan officers, just like credit repair companies, we're getting emails from all these different companies all the time. And then now emails are harder to be delivered if you're doing, you know, a lot of marketing. If I had to start all over again, I'd be creative. I would probably, I would continue to email market personally, but I would also pick up the phone. I mean I had the self. We were cold calling people to trade in their cars. You know, when times were slow in the car business, like, it's like pick up the phones here, you know, dial. And so I had learned cold calling skills. I was so fearful of it in the beginning. It took me probably about three, three months to get really good at it. Just a lot of like nos. But like, I think for me the thing that is been, that's worked really well for me is just 100 actions. I try to do 100 actions every day no matter what. And that's very helpful for my sales guys that that work is this, you know, whether you spend $100 on ads or you're. You're doing 100 outreaches or cold calling 100 people, at least you're creating that momentum. But the biggest thing that you're creating out of that is your. You're getting tougher skin, you're learning how to get a lot of no's, and eventually you learn how to edit the way that you're approaching people to be able to really hit the pain points that they're. They're dealing with, with their clients and, you know, converting clients and getting people approved, that all of a sudden they start listening. And so I'm making calls. But I think the most important thing that I learned is you got to own your market. I mean, everybody around your house, around your business, you got to own them. Uh, like I've heard people say, be the mayor of your own town. And I think that that's really true, because when you can build a relationship in person, the one thing I didn't say, whenever we sent out all those 600,000 emails, the ones that were decently local or like San Antonio, I had multiple loan officers. It was wild. San Antonio was a really hot market back then. They wanted to meet me in person, so I had to go drive and, and do all that. And it's awesome. I. I built the relationship, but, like, I was bypassing so many mortgage companies and car dealerships along the way that, you know, one of the areas of marketing that I think works really well is just printing out a Google map and finding out what's around you. Anybody that pulls credit from insurance companies to attorneys, bankruptcy attorneys, to mortgage companies, car dealers, all those. Anybody that pulls credit, you should be at least going and introducing yourself. You know, you don't, don't go in for the sale. Go in and introduce yourself and maybe be interested in them for once.

I want to dig deeper on owning your area there. So you talk about, like, really just getting out, getting out of your house, going in person, meeting people that are turning down clients. What is that? What would that interaction look like?

So for me, I sound interested in what they. What they offer first. You know, hey, I'm new to the area. I live around the street. I didn't even know you even were here and want to know more about your business and what you offer, because I think it's something that I can offer my clients. So we get a lot of people in my industry, and then they start asking, what do you do? For me, obviously, I had the car business background, so it Was easy for me, just go to the car dealerships. But I know that a lot of your audience may not have a background in sales or a background in that. And I think that the most important thing is like you got to, you have to get out of your comfort zone at some point in time. You know, the longer you wait, the long, the harder it is for you to start getting leads and because what's going to happen is the worst case, like they're not interested and you move on to the next person in their building or the next person in their department. At the end of the day, you're going to finally find somebody that just wants to have a conversation. And after you build that rapport with that person, it's crazy how much they're, they'll be more interested in you and start referring you business. You know, I remember being asked to speak to a bunch of mortgage loan officers on that first blast that I did to an office of 20 mortgage loan officers. I literally like, I had so much anxiety. And this, the meeting was, was it three weeks from that day? Like I had three weeks to prepare. I had anxiety every single day. Even being in the car business, talking to people. I had never led a presentation, I had never gotten in front of a bunch of people. I just had to learn and I think just building, getting back to just building relationships with people and sounding interested in people and what they offer and just saying, hey, I live in the area, I didn't even know you were here. I would love to learn about more about your products that you offer. In fact, I have clients that are always looking for X and wanted to see, you know, what, what we could offer in case I have somebody that can refer your what your way. And you'd be amazed that the next question I asked is like, oh really? What do you do? And then you can talk about what you do. You know, maybe you don't want to say I do credit repair. You know, you want to say like, I help people, you know, get out of debt or I help people learn how to like manage their credit and their finances. You know, I think sometimes when we throw around the word credit repair, it just has a bad rep. And unfortunately that's just what we have to understand. But if you are talking about how you're helping people, people become interested and then they, they, they start, believe it or not, start referring you business faster than you realize. But I think a lot of people are just scared to make that first step.

What are some other important things you've learned?

I think the most important thing for me that I realized very early on is it wasn't about the results. I think the credit repair results is, is a, is an important part of it, but it's a important part of a, like of 10 other things that are just as important if not more. And building a product, in this case a service that is top notch and really investing in customer service is what we did in the very beginning. That's all I knew is like I knew how to take care of people. I knew when we sold a car, I got to take care of them. I have to deliver the vehicle to them. I got to deliver great customer service because I had a survey behind that vehicle purchase that I had to get, you know, completely satisfied or I could lose my job, I could lose my, lose my bonuses. And when I shifted that focus and I really set pro, like just like put all my time into building the right process in helping people really understand the process. And you know, the, the, the results became a byproduct of what we did. But you would be surprised. And I say this to my employees all the time. Like I've had clients where I've removed 80% of their items and they were so, they were so unhappy. And I've had clients that got one or two items off and they were happier than I always say, you know, pig, pig and crap. Right? They, they were looking at from a bird's eye view, they were looking at the entire experience that they received from us and the relationships they built with the team. You know, if you call into our, our company like you're going to get somebody that's excited to hear from you, excited to talk to you. Like we just built this ma really amazing culture around experience. And so that's what I learned on, early on is that I used to beat myself up about results and like I got them 30% of the items removed. Why couldn't I get them 50, 60? And I would put so much pressure on myself. And then I realized like most of that doesn't matter the results. Like it's important, but it's not what your focus should be. Your focus should be on the experience and building a service that is just, you know, a red carpet experience type service.

From what we could see online with reviews, it pays off because even just in some pre research we're looking at like your listing is online on, on Google Maps you have like eight different locations. I was able to find on Google Maps. They were all 4, 8, 4, 9 like nearly perfect reviews, but just nearly perfect Google Listings, thousands and thousands of reviews. So really a testament to what process you put in place and that culture you put in place 100%.

You should be asking, by the way, you should be asking reviews from everybody, regardless if they're sold or not. You know, grade me on like, Google wants to know their experience in general, not just about like the outcome of their services. So like, you know, something I would recommend to every business owner is ask for reviews. While you're have your reps, whoever's on the phones, ask for reviews. Hey, I was great. I'm graded on this call for how good I did or how, how I, you know, presented our services, answered your questions. Would you be open to leave me a five star review? In fact, we say like, you know, it would mean the world to me if you could do that. And you would be surprised how many people leave us reviews. You know, we have tons of reviews on, you know, on the overall completion of the services, but we get a lot of reviews as well on people that are interested in our services and, and some of those clients never even proceed with us. But we got the review out of them just because they enjoyed the experience and how, you know, attention to detail. We were, when we were talking to them on the phone.

Is there anything else you do with your team to train them to really help get more of those reviews? You mentioned a few things, but anything.

Else, I mean, yeah, so it's part of their KPI. I mean they, they have to get reviews, right? They have to get feedback. We, we call it more feedback than reviews. But ultimately our employees are, you know, that is their KPI. They have goals that they have to hit every month because it's important. Asking for a review is very scary for people. They're like, why would I ask for a review? They haven't even completed services and, and like we had to break that ideology behind our employees. And when we started doing that, like our guys are really good at getting reviews. You know, getting reviews even after a client that has a concern call, like, they just, maybe the outcome wasn't exactly what they wanted. But like they see the big picture and they tell us that like I, you guys have helped me overall. I wish I got a few more items removed or I wish you guys would have got that capital One account or whatever account off. But like the reality is we still ask for the review, but we also preface like, if for some reason you can't give me a five star review, just like, let me know now because it's important that we solve this problem, but also improve our processes. And so it's just a gateway to be able to get actual honest feedback. Surveying your clients is really important because then you know their temperament, you know where they're at. You should be like surveying your clients. The second you see a client is upset, you should be running to the phone to call them, not running away from the phone to say like, oh, hopefully our services will fix that problem because it will become a bigger problem for you when their services are over. And it's going to see they're going to be a really bad review or you're going to, you know, CFPB complaint or have to refund them their money at the very end. So why not solve the problem now and like really understand where your clients are throughout the entire process.

I know you've got this huge team. A lot of the people listening and watching are probably where you were in the beginning, where you're like a one man band. You're, you're doing the disputes, you're doing sales, you're the marketing department, you're everything. How did you decide what to offload first with that first employee? Tell us about that.

Yeah, so I offloaded sales immediately. Like I trained the person. They had no sales experience, but they were good at gift of gab. They could open a conversation with anybody. They were just scared to ask for the money. I think that you have to utilize your strengths and say, what can I train right now? Like, what can I teach somebody? Because if you're trying to teach somebody a skill that you don't know, I think the training becomes much harder for that person to better understand. They're going to ask questions that you're going to get frustrated because you can't answer because then it was much easier to do. And I did a hands on approach. I'm big on hands on. Like, like just here's a training manual. Go figure it out. It was like, hey, this is what you do. Okay, I do it. You watch, you do it. I watch, we do it together. And then you do it, I watch. And so by doing that four step process, it allowed me to make sure they knew what they were doing and so I didn't have to like go back and question it. Yeah, they're going to make mistakes making sure that I had the confidence they could do it. Every business owner is going to struggle with getting rid of stuff or having somebody else do it because they can always do it better. But you cannot grow and scale your organization without offloading certain tasks that like, literally, like you can train somebody to do it just as well as you, if not even better.

So early on you started getting a flow of clients from all these affiliates that you, you reached out to after scraping them. Is that the affiliates are still the bulk of the business, right?

It's the bulk of the business, yeah. So the our two areas of the business right now are affiliates and which is about 70% of our business and then 30% which is still huge for us is organic. Those are the only two. Like we ran ads until 2018 until Google got in the whole advertisement of credit repair got shut down. We realized in 2018 it was time to shift focus. Like the ads were great, like we made a lot of money. Facebook ads back then were cheap and you could get people to convert. And same with Google. But we realized after that like again I've always, it felt like I've been ahead of the curve and just knowing that something doesn't feel right but like I don't want to rely. That's another risk of a business is relying on one. One affiliate source or one, one lead generation source is that you want to be able to have multiple in case one goes away or you lose a big mortgage loan officer, you lose something like you always got to have others. So it doesn't feel like a big loss when you lose somebody because you are, you're going to lose loan officers. You're going to do something like they're going to have the wrong impression. They send you a whole bunch of business and then like one of the 10 clients doesn't get the outcome and maybe they over promise not you. And so you're going to lose people. So for us, our biggest like we are always, we have a whole marketing team. We are always looking for more affiliates. We're remarketing to affiliates that we marketed two, three, two, three years ago that said no. And the funny thing is is you'd be surprised how many of those people are like okay, you're a legit business if you're still doing this and you marketed me three years ago, you know, people like some people obviously don't like it, but you'd be surprised how many people they didn't give your first email a chance. But now that they know that they saw your name and your name looks familiar, they the company looks familiar, they give you another shot. But yeah, affiliates are everything. They literally are your own. They're like employees that you don't have to hire if you do a really good job. And we do a lot of zoom calls and a Lot of training for all of our affiliate, especially the big organizations that send us business. And we train them, we tell them what to say, how to do it, the best way to hand off a client. Cause that's really valuable and important. And we give them so much, so many resources. So it's almost like they are our salespeople out in the field and we've gone to incentivizing a lot. I do believe in incentivizing when you need to because like they become motivated because they are. You have to remember that a lot of salespeople, the people that are referring to business are salespeople and a lot of them are motivated by money. And so, you know, we do a mixture of both. But yeah, I mean I. It's better quality clients, higher converting clients, less churn, you know, they're goal oriented most of them obviously because the person referring them are help trying to help them get some type of a product or service. And so like it's just a better quality client. Like, you know, could we fake? Could we advertise? We still do some ads on Facebook here and there, you know, but like it's just, you're having to weed through a lot more people getting more frustrated, banging your head against the wall than just if you can get one good affiliate, like one big affiliate is going to change. It's one. We call it a well, one well will literally change the direction of business and can. And so if you can get one well and then go get a second well, you know, it's just like, it's just lead generation in itself versus having to go out there and pay for leads. Traditionally through advertisement.

Yeah. So you haven't run any Facebook or Google Ads in several years, but I noticed that you're posting a lot of results and client stories on your social media. So how has that helped?

I'll tell you, storytelling is the most underrated way to market. You know, if you can tell a story, it will relate with somebody that's on your page. If you can storytell, like tell the story about that person's results, you know, like so and so came to us, they were frustrated, they couldn't get a home, they couldn't do this. We have, we keep such good notes on our clients. We build so much rapport. Everything is tracked. So when a client calls in, we learn about what their goals are. You know, like how they found us, you know, have they used credit repair service before? Like we were able to really build like a portfolio so that when they're done with our Services like, we just literally can generate that. I mean, you could take all those notes and put them in ChatGPT and it'll create the story for you based off the timeline and based off all the notes. And so storytelling will relate to somebody. Somebody is going through a situation. You start selling credit repair. Like, no, I don't know what that is. They just don't know. They don't understand what that entails. But if you can sell the dream of the outcome of what you've been able to actually accomplish for somebody, you know, don't lie about it. Just tell the story. You have them in your CRM right now. You have so many stories that we're not using. You have so many reviews that you can leverage. You don't get like, we don't get tons of engagement on our post. We get a ton of messages, you know, because we've built a huge following on, on social media and, and are able to, to monetize on that just based off of storytelling.

You mentioned the early days. Like, if you were to start from the very beginning to get those affiliates, you'd go door knocking, go around your town, get people that way. How are you getting your affiliates now as your business has grown?

Yeah, so we, we actually have reps that are in the field that go and do that. They're affiliates. We actually pay them as what we call super affiliates. So they essentially go out and build more relationships with other people. So they'll go to a salesper. Like, you can get paid off of this. We pay the super affiliate them for going to find the salesperson who gets paid for the, the lead that they, or the, the deal that they bring us. And so, you know, we're very strategic on that. So boots on the ground is one way. Email marketing is still really good. You just have to be really. You have to learn how to season your domains and build a marketing platform. But we also are consultants who are selling the credit repair service. Like they have KPIs around building their own businesses. They have the luxury to have leads coming in every day, but they also, they work on those affiliate relationships and ask for additional referrals. There's a loan officer that's sitting in an office with a lot of other loan officers usually. Why are you only getting that one loan officer's business? Why are you not getting everybody else's? And so really just trying to use relationships to build more affiliate opportunities is kind of where our strategy is now.

So the other part of your marketing strategy is the organic side. You're getting 30% of your clients there. I noticed and I did like a SEO analysis of your website prior. It looked like you're getting a lot of your clients from like your Google listings. You just have these amazing Google listings. You got. It looks like you have at least eight solid Google listings that have thousands of reviews in all these cities across America. And that's driving you what looks to be tens of thousands of visits a month. Is there anything besides just getting consumers to leave reviews on Google My business, the Google listings. Is there anything more that you're doing outside of that?

Every like we log into those profiles and we're posting all the time on Google. That's really important. We find that on the review side having at least 10 reviews or I'm sorry a hundred reviews or more is kind of Google's threshold. There's just like credit scores, there's an algorithm that nobody knows. Just with Google there's an algorithm they're not going to tell you, right? But we found is like when we got our locations over 100 reviews, it really like started to 1x2x3XR calls. Having chat on there like having your phone number and being able to chat with people and then doing updates. Logging into your Google My business profile, believe it or not, just logging in shows that you're an active business owner on Google My business. And that's what Google wants. And so keeping you know, leveraging every character limit on every field and being able to like your Description alone gets 750 characters. Like you should find a way to tell your story and tell like resonate with people in your description. It's massive. It's very important. I know a lot of credit repair business owners don't even like have a GMB Google My business. And so you should have that. You should also like be like be on every one of the domain sites of the domain registry sites beyond Yahoo being you know, Yelp, you would be surprised how much business just because we're found on all these different, I mean obviously being in business going on 13 years now, like we have a lot of history, right. And you know, people start writing about you and writing about your company and so then you start getting exposure on all these different sites. But being able to be a legitimate business means like that people can find you everywhere. Google, Bing, there's, there's a lot of different resources out there that will build those profiles for you at a low cost, doesn't cost much and they'll go out there and do that. The other side that we, we focus a lot on is really blog writing. I think blog writing is still very under undervalued traffic. It does take time and I don't encourage business owners to do it themselves. There's a lot of resources that are good out there that'll do it. Be careful with AI and don't leverage AI and have AI to write your blogs because you know that'll get you in some trouble or get them flagged and get them to shut down and, and you'll see your traffic change on your website. But for us, we've targeted a lot of collection agencies, built, built blogs around, about, around the, the industries that have the problems. Collection agencies, you know, people not being able to get business loans, people not be able to get personal loans. And really writing blogs around that instead of just credit repair stuff. Right? Like that's great, but that's so oversaturated. You guys know it because I've seen you guys back in profile. Like you guys have spent a lot of time on, you know, those types of keyboards and other things. But I'm just saying, like a lot of credit pair companies that are doing some type of content blogs just focus on just credit repair when it's like there's so much opportunity out there. Business lend alone has exploded on the scene in the last two, three years. And so there's a lot of opportunity out there to write a really, really good post and get traffic to your website and then learn how to monetize the traffic that goes to your website. And so we've been able to do that like literally take somebody that's cold, not looking for credit repair, but they have a collection on their credit report that they need removed. And so they go into a blog to find out to remove it and then, hey, oh wow, I'm on a credit repair circle. They do it here. Okay, let's do it. And so that's how we've been able to funnel a lot of our traffic into leads and build lead generation that way.

Do you know how many clients you've served or how many you're serving today?

So we've serviced now over 68,000 clients in 12 years. Active clients. I don't have that number in front of me. Well over a thousand active clients. I'd say the close number's probably closer to 2,000 active clients. And remember our timeline cycle is 120 days. So you know, the, the, the benefit of recurring revenue is you can keep people, if you do really good at, you know, providing value, you'll keep Your clients forever. So, like, you know, for us, because we were catering to mortgage companies as like our number one referral source in the very beginning is like, they want their clients back to them within, like tomorrow. Which obviously we set expectations on that. But we were able to get them back to them much faster. Had we done a reoccurring revenue model, it might not have worked out as well. You know, our, our, our turnover, you know, obviously is 120 days with the new financial literacy product that we've added to the back end. We've already seen, you know, people stay on a lot longer, being able to charge them and, and have an alternative, having additional things that you can sell people when they're happy with your services, like, it's, it's the easiest sell you'll ever have. And so selling additional services for us was a huge one. And now financial services, you know, it's just, it's, it's a way to monetize your clients and really keep happy clients. So.

Well, then let's talk about credit repair.

Yeah.

Of all the credit repair strategies you've learned, what's one that's been a real game changer?

Email disputes. I think that it's getting saturated now, unfortunately. But like, I wrote a, I wrote a blog post on this, on the CEO method, because I started finding ways. I started getting really frustrated the process, especially on like some big repossessions and stuff like that. So I started challenging the account itself. And I would start to get to a point where I would, I was just at an like an end point where it's like I was going to have to call a client and say, like, we couldn't get it removed, which, like, we know how to handle those situations now. You know, like, we know clients have that expectation that there's no guarantee that we're going to get it removed. But going directly to leadership and either selling the story, giving them more information, you would be surprised how many things that we've gotten removed based off that alone. And just again, scraping the email finding the leadership, don't bombard them with emails. Like, don't do it the wrong way because they're going to remember you. But you know, it's important to touch to, to be able to. You can build a dispute process that way and just say, like, here's what I'm trying. Here's what's happened and tell them the story. Get the story from the client. I think it's important for if you're trying to get an account removed, if you can get the story and just understand what the issue is or what the issue, potential issue may be. I think it's easier to convert that, to be able to, to utilize that story into getting your results. Is, is this, does this method work every time? Of course not. But it's helped us get repossessions off some of these bigger accounts. We, we use a, a validation process that I think is super effective for us, not effective for everybody. But the way that we look at the law is a lot different than others. Is that if you look at a credit report looking to see if account is accurate or not, like sometimes you'll see a visual error. Great. Dispute it. You have leverage. You can dispute it, but in most cases you're not going to see a visual error on a credit report. And so for. In order for an item to be on a credit report, it has to be accurate. So what makes account accurate? And so what we did, we have shifted to is requesting documentation. The data furnishers and creditors aren't required to provide all this proof, but most do. And so we've been doing this, disputing on behalf of the client, having them sign a power of attorney for such a long time that we're well known when a dispute comes over. In most cases alone, they don't fight back and forth with us. When we find an FCRA violation, we get attorneys involved. And so that's even more leverage because we're tied to those, those emails in the beginning, usually. And so now these creditors know that we have attorneys that we work with directly that help for any FCRA violations. And so our disputes are taken more seriously. We don't just send out RAND disputes, but we're requesting documentation. And then we try to find discrepancies and errors and build a case to get that account removed. And that's been very helpful for us than just sending out traditional, just dispute letters.

Very cool. You said something interesting I want to get back to because it's probably the answer to my next question. I was going to ask you about how you deal with stall letters, but you just said you use a power of attorney. So you don't get stall letters anymore.

Yeah, I mean, we got stall letters prior to it. We don't get stall. It's very rare we get a stall letter. And again, like building a reputation when you're doing like a lot of people are questioning, should I do a power of attorney or not? Does it give me too much exposure? Power returning is the way to go, period, point blank. There probably is some risk There is some exposure risk that you may have out there, you know, down the road. But in reality, like, most disputes aren't taken seriously because there is no power of attorney attached. Those stall letters are worse now, from what I've heard, than ever. We haven't gotten a stall letter. I mean, we get them.

Don't.

Don't get me wrong. But when we're talking about percentages of stall letters we ever get, like, we get very few at all, if ever. Whereas we hear credit repair companies all the time, especially in the community, asking, like, what do I do? And it's like, are you, like, first question, are you using a power of attorney? No. There's your issue. But creditors get to know who you are. And if you're not doing some fraudulent disputes and you're, you're, you're, you're being human and you're doing the right thing and you're just asking for certain things, you would be surprised. I feel this is my own perception that we get better results in most cases because we've been well known and we, and like, we're not, we're not pestering them. We have a legit concern. Please, you know, please do you know, please look at our dispute, whatever. And I think that the outcomes just seem to be different than they were years before.

Amazing. And so every single client you service now signs the power of attorney.

Always limited power of attorney. Yep.

Fascinating.

And are you doing any type of notarization on that or just.

No, we do electronic. We do do electronic signatures on that. They sign. They sign it, and we do electronic signature on it yet, but no notarization.

Oh, interesting. I thought it had to have a notary, but. Sounds like you don't.

No.

That's awesome. Okay. In a recent post you made on Facebook, you mentioned that one out of five credit reports contains an FCRA violation. So for people who didn't see that post, can you explain why that statistic is such a big opportunity for them?

Yeah. So FCRA violations, believe it or not, are pretty common on credit reports. And we did our own data analysis because we use leverage. An attorney who. That's all they do do is FCRA violations. And so we literally, you know, got the client's consent in, in the process of doing their credit repair to say, hey, look, you may or may not have an FCR violation. You could be entitled up to X amount of dollars. Would you be open to letting our attorneys look at it? So we just started forwarding credit reports to our, to our attorney, and we found that 1 out of 20 had some type of FCRA violation. The client's entitled to compensation. And so that's what we found very quickly. And, and that's a great, for me personally, it's a great resource. You know, there's an affiliate revenue on top of it, but for me the affiliate revenue was just icing on the cake. That was the most important thing is you'd be surprised, like maybe it's an account that they actually needed removed, maybe it's account they've been barking that hat that has a violation. But yeah, I mean typically a lot of the FCR violations are visual on a credit report. Some are situational, meaning the client has a story and what they were told was different and what's reported is different. Again goes back to like billing statements, account history, stuff that you don't see on a credit report in detail that could show showcase an FCR violation that may not present itself immediately. And so having a good attorney on, on not even on staff, this is an attorney law firm, that this is what they do and they've been very, very successful in helping us. It's just again, being able to tell a client like hey, these attorneys got this removed for you and you're getting a check back is, is pretty amazing.

I bet they love that. And what are the violations that you can spot?

The most common ones are dates and balances being off. Typically balances is probably the most common one. So if an account has a different balance, I mean we see these types of posts all the time from credit repair business owners. What do I do? What do I handle? The most important thing in my opinion is you could dispute it, but you're probably going to have a lot better success going through the attorney because if it's for sure an FCRA violation like worst case, they typically get the account removed. I haven't seen a situation, I don't want to say it's guaranteed, but I haven't seen a situation where the accountant didn't get removed. That's like worst case. That's still a good case, right? Best cases, they get that it either settles out or they win the case in court. Most are settled out, very few go to court and they get compensation. So typically it's balances. Just look at, you can look at a typical credit report, look at the last date reported and then look at the balance. Sometimes they make. If they're a month behind on reporting and the balance isn't correct, then that's not considered an FCR violation. It's when the months are recent all within the same. But one of the bureaus shows a balance that's off by a dollar or more and the others show something. So now the attorneys can go after the data furniture and the credit bureau that has the wrong inaccurate balance. And so, you know, I would look out for those, be happy to, to help anybody that has a case like that. But yeah, I mean it's just, it's just an extra tool that you get to, you use and leverage. You don't technically, in my opinion, I wouldn't dispute the account. I'd let the attorneys handle it and then just handle the rest of the accounts. And so that's, that's kind of what we do.

Very cool. So Joe, with all the regulations within the industry, what are things that you're doing to stay compliant with Crow and especially with the tsr?

So the first thing that we did was like so a lot of people don't know that we got suede six times last year by one of these bottom feeder attorneys and it was flying something so small on our agreement. And then they just go and try to open a huge case and want you to settle out. Luckily, we've learned a lot through that process. Even as compliant as we thought our agreements were, it was like little things. So like the most important thing I can tell anybody is a really important investment you need to make early on is making sure all your documents are compliant, your agreements and all that. Like you're never going to be an attorneys will tell you this. You'll never be 100 compliant. The attorneys, if they want to find something, they'll find something little that you said or did. And so like trying to be 100 compliant like that shouldn't be your focus is just trying to be off the radar so that if you know, attorney tries to poach one of your clients and reach out to them, you know, these are clients that gave us good reviews. So they found us on found them on Google and then they sued suit. You know, ask the client, they had a good experience I'm assuming. And then all of a sudden the client's not happy and because they had a conversation with them and could earn $1,000. And so these bottom feeder attorneys reached out and sued us. But I learned compliance is number one is just making sure you're compliant. The second thing that we transitioned because of of the TSR is trying to sign up more clients online. And so what we did personally is we built a funnel on our website. We were able to leverage a company called Credit Report Preview. But what they basically give us is pieces of data of the credit report, not the full credit report, but enough like collections, derogatory accounts, late payment history, all that. We got all the things that are important to determine if this client is somebody that might have credit issues and then present them an audit all on the same page and then give them the opportunity to sign up and pay. And what that's been able to do is we got a lot more clients signing up. I was always the belief that I have to talk to a client to sell them, like I have to sell them on me and sell them on the company. You know, for us the opportunity that we have is we have a great reputation online presence, but it allowed us to like literally sell people something I was scared to do, be able to sign people up online. They pay and then I literally go and call and that's where I go in and just reiterate the consultation. It saves our time, a lot of team a lot of time and like makes everything flow much easier and it allows us to be closer to compliance on the TSR as possible. You'll never, I think everybody's debating the TSR and being compliant 100%. There's, there's like no way to be 100% compliant. But if you can get a lot of the key areas of, of the law that, that they're focusing on mainly around calling, you can be able to transition that to having people sign up online. And the one thing I'll tell you is a lot of people are like, well I don't know how to build a funnel. The most important thing is like picture yourself on this website. You go to a random person's website because your friend recommended you. What would you want to see that would build enough trust? I think a lot of credit repair companies have like, it's considered a funnel. They have a sign up and pay and we'll start your disputes. The problem is, is there's so much there, there's, there's so many people, so many clients these days that are like, they're, they're unsure and they've heard a lot of bad things about back, about credit repair and like, you know, they're just not sure. And so you have a lot of clients that just go onto your website and then leave. If you can like sell yourself, sell the reviews that you have, maybe you only have three reviews, that's okay, Put the reviews on there, sell the stories that I talked about earlier of like the clients success that you have and clients just literally picture themselves and say awesome. They have a great reputation. They got some reviews, they have some stories, they're getting results. I can see that they do a little, maybe they'll do a little research on your company a little bit deeper. So just make sure that you like, your reputation is cleaned up online and you have a presence. But what we found is that like the same clients that we were trying to get to sign up online previously weren't signing up because they just like the story wasn't there. And so being able to present somebody a credit audit without having to pull the credit reports, I'm a big believer. Our team pulls credit reports all the time. For those that don't go through the funnel, like it's not an issue for us, but for a lot of clients, that's kind of the barrier. That's like the, the clients, you know, barrier to entry is that they don't want to pull the reports for the consultation. They don't really know you. And then you're telling them to send your reports or maybe even the logins and so they get really skeptical. And so we have found that 96% of our clients that enroll online, they go through the credit monitoring site of our choice, even if they have Experian or annual credit report, because that trust is already built. And so I think that that's a big component is just trying to shift focus and change your belief system that I had that I have to talk to clients. I want to build rapport. I want to do sell that story and build that rapport through your funnel. And you will be amazed how easy it is to convert clients. We've literally 10x'd ourselves in the last six months just because of this funnel alone. So it's just really important. That's my advice. As far as the main component of the TSR being phone calls, that will help alleviate a lot of that stress and pain that you may be going through.

Yeah. So for anyone that's not aware, we do have a system similar inside of Credit for cloud where you can, if you turn on the self service signup flow, you can actually give audits to your clients as they're signing up. And if the client doesn't sign up right away too, we have a bunch of marketing automation and nurture tools set up where it keeps following up with the client to remind them to complete that sign up with your services without you having to do anything similar to what Joe's built. You talked a little bit about your pricing and how at the start you, I think you mentioned you were underpricing and you were afraid to raise prices. What gave you the confidence to raise your prices and what did that do to your business?

Well, I had a guy that you could consider my mentor, but he said I was an idiot for charging that much. He said, do you not value what you offer? And it really struck me hard because it's like, he's right. It's like you're undervaluing your prices. You're working 10 times harder than you should. You're selling a bunch of clients that are not aligned to the goals that you have for them. They're just like, they heard they can get their credit fixed. They don't know if they can make all the other payments. They'll, they'll get started. And so you start to like you. It's, it's very painful. And when I heard that, I was offended. But then I thought about it a little bit. It's like, right, so what do I do about it? He said, dude, you need to, you need to raise your prices. And so he gave me a metric that I thought was really, really powerful. And so you got to look at your closing percentage. We were closing 51% of the consultations we were doing, which is high. He said that the metric that you should be at, and this is just an idea, is around 35% of your closes. If you're, you know, below 35%, then you need to work on whether it's scripts. You know, maybe pricing is too high. Maybe you need to look at that and say, like, am I overpriced here? But if you're at 50%, like, he's like, you're, you're, you're, your problem isn't closing people. You guys are closing at a great high percentage. Your issue is pricing. You know, I don't know how you even said, I don't know how you pay your employees. I'm like, well, I mean, the margins are low or small. And so that was really, really an eye opening experience for me. But he also said, like, for us, we didn't have to deal with Churn, but if we like Churn, if you have a lot of clients just like signing up and leaving, then you have a, you have an issue with whether it's expectations, pricing, maybe, you know, online presence. There's a lot of factors there. But he said when you, when you increase pricing, you're going to see about a 15 to 20% drop immediately. But what people don't realize is you're going to probably sell 20% less, but you're Going to make more money because you're selling less people. You're also valuing your services differently. So you're going to attract more high, I call them higher quality clients. Not to offend somebody, but people that have more money, that are more dedicated to their goal. You know, same thing I was talking about earlier about affiliates. Like, you're like, they've already served up the perfect client to you. Now you just got to close them. And so it's funny, when we raise prices about almost 20%, our closing percentage didn't drop 20% or. Yeah, our closing percentage didn't drop 20%, it only dropped 5% and it went right back up. And so like I realized, like, maybe we need to do this again. And our, in our overall profitability went way up, up obviously as a company and our sales went up. And so like we sold ideally less clients, but we made more money. And so I, I think it's one of the most important things that people should focus on as their business grows is that maybe your pricing needs to change. You're going to kind of, you're going to put yourself on a different island than other people don't. Just like in the beginning, it's great, 99amonth or whatever you want to charge, it's great. Like follow the plan. But eventually you need to look at and say, how much value am I providing these clients? Do I need to add more value? Like, you know, like I talked about financial services, maybe that's too big of something to add right now. But like, what can I do? And I'll tell you one extra added value that was really, really valuable. That has helped. We had an issue with clients making their second, maybe even third payment to us. We. What you do after the 30 days of them signing up with your services is the most important part. You got them now they're. Some of them may get cold feet. Some of them may decide like, I don't know, or maybe they see a bad review that you have. Like, we've had this and then they cancel. Those 30 days are valuable. What value can you bring? We've created literally a system, videos. Like, we, we make sure they understand what they paid for and the process and we make sure they understand we're here, we are. We up our phone calls. Like, we're almost like, like bothersome just because we want the client to have that experience. Because a lot of people buy a product and I think we've all experienced this. You buy a product today and then tomorrow it's like, where'd My sales rep go, I feel like I was just sold. And so like value that you can provide your clients in that next 30 day window, like literally the most, the most important is the first seven days after they buy, then the 14, then 21, 28. But like spend so much time in perfecting that process and bring in as much value as you can. Just like extra emails, extra information, a video, whatever. And like, you know, shoot them a text and say video, like hey Daniel, I really appreciate you signing up. Thank you. Like doing these little things literally, like extend the lifetime of these clients and your churn percentage goes way down. And so that's kind of a piece of advice I have.

What's a common misconception people have about credit repair that you wish you could correct?

I hate to go to like the most basic answer, but like guaranteed results. You know, I think that the, the problem that I have is that just people are getting misinformation. I think that there's like, I love that a lot of people want to sell credit repair. I love like it's a lucrative industry. Like you can make great money, you can help a lot of people. But I think that there's a lot of people get in the space very quickly and make a lot of promises and guarantees. And then what happens is other credit repair companies have to clean that mess up. I mean we get, I've always said some of the bigger credit repair companies are our biggest referrers. And I've always said that because we get them. It went through a 12, 16 month process, didn't get any results, got all these promises, are pissed off and then they come to us and we have to be the garbage man that cleans up the mess. You know, the biggest misconception with credit repair is that it can just like it's clean slate, start all over and you know, you're good to go, you know, in a month from now or three months from now. And that's just not the case. You know, you have to rebuild it up. In a lot of situations you got to rebuild your credit. Even when we get accounts off you still, there's still things that you still have to do as a client. And that's why expectations for us has been so important for us and our clients.

And what's one piece of advice you'd give to somebody who wants to start their own credit repair business?

Get started. I, I think that everybody wants to perfect the process. Everyone's protected this process. Everyone wants to ask a bunch of questions, everyone wants to do all this and, like, it's important that you do your research and it's important that you learn. Like, I think that it's like a 50, 50 thing. Like, you, you 50% of your time should be probably learning some of the laws and learning some of the stuff, figuring out, like, your business model and all that. But the other 50 is action. You know, it's like you just got to get started. You know, as I said before, like, I have nothing against mentors. I think mentors can be really, really valuable for a lot of people. But, like, they're gonna, they're. They're gonna tell you the how, but they're not gonna do it for you. And so you still have to go in there and do all the hard work. And I think that a lot of people are just scared. I mean, you're. I'm nobody special. And I know a lot of people say that on this podcast, but truly, I'm not anybody special. I just, I like, you can't fail if you don't quit. And so you're not going to learn everything. You're not going to be able to, like, figure it all out before you get started. Just get started and, like, create your own problems. Go get a mortgage loan officer to send you a credit report. Now you don't know how to dispute and have to figure it out and say, like, can anybody help me with this? The community is amazing because there's so many resources and so many people that'll give really good advice. Like, if you don't have anything to get advice on because you haven't done the action, then you're where a lot of people are stuck. And not just for credit repair space, but in business in general, is that most people don't get started because they're hesitant because they don't have every checkbox completed, you know, and so that would be. My advice is just like, literally just, just get started. I think that, like, if your goal is in the future to sell your business, your biggest risk is key, man risk. And that risk is that you are involved in everything. Like, nobody wants to buy a business that you are, like, you're 100% involved unless they hire you on. And then now you're still stuck in the business. What I ended up having to do is take time off eventually, as I hired multiple employees, is like, the way that you realize how much you're needed is you have to take time off and you have to just let the fires burn, you know, and then you have your entire team write down the things that they struggled at while you were out. And then you learn to train them on those things. And so over time, you can take like, I'm literally live in Denver, my business is, are running and you know, I'm. I 100% get the gift to, to grow my business now and like, not be working inside my business. But it was very hard for me to give up things. So, like, I'm, I'm not preaching from, like, this is my belief system. Twelve years ago, like, I had to teach myself that I had to give up things and I had to trust in employees. And, you know, I could talk a lot about people. I think the most important thing that you invest in other than yourself is your people. You know, pay them well, pay them what they're worth, because those people are why you're great and why your company succeeds. And if you train them right and you make the environment fun and you understand what they want and what their needs are, like, literally, like, you will have loyal employees. I, like, I have one of my first employees that I ever hired. She's still with me. She's going on 11 years and like, she's gone through a lot. But like, I, I owe so much to her. Like, she has gone through a lot. She had to put up with me first off. But number two is like, you know, she, like, that's what built like that's why we're successful as business owners is you have to like, as much as there's so many people that want to build a business and just say, I just want to be my own. I don't want employees. They're. They're a headache. You're not going to grow as big as you want to, and you're going to have more headaches at the end because your profit's never going to be what you want it to be until you start hiring people.

So what have you done to really identify the people that you want to bring onto your team to make sure that they're that strong fit?

I think you got to know what you want, number one. But, like, getting good people is just like running ads. You know, running ads to get leads. You run ads to attract really good people. And so I think you have to have, number one, a business that's attract. That will attract people, number one. It has to be the right fit for both of you. But, like, you have to understand what they want and what their needs are. Most people's needs is not just money. Like, yeah, they want to be financially stable and they want to make a, you know, they. They want to make a good living, but, like, what is important to them? You know, like, what. What are the key factors that are going to keep them around for a long time? And so I think that we've done a really good job investing in understanding what our employees needs are so that they don't feel like they're just working for another company. I lost some people just because I had an anger issue or a temper issue, or I let things bother me and I get, like, take things personal and all these things. And so, you know, one of my biggest, you know, one of, like, aha moments is like, a year into hiring, it's like, I realized, like, am I really, like, am I chasing the money? Because if that's what I'm. I'm never going to be happy at this.

But when you stopped focusing on the money and you started focusing on the experience of the employees and the clients, then what happened with the money?

The money went way up, right? Like, because it's like, you start getting to get more things done. You start to get more salespeople to work for you get more customer service reps that enjoy what they do. You get to start to, like, these plates that you're holding up in the air. You're frustrated. You're frustrated because you're not making a lot of money and you're doing everything. And then when somebody makes a mistake, you're frustrated, right? So I shifted that from saying, like, how do I get rid of some of these plates that are in my hands? And look, how do I actually transfer that? So literally, after hiring a salesperson, the next person I hired was a customer service rep who was awesome, who ended up being one of my top leaders for a very, very long time. She eventually wanted to go to school, but she literally, like, she created the experience that employees really wanted to come work here. They treat it like it's their own business. And you know, that just. That takes work, but it's so. It's so important to establishing growth within your business.

And it's actually the fun part.

It is so fun.

It's good advice. Okay, let's switch gears now. I'm going to ask you some rapid questions. Answer with the first thing that pops into your head. Okay, what's your business?

Superpower customer service.

What's your business? Kryptonite. Meaning the area you had to work the hardest to improve.

Processes.

What does business ownership mean to you?

Freedom.

What drives and motivates you?

My kids and my wife.

What's your definition of success?

Being able to spend time with more people.

Okay, do you have any other advice for someone just starting out with a credit repair business?

Go all in.

I like that. And what's next for you? What's the next big goal you're working towards?

Oh, an extension to our services was to help people while they're in services, understand their money, understand how to budget and do things, and do it in a fun way. Nobody loves the budget. You know, if you listen to Dave Ramsey, he's going to tell you just like, cut it all off. And I think that that's an amazing advice for some. But a lot of people, like, they need to be taught and they need to be told what to do. And so we've been able to infuse financial literacy into our process. And I think that that's like, it's a game changer because number one, it's an additional revenue source, which is always awesome. But it also actually goes hand in hand with credit repair. Like, literally, like most of the advice you're giving somebody is pay down balances and stuff like that. And like, they have to do that to better their financial structure anyways and be able to like, learn how to budget. And so when you can do both, you're solving two problems at once. And then churn, man. Like, although we're a flat fee service, we don't really have to deal with a lot of churn. But for those that are like monthly payment services, like when you have a huge added value, you don't have to like go in and build a platform, but like start to infuse financial literacy in your conversations and talk about where they are financially in budgeting. And just add one little piece this week and then a few weeks later add another piece. And what you'll start to find is you'll start to build, develop a kind of a system that is aligned with credit repair, that helps them better understand their money. Because, like telling them to pay off their credit cards and it just be like credit centric, they just don't understand that. But if they can see the value of both sides of it, because most people just don't know where their money is, man. It's not that they, maybe they don't make as much money as they'd like to.

Great.

A lot of people don't know where their money is. And so when you can solve both those problems, you're going to have clients that will stay on your program forever or as long as they need, especially if you're billing them monthly and they're just going to be happier clients because then the focus isn't just credit repair. And when you can take the focus off just like getting better credit scores and they're like, wow, I solved two problems. It's awesome. And what we did in the very beginning that was really, really beneficial for us is we just offered that as a free service and then upgraded eventually to selling it to our clients. And that free service allowed us to perfect the process. But also it's like people were leaving, like, oh my God. Like I came in what you guys brought in a whole different product that I wasn't aware that I wasn't even thinking that you guys were going to do. And it's been very, very helpful. So we got a lot of positive feedback. But that's important, especially with, you know, all the regulations in our industry to be able to just like have, you know, you. We were all went to the same event and one of the attorneys said is like, when the CFPB is coming after companies, they're coming after the people with the most bad complaints. And so if you can get less complaints and better reviews and focus on that because you have a great clients, have great experience and you have an amazing process, it, it, it's going to take away a lot of the stress that you may have, especially when you get a new post about the CFPB is doing this or going after can literally like, it can give you peace of mind that like the chances of them coming after you is a lot less because you're taking care of clients.

That was a mic drop. That was amazing.

Yeah, it was awesome.

Joe, how can people find you and reach out to you, man?

I'm not a big on social media, but like you can find me on Facebook, have questions and you want to reach out. I'd be happy to help and, and, and do anything I can to help you with anything.

That's awesome. And your business, Facebook is extreme. Credit repair.

Yes. Yeah.

Okay, awesome. And Your website is asapcreditrepairusa.com yes, sir. And we'll put those links down in the show notes as well. Joe, I want to thank you so much for your time today. This was a lot of fun. It was amazing.

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