How Michael Franks Built a Credit Repair Empire with Just One Viral Post

Hey, credit heroes. Want to know the secret to changing thousands of lives? Well, today I'm joined by Michael Franks, the CEO of Cupid's Lounge, and he's going to share how he built his very, very successful credit repair business. So you better stick around.

So the big question is this. How can we take our passion for helping people with their credit and turn it into a successful business without taking loans, without spending a fortune by bootstrapping it from nothing so we can help the people and still become highly profitable? That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answer. My name is Daniel Rosen, and welcome to Credit Repair Business Secrets.

Our most successful credit heroes, the ones who make a great living and make a massive impact, they all have one thing in common. They all care about changing lives. Michael Franks is a credit repair expert with a passion for financial education and. And motivating everyone around him. He's changed the lives of over 10,000 clients in just two years. He's an awesome guest, and I know you are going to love this interview. So let's welcome to the show Michael Franks. Hey, Michael. Welcome, and thank you for not calling me sir anymore.

I apologize in advance. My mother has passed for. She found me. If she heard me call somebody, anything other than sir or ma', am, she would haunt me. So.

And you're now in Atlanta?

Yes.

Now, earlier, before I jumped on, you were talking to Keenan. You said people call you Cupid. Why is that?

My favorite song when I was 16 was Cupid, and I played it everywhere, and I had a. I had a Chevy Crown Vic, and I still played Cupid. Like, we was listening to no Limit or any. Anything but, you know, heavy bass back then. I just played Cupid everywhere, and everyone just started calling me Cupid.

Oh, that's so funny. And what was your life like before Credit Repair?

I worked for Verizon. I was accountant, a district account manager. I traveled from store to store making sure that everyone was ready for the new products and the new plans and, you know, keeping them on their toes.

What made you go from that to Credit Repair? Did. Did you have credit issues at one point in time?

I did. My best friend has always owned a credit repair business since, oh, five. So I kind of always dibbled and dabbled in it with him, and I brought clients over to him. And then I just began teaching people. As you know, I began to clean my credit, I began teaching, I made Facebook posts, and then I had, like, 150,000 shares on the post one day, and he was like, you might as well Go ahead and make it a business. And then so for the last three years, it's been my full time business now.

Wow. Have you been entrepreneurial ever also in your life or is this, is this the first time being entrepreneurial?

No, I've owned multiple businesses now. Everything, of course is I, this is Cupid's Lounge. I own Cupid's Cards Lounge, which you can see all the sports stuff everywhere that you look. I own a sports memorabilia store, own Cupid's Hawaiian Ice. So everything is Cupid and then whatever business that I own. And then I also make posts on TikTok and Facebook all the time. Send me your business plans and I invest in other people's business.

You started making videos, teaching about credit and credit repair. Cause you had been, had this connection with your friend who had the credit repair business. And then you started getting tons of views and decided to turn it into a business. How did you first start to turn it into a business?

I don't think it's still a business, technically a business. I did go to license, I did go get everything that I'm supposed to have. So I guess technically the business. But I don't, I don't carry myself as a business. I carry myself as an individual who actually helps people, you know, fix their lives and better themselves.

Did the first clients come from Those videos?

Almost 90% of my clients come from Facebook. So it started with just my friends. Since I've, I've been in the music business also, like wrote my first song and went on the top 40 charts in 2009 and I got signed and you know, things like that. So I kind of, kind of, you know, a lot of followers from that on Facebook. And they just, you know, it's just people that know me personally and trust me. So they was like, okay, we'll do this. And they was like, well, we don't really want to do it. Why can't we just pay you to do it? And I was like, cool, okay, I'll do it. And then that's how I started.

That's amazing. And then how did you start to scale it up? Because you have a lot of clients today. In fact, how many clients do you have today?

3,100 current.

That's a lot of clients. That is amazing.

I just make two or three posts on Facebook a week and that gets me enough business to, to pay me and my five other employees every week to keep us busy.

That's awesome. So you got, you got a team of five or you got a team of six? Including you, the team.

I'm five.

How long were you a one man band?

When I went full time like this, not even a month. Because like I said that, that, that post that blew up where I began to charge people. My son started helping me immediately and then I, that's what I learned of you guys. And then because I had probably 500 people and I was doing everything manually and if you was like no repair cloud, oh, it was rough. I had, I had two employees from the Philippines and they was doing everything for me and we got credit. Repair cloud made life a billion times better.

Oh, that'd be pretty rough to do everything manually.

Reading reports and having people send you their reports. At first, but then again I was new. I didn't know. And then my friend, he had his own software and I just never, I was like, yeah, I don't want to really want to use that because it looked difficult. And I wanted to be more in touch, more in tune. But as I grew, it was impossible to sit there and go line by line somebody. But now even it's still line by line. Technically the same exact thing with you guys. The way that you guys have everything set up, I can just go through there and bam. Everything is right there in front of you.

Sure. It tells you what the issues are.

It saves me paper. I got a print. No more. I think the staying up to two or three o'clock in the morning, that's what I don't miss on anything. So shipping letters out, you do a.

Few things differently that I think are really, really interesting that really set you apart from others in the industry. Like you offer a free package for clients. Right?

Because I couldn't afford credit repair. And they pay you guys the 1999 and then I don't charge them, but they got to mail their own letters. I email them and then they got to, you know, send their own letters. Now 75% of the time they do end up going to tier two because they find out that hey, this is not easy. I got to go to work, I got to mail these off. But I still, I gained a lot of people. I think I went free for the first time Black Friday last year and I signed up 2,100 people in 24 hours.

Wow, that's amazing.

It was amazing, but it was rough. That was not signing up that many people to credit hero score and the amount of time a lot of people signed up, they didn't finish signing up. We couldn't get in contact with them. They didn't fill out the form Correctly. They didn't leave an email or phone number. But I think out of those over 2,000 people, I think it was probably about 60, 65% we got completed and into the system.

And then you find many of them that are do it yourself. Get started to get frustrated by the process or by the stall letters and. And then they upgrade to a paid account.

It is very frustrating and especially with the star letters. I found a way now that I don't get star letters anymore. They have stopped and they send one client got one the other day from experience and I told her go to the courthouse. And we filed with cfpb, went to the courthouse and well, we'll hear from experian, hopefully within 14 days.

That's amazing. What's your secret? Just between you and me, what's your secret for not having stall letters?

I let them know up front that if you send me a stall letter, I'm going to sue you.

Oh, wow.

That's the very first line in the letter. Every letter I send. Now if you send me a computer generated letter just like you, just like the letter that you had, the reply, the reply to credit acquisition, I put that in the first letter.

Now that is amazing. So they take it seriously.

Yeah. Especially when I pay for shipping, that that cuts my bottom line out. When you pay me your fee, that shipping comes out of my fee. So if I'm sending 100 style response letters every week of what a $13 per letter, that's $113 a week, that's $500 a month. So I think my money, I love it.

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

We're not all scammers.

Yeah.

I think that's why I don't go to TikTok very often. As much as I love TikTok and I've had videos with 250,000 views on there, I don't want to come off as just another scammer. Is disappointing that that is in, you know, our area of expertise, but it's there. And you know, you can check my name anywhere and you can go down my Facebook page anywhere and you'll never see my name and scamming in the same sentence.

How you got so many clients, you have not a whole lot of presence online. How do you get thousands of clients? What's your secret?

I'm honest and I don't. I don't market. I've never posted a flyer. I've never posted a commercial. My make my Posts and I, I've treated people so well. I've sold so many houses, I've gotten people so many vehicles. I've gotten people so many credit cards, changed their lives. There's family lives that they go and tell other people about me and then they go to my Facebook page, they follow me for. I've had people say, hey, I followed you for a year. I think I can trust you. I've had this so and so, take my money, I want to go with you. And then six months later when their scores in the 700s, they say thank you. And then they tell somebody else. If scammers only knew the amount of money that you can make when you treat somebody right will far outweigh what you've done by scamming one person.

Are you doing anything to prompt people to refer their friends?

I have my referral program starting January 2nd. I also, I own a tax business. I invested into a friend's tax business and I fix your credit for free. If you file your taxes through me.

That's really clever.

If you go through them other tax businesses, then whatever you have to pay to get your credit repair fixed, it comes out of your taxes.

Can you tell us more about the specifics of, of disputing late payments?

Well, when I do the, the US code 166B, the first letter that I sent us to the credit bureaus, if I don't get the response that I want, I send it directly to the lender and from there, if that does, if I don't get a response from that, I'm going to send you, I'm going to find you on LinkedIn and we're going to send it to you on LinkedIn. Either way, we're going to get it to you. If we don't get the desired result that we have, if you cannot prove to me that you sent something to my client within 21 days and notifying them that she's going to put this on their credit report, we'll see in court.

Amazing. And then are you teaming up with attorneys as well?

I pretty much learned to do everything myself. I've learned from Mike Watts out of Alabama, huge consumer law attorney and I've watched by a thousand hours of his videos on YouTube Learning the laws the way I could do it myself. At first I was actually going through him and then he introduced me to a lawyer in Tennessee because my business is actually based out of Memphis because I lived, I just moved to Atlanta six months ago and you know, just learning from him and they was they was willing to teach me anything that I asked. I pretty much do everything myself now.

Amazing. Have you actually taken any of these people to court?

They never go to court. They always go to. We always go to arbitration and they pay before we even go to court. I've never went to court. Not one time. Arbitration every time.

And have you gotten your clients cash settlements?

Actually? Oh yeah, hundreds.

What would be the range that gets paid out in these settlements?

Well, the minimum is always around 750 to 1000. Most of the time that's from the collection agencies if we, if we don't get to respond to them. But we've never really gotten to that point where the 166B law. We haven't gotten to that point where we've actually had to file charge. We, we went to the CFPB route. Now when we go that route and we threaten the lawsuit through them, nine times out of 10 is coming off at that point. But for the collection agencies, yeah, hundreds of out of, out of court settlements.

That's really amazing.

It was your show that made me step it up, I believe. Vance.

Oh yeah, Vance Dodson.

Yeah. So yeah, I actually, I actually, I learned from him. I bought his program. I learned more. I learned the laws over the fdcpa. So I learned all that. I read it and I soaked up the knowledge. And then there was others who own. I do watch the TikTok videos. I try to, you know, say, hey, this isn't real. This is okay, we can actually do this. And then once we send those letters out certified, we either want our desired results or we're going to see at the arbitration table.

Can you share a time when a business strategy of yours failed and how you pivoted to overcome it?

Now with credit repair, opened a cell phone business. And two, when I, when I left Verizon, opened up my own cell phone business and it did not work because that was around the time that they started bricking cell phones, the iPhones and things like that. So it was called Cupid's Priority Mobile. And then we was going through one of the businesses where you buy here pay later programs, but they started bricking phones. So the phones that I was buying on ebay and different things like that, people would bring me phones off of the street. They were no good, no more. So I failed at that.

What methods do you use to keep your clients engaged and committed throughout the credit repair process?

I call them and text them every month. Me or one of somebody from my team. And if you're on tier Two, you get that phone call. If you're on tier one, you do you get a. The summary that you guys have when we update. They do get that, and they do get the email. You're allowed to email me and things like that. You are allowed to set an appointment for $25 unless you're on. Like I said, if you're on tier two, then we automatically text you and say, hey, this is what we need this month. What have you received in the mail? And, you know, we just. I do Facebook lives to answer questions and things like that. And, you know, keep them engaged, keep it fun, especially with the teenagers. They love it.

To have worked with as many clients as you have and to have as many referrals as you have, clearly you're doing the right things. It's really, really amazing. Speaking of all your clients, can you share one of your most impactful stories of a client whose life was changed by your service last week?

I do coat drives every December, and a lady, she messaged me last week and said she got her house after I fixed her credit, and she said, you know, you gave my kids coats two years ago, and I told you I would pay it forward. And then when she got that house last week, she said she's going to have a coach drive to pay it forward. So that's probably the newest one.

That's really, really cool. And I also heard that you sold over a hundred houses. Are you also a realtor?

I'm not. I'm an investor. Oh. So if I have a house that I let a client know that, hey, I have this house, once we get done, if it's still available. I work with realtors. I know brokers. I work with many brokers all over America. So if, if, if it comes up, they need a house, then, you know, we can go find the house. I'll. I'll buy the house and then flip it over to my client.

I see you use the phrase help somebody today. You use that a lot in your social media. What does that mean to you and how has this helped you and your business?

I've been doing that on social media since my space. You know, I always put on there, hey, help someone today. I get that from my mom, you know, just. Just growing up, watching how she used to help people. She used to pass out commodities every day. I don't know, the, the, the peanut butter in the. The white jars, the commodity cheese at the. The white package, and, you know, the, the corn flakes with the white boxes. I've always watched my mom do that. And I get that from her. And I just. I've always had, you know, help someone today and, you know, just spread joy.

To everyone and then it comes back.

To you every time.

Yeah. Most of the social media you're doing is on Facebook then, right?

Yes.

Is that driving most of your business?

90% of my business for now. But I am going to TikTok. I've already filmed commercials. The people that I know in the music industry film commercials with them. My first teenage class of 2024, I'm going to have two. I'm going to start bringing in special special guests. Can't say the special guest right now because I have not put it on my Facebook or anything yet. But they are. One had a number one rap album this year, and the lady that's going to be in the group, she had the number one rap single last year.

Wow, that's incredible. And this is a credit class that you put on for teens?

Yes.

That's super cool. Do they join it by zoom or is it in person?

Everything is by zoom. Yes.

What has the impact been. Have you been doing these regularly?

I started them back last month. I quit for a while during the summertime because I got burned out. I'm not going to lie to you. I got burned out doing everything every day. I took some time off. I let my employees basically update who I currently have, and I was like, man, I just need some time off just to get back into the swing of things. I came back, I was like, okay, let's get these teen classes going back. This. You know, I got a. I've been locked up before. I am a convicted felon. So now we're going to start going to jails and things like that and starting a free program for inmates. So I am working on nonprofit for that, so the nonprofit can pay for their credit monitoring. And then when they get out, they can have a leg to stand on.

Wow, that's really, really cool. What's one piece of advice that you'd give to someone who wants to start their own credit repair business?

Wow. Make mistakes and learn from them. Sell your mistakes, don't sell the program. I've learned the hard way that way is that when. When I want somebody's service, I ask them, what mistakes have you made or what have you learned from them? You know, it's because I don't want to make the same mistakes. I feel that especially in credit repair, you'll watch a YouTube video and then five minutes later you're a credit repair expert. These Laws are no joke. The government, the way that they're, they're, they're cramping down on a lot of this fraud. You had to be prepared. You have to know these laws, and you have to know how to reply to certain things that the credit. Credit bureaus respond with or license, Nexus, LCI or any of them like that.

And of all the credit repair strategies you've learned, which one was the game changer? Or what are a couple key strategies that have been most effective for you in disputing items?

I would have to say US code 166B, disputing late payments. Once I learned that, you know, I used to ask. I used to seek validation. And then at first, that worked years ago, seeking validation. But then, you know, when Covid really, really happened, it's like those validation letters just stopped. And then you had to start using real codes, you know, either US code 1681 or, you know, the right to privacy, things like that. So. And learn those codes and know them like the backyard, because people are going to ask you about what code do you use? So, you know, learn them. Read. Read the fcra. Read it every week. Learn it.

Amazing. And what are your next big goals for your business?

2024. We're going to expand. I said, so the commercials. I'm. I'm building a movie studio in Atlanta.

Wow.

So I. I have my own studio to film the commercials. We start filming my first movie 22nd of next month. In those movies, there's going to be hidden commercials for my business in there. So. And then the celebrities that I know, you know, they're going to be posting. I'm going to do post. I can say. I can't say. I'm going to post. On Shade room, they've got 40 million followers. But the celebrities and stuff like that. We'll wait until announce everything next month.

That's really super cool. I love that. Okay, well, we're going to wrap up soon, so I want to switch gears and ask you a few rapid questions. So answer with the first word or phrase that pops in your head. Okay? Okay. What's your business? Superpower?

Learning.

What's your business? Kryptonite. The area that gives you the most trouble.

Clients that don't read.

What does business ownership mean to you?

Freedom.

What drives and motivates you, my son? What's your definition of success?

Happiness.

Awesome. And if you could go back in time and give yourself one piece of advice, what would it be?

Everything's going to be okay.

I love that. Well, Michael, I Want to thank you so much for your time today. This was a lot of fun.

Thank you for having me, sir. Throw another one in there for you.

That makes me feel so old, but I wish you continued success. You're doing awesome. Thank you again for your time and for everyone out there. If you're finding value in the things that I share on this podcast, click below to subscribe and follow. Also, give me a five star review or share the show and help me to change more lives. If you have a question or a comment, drop it down below because I read each and every one of them. I would love to hear from you and I'll respond as soon as I can. If you want to learn more about growing a credit repair business, check out my podcast or on how to find quality credit repair leads that actually convert. And if you'd like to get certified in disputing and gain confidence and grow your very own credit repair business, check out our Credit Hero Challenge. Doors are closing soon, so sign up right now@creditherochallenge.com and keep changing lives.

Hey everybody, it's Daniel again and really quick. I'd like to invite you to join what I believe is the best thing we have ever created inside the credit repair cloud community. And it is a challenge that we call the Credit Hero Challenge. If you're just planning out your business or you're just getting it started and you dream of having a successful business of your own so you can quit your 9 to 5 and fire your boss and have financial freedom or so you can add another revenue stream to your existing business. If that's your dream, you need to get into this challenge. We created this challenge to help you to create and launch your very own credit repair business to build a proper foundation for a really successful business. This challenge is going to help you to understand the strategy, the tactics and all the things you need to be successful at credit repair. It really is the greatest thing we have ever built and it will change your life. So I recommend you do it right now. Stop everything. Pause this audio, go online and go to creditherochallenge.com that's creditherochallenge.com and join the next challenge. And there's a challenge that's starting in just a few days. So go get started right now@creditherochallenge.com.