How To Grow Your Credit Repair Business with Outsourcing - Bruce Politano

No matter where you are in this business, you are going to get so much from our special guest today. He's going to show you how you can start your business easier by using outsourcing. Then he's going to show you how to grow your business faster by working with affiliates. And then he's going to show you how to make an additional revenue by helping your clients with their student loans. This is a show you're not going to want to miss, so start that music.

So the big question is, 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 most 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.

Hey, credit heroes. I am so excited for our guest today. He's been in the credit repair industry since 2012. He is the author of the book Understanding Credit Repair and the World Around It. And he started and grew a successful credit repair business from nothing. And he eventually sold that business so he could focus on launching a brand new business, Student loan relief. But his passion for credit repair is so great that he couldn't stay away. So after selling that first business, he started another credit repair business again from scratch. And on top of that, he also does outsourcing to help other credit repair business owners with their daily operations and their processing. So please welcome to the podcast Barousse Politano. Hey, Bruce. Welcome.

Hello.

I'm so excited you're here.

I'm excited.

I got your book. It's awesome. You guys out there. I recommend getting this. It's on Amazon. It's really, really. What I love about it is you make everything so simple and clear.

I tried. I tried my best.

Yeah. So congratulations on that. That's brand new, right?

Yeah, it's been maybe about a year. I just never really marketed yet. Cool.

Well, I'm glad I got it. So let's dive in. I want to know everything about you, but first of all, I want to know what were you doing before credit repair and what led you into it?

Yeah, that's a great question. I used to work for a debt relief company. What they used to do was they would litigate time, bar debt, and help their clients, you know, get out of their unsecured debt obligations. It was pretty decent. When I started working there, I was one of four employees. When I left, I was one of 400.

Wow.

And this was within about a year and a half. So they grew very fast. And my role there was to hire and train everyone that came through the company. And part of the services wasn't only the debt relief. They also provided credit repair services to their clients. The reason I left is they got greedy and they just started charging their clients, not providing the service. And my role there was to hire and train people how to do that. So I got to a point where I couldn't sleep at night. So. So I quit. I had no plan B. I quit. And I was like, credit repair sounds pretty awesome. I love doing it. I love teaching it. So let me start my own business. And that's how I got started.

Wow, that's amazing. That was quite a leap. So how did you get that started on your own? How'd you get your first clients? How did that work?

Yeah, so I had a lot of friends who were real estate agents. And I just started tapping into that market. You know, as I started my credit repair company, obviously, first thing I found was credit repair cloud back in. It was. I think you had just moved on from credit aid, I believe, 2013. Yeah, exactly. So I got a credit repair cloud account and, you know, dive, then saw the letters and started getting my clients by affiliates. And to this day, I never stopped. That's the only way that we get our clients is referral from affiliates.

So you're not doing any traditional advertising of any kind?

No, and I believe I'm leaving money on the table by doing that. Right. I mean, everyone is online, and I haven't tapped into that market. Cause we were just so busy with all of our affiliates.

Well, I think affiliates is really the way to go if you can build those relationships. Tell me, how do you build those relationships? What kind of people, first of all, are your affiliates? And tell us about them.

Yep. So all of our affiliates, I don't want to say all, but I would say 99% of them are mortgage professionals, either real estate agents or loan officers. And honestly, I go after the real estate agents to get to their loan officers. At the end of the day, the loan officer is the one that's looking at the credit and saying no. They just pass that message on to the real estate agent and the client. So when I meet with real estate agents, it's with the end goal of getting an introduction to their loan officer. And what we normally do to get affiliates. Permit me to talk about that is we walk into an office. We'll walk into a real estate office and just pretty much tell them exactly what we do and why we do it and how I can help them. And if they say yes, great. And if they say no, great. I'll move on to the next office. So that's kind of like how I started it back in 2012, 2013. Nowadays, we've kind of perfected that a little bit. We've become a little more organized. I'm not just randomly walking into people's offices anymore. We try to have appointments made and things like that.

But what do you tell them during that pitch? What do you tell them that you can do for their business?

Oh, it's a very easy, very simple pitch. Right. It'll sound something like this. Hey, Daniel, my name is Bruce. I own a credit repair company here in Long Beach, California. Wherever city it is that you're located at. Right. And we have a lot of clients that come into our program with an end goal of purchasing a home. And a lot of our clients aren't working with a mortgage professional. I saw you online. I see you have some great reviews. So I wanted to stop by or see if I can schedule time to speak with you to see if you'd be a good fit for me to refer my clients to that need someone to work with. That's the pitch. They almost feel like they're auditioning or interviewing for my referrals.

Absolutely. And they'd be missing out if they didn't take you up on this.

Correct. And then when we have that meeting, I always tell them, one hand washes the other. Right. Daniel, if you happen to run across a client, which I'm sure you do, that you cannot help at the time because of a credit criteria, please refer them over to us and we'll do our job. We'll help them fix their credit, and we'll refer them right back to you. And now you have a pipeline that's going to be growing, that's going to be adding to your bottom line. I know you can see how that can benefit your business.

And then after you help the people with their credit, you send them back to them, right?

Always. Yes.

So this has got to be having a major increase in their revenue, right?

Always. Yeah. Yeah. And what we do with them is when it's a new affiliate, we tell them, Daniel, the first two clients they send over to us, we'll do them for free. We won't charge your clients a penny. We want to show you the quality of our work so you can feel confident in referring your clients over to us. And what we get out of that, Daniel, is That once they refer the first two clients, now they know how to refer the client. And once they get the third client, they're not gonna stop. They're just gonna refer the third and fourth. And that's how we've done it.

Wow, that is so smart. I love that. How many affiliates do you have at the moment?

I think we're probably around close to 250.

Wow, that is awesome. And how do you keep them happy and how do you keep that relationship going?

So there's one person in my company, their position is our affiliate manager. That's all he does, all 40 hours a week is he spends about 70% of his week visiting with our current affiliates. Right. Just stopping by, saying hello, taking them out to lunch to make sure that our relationship stays active. And 30% of his time is getting new affiliates. So we got to a point where we can't just have someone sign on and send one client. We got to stay in front of them over and over again to keep them, you know, happy.

Sure makes a lot of sense now. So you started a credit repair business from nothing in 2012, and then you grew it and you learned all the parts. What led you to selling it?

So my old business partner and I, he used to own the student loan company, and he had a small credit repair company. I had a big credit repair company and just started a small student loan company. So when we partnered up, we kind of joined forces, right? I brought my big credit repair company, he brought his big student loan company, and we joined forces. And it got to a point where the partnership just ended. And part of that the agreement was he was going to keep the credit repair company and I was going to keep the student loan company. So I started focusing my time on the student loan business because we were getting a lot, I mean, a ton of new student loan clients. And what I mean by student loan clients are, you know, people who needed help managing their student loan debt. Right. The same affiliates that referred credit repair clients to us. Referred student loan clients to us. People don't qualify for a mortgage because their debt to income ratio is too high because of their student loan debt or because they're loans are in default. So I decided to focus my time on that more than so the credit repair company, because I was already big, that was established, and the student loan company was more of a project than I wanted to take on at the time.

Well, so what has that project turned into? Can you tell us about that service?

Yeah. So the service that we offer is we help the clients consolidate their student loan debt, which in essence helps them lower their monthly payments, lower their interest rates. We enroll them into different forgiveness programs that they may qualify for income driven repayment plans where they can qualify for payments as low as $0 a month on our student loan debt. And most importantly, help them getting their loans out of default. You know, they go nine months without making a payment, their loan goes into default. Now they run the risk of getting their wages garnished and their income tax refund offset. So we help them get the loans out of default so that they can be on time with the payment that they could afford.

Wow, that is super cool. And then you've also turned this into something that can help other credit repair businesses, right?

Yeah. So we were, we used to have an affiliate program where credit repair businesses refer their clients over to, to us and we would pay them $100. Right. For every referral of a client that needed help with their student loans. And we got flooded. I mean there were hundreds of credit repair companies referring business, more than we could handle. So I'm sure you've heard the saying, you know, feed a man a fish, you feed them for a day, teach them how to fish, feed them for a lifetime. I taught them how to fish. I created a course that teaches them A to Z, exactly what all the services are, how they work, how to perform so that they don't need to refer the client to me. They can just do it themselves in house. So that was a business that we created, which is pretty much the course that teaches them how to do everything themselves and add that additional stream of income to their business, which is what I spoke about in the first expo that you guys had me at.

Right, right, right. I remember. What is this course called?

It's a Student Loan Companion.

Student Loan Companion. Okay. And we're going to give all the links at the end for people who are interested. And how has this helped the credit repair businesses that have signed up for this?

I haven't had honestly not one complaint about it. Everyone loves it. And the people who took the course and took action, they've added, you know, six figures to their income. The ones who really took action just by offering these new services. You know, we make money off of credit monitoring. Right. We make money off of the secured credit cards. Why not make money off of our clients who need student loan help as well, Right, Absolutely.

And it's an amazing service for them.

Absolutely is.

Yeah, yeah. Because people come out of school and they're in such debt, it's such a bad system.

It's crazy.

Yeah. Did you experience this yourself?

I did not. I did not go to college. I barely graduated high school.

Well, you're further along than me. I didn't even graduate high school.

But I didn't. And I honestly, my opinion on it is unless you're going to be like a doctor or an attorney or something that need that education, I don't recommend it. My personal opinion, it's not worth the debt.

I actually think learning online, I think this is the new college. I think this is so much better way to learn because you can learn what's really going to apply to you.

Absolutely. Yeah, I agree.

Yeah. So this is so, so cool. Now, at what point did you relaunch your new credit repair business and how's that going?

That was back in the end of 2017, I believe I incorporated again. It was October 2017, kind of finished the year and then hit the ground running in 2018, January. It's going well. But I focused so much on our outsourcing that I kind of lacked my own credit repair company for like to decide like the ugly child. And it's been tough because when I sold the other business, I have a non compete where I can't go after the affiliates that were referring clients to that business. Problem with that is everybody and their mother was referring clients to that business already. So I'm having to go after the new blood, the new loan officers, the new real estate agents that have come into the business since I started my own again. So we're back on that track again of adding the affiliates.

And so at the same time, you're doing all this outsourcing for a whole lot of other credit repair businesses. Can you tell us what outsourcing is?

Yeah. So we pretty much handle the entire dispute process for as of right now, about 60 other credit repair companies and majority of them, I want to say 95% of them are using credit repair cloud, which is great. I mean, I love it. All they do is they add the client into the system, right. Make sure their ID documents are uploaded, make sure their credit monitor information is in there. And we create a custom status in their credit repair cloud called ready for processing. And all they do is change the client status to ready for processing. My team logs in twice a day, once in the morning, once in the afternoon. If there's anyone in the ready for processing status, we're going to import the report, we're going to create the letters, we're going to print them, we're going to mail them out, we're going to change the our status to in dispute, which is another custom status that we create. And 35 days later, we'll update the results.

Wow. So this is a perfect opportunity for somebody who maybe is good at sales and good at being the front person, but doesn't know how to do all the back end processing or doesn't have time. So this gives them an instant way to scale the business. Right.

Even if they do know how to process and they do have the time. I believe as the owner of the company, you shouldn't be licking stamps. You should be running your business. You should be growing your business. The more time you spend folding letters and licking stamps, the less time you're out there growing your business. Right. So either hire staff or outsource the work to someone who you trust that will do Right. By your company, by your clients.

Now, when is the right time for a company to look into outsourcing?

It's really up to the owner, right? I mean, we have companies that are just getting started when they have zero clients or they have 10 clients and we have companies that have, you know, 1500 clients. You know, it really, it's up to the owner of the company. What I recommend is start right away because the hardest part of your business is going from zero to 100 clients. Right. And it's going to take you so much longer to do that. If you're spending majority of your time going to the post office, you should be going to networking events, not the post office.

Absolutely. You should be steering the ship and not down below rowing.

Exactly. Yes. And we also offer backend as well. So the difference about what we do in outsourcing versus other outsourcing companies is we handle customer service, billing and even sales if the company wants us to. So for a monthly fee per client, we'll handle all your customer service and billing. All your inbound calls will be answered by us. The monthly outbound update calls to the clients will be done by us. If the client's payment fails and they need to reschedule, we pretty much can run your business if you really wanted us to.

How cost effective is this?

$1 million. If you're charging 50 bucks a month, not worth it. Right. But if you're in the norm where most companies are around 99 to 149 per month, I believe it's worth it until you grow to the point where you could afford to hire staff in house. Right. And. Or you may not want to hire staff in house because people quit, people will call in sick and you still have those issues, you know what I mean? We charge anywhere from 15 to $20 per client for our services, per month? Per month for the processing, and it's the same for the customer service and billing. Another 15 to $20 per client per month, depending on how many clients they have.

So if someone's charging, let's say in the average of $99, $120 a month, somewhere in there, they're still going to have a pretty big profit margin and.

They'Re pretty much netting everything. Because it's my paper, it's my ink, it's my stamp, it's my staff. Right.

Wow, that seems really amazing.

Yeah, we found a way to make it work.

Wow. And so you're doing this now for 60 companies. That is huge. I didn't realize you had that big an operation. How big a team do you have?

So we have one, two, three. We're eight. Eight people.

Wow. They must be frantically busy all day long.

All day.

But you've been doing this so long you have all your processes down.

Yeah. I mean, if we're not organized and have a system in place, then we fail. Right. So before we added and before we grew, we didn't, you know, figure things out as we went. We kind of figured things out first and then we went.

Makes a lot of sense. Wow. How long did it take to grow to that big of a team and what's that process like?

So we add as we need. Right. I'm structured to be able to handle more business with the staff that I have now so that I don't have to turn business away. So whenever I feel like we're cutting it close, I hire a new staff member. They go through our training and then they hit the ground running and just help with the workload. Wow.

Awesome. What's your big goal for 2020?

My big goal for 2020 is to focus on credit likes, which is my credit repair company. I want to grow that to what my old company was before I sold it. I would really want to focus on Bruce this year.

Yeah, that sounds good. What was it like when you sold the first company? Was it strange then not having that to do every day?

Yeah, it was like breaking up with a long term wife. That was my baby for so many years. And then having to part ways with was bittersweet, you know, but it really freed up my time to focus on the student loan stuff. I'm a big believer if you're going to do something right, you got to give 100% of what you have into that One thing. And what was happening was I was Giving, you know, 60% of myself to that, and that's why it wasn't growing the way I'd like it to.

Got it. And then you missed it, and now you're doing it again.

I couldn't stay away. And that's when I wrote the book. I was like, man, I just got to do something, right? So I wrote the book, and I was like, man, let me just start another company. Why not?

Wow, you really are driven. Now, what's your advice for someone just starting out in credit repair?

Don't give up. Right? Don't give up. I see a lot of people that. Especially because we outsource. Right. So we have companies that start and, you know, they have that fire in their belly, and then they hit a roadblock, and they're like, oh, this is too hard. This is too difficult. And they kind of just go away a little bit. And I almost have. I call them. You know, I speak to them, like, what's going on? I noticed you haven't really picked up. What troubles are you having? And they're like, man, you know, I can't get new clients. My Facebook posts aren't working anymore. So don't give up. You know, just find a different way of doing it. What works for one person isn't going to work for every person. Affiliates may not work for you. Right. You might be a genius online marketer. Then do that. You don't have to do what's working for somebody else. Find what works for you and run with it.

Absolutely. And being an entrepreneur is about solving these kinds of problems. It's about making mistakes and learning from them and. And adjusting. I mean, you've certainly done a lot of that. You started from zero, and now look at everything you're doing. It's amazing.

Thank you. Yeah, I tell everybody, success wouldn't exist if failure also didn't exist. So you're going to fail before you succeed, and it's okay. I tell my team the same thing. It's okay.

That's really good advice. Bruce, I want to thank you so much for being here. I'm so excited for you with everything you're doing. Can you please tell everyone? Well, we know they can get your book on Amazon, right?

Yes, it is on Amazon.

And so they can search your name, Bruce Politano. And it's called Understanding Credit Repair and the world around It. And where can they get information about student loan relief?

So if they want the course, they can just visit studentloancompanion.com the course is on that website. You can purchase it the moment that you buy it. You have access to it right away and you have lifetime access to it. It's a three and a half hour video course of me personally teaching everything there is to know. You get an 82 page training man, which is pretty much the entire video course, but in a written manual format for those who like to read and you know, and lots of extra resources. Sales scripts, customer service scripts, processing flowcharts, whole nine.

Awesome. And for people who want to know more about your outsourcing services, where do they go for that?

They will go to disputesforme.com and four spelled out F O R disputeforme.com disputeforme.com okay.

Awesome. Bruce, I want to thank you for your time. I look forward to seeing you at Credit Repair Expo.

I can't wait.

Yeah, you've been at all of them so far?

Yes, sir.

And hey, what's that experience been like for you?

It's amazing. I mean, Credit Repair Expo is not like any other event. You know, it's fun, it's relaxed and it's full of content. You know, we all go to these events. Whether you've been in the business for a year or a hundred years, you always leave knowing something new. And meeting somebody new. And meeting somebody new is just as important as learning new information.

Absolutely. So you guys out there, I hope this gave you a lot of inspiration out there to go out and keep growing your credit repair business. And I want to thank you again for being here, Bruce.

You're welcome, Daniel. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

I hope to have you back and you guys out there, thanks for listening and I will see you on the next podcast. And until then, keep changing lives.

Want a fast track to creating an amazing business that helps people, changes lives and makes you a great, great living in the process. Then I'd like to invite you to my free online training@creditrepaircloud.com freetraining. In this free training, you will learn how to get clients willing to pay you even if you're just starting out. How to get easy credit repair results without being an expert, and how to get all the clients you'll ever need without paying for advertising. Again, again, this training is absolutely free. Just visit creditrepaircloud.com freetraining.