This past Tuesday marks ten years of our company, Kingston Data & Credit, being in business. We’ve grown from a small one person office in Elmira, Ontario to six branches across Canada and the US. To celebrate, there might have been an ambush/surprise by a number of our team members, which might have involved a pink flamingo costume, a tribute video put together by one of our oldest clients involving disco costumes, and a lot of team members from nearby branch offices dropping in to celebrate.
I might have gotten a bit verklempt, and spent the last few days looking back on the last ten years, which frankly have been a blur. Thinking on it, the thing I am absolutely most proud of is that we are the masters of our own destiny – here’s why.
I have worked at other agencies where their entire revenue stream was based on just two clients (and one got up one day, and decided to let all their contingency agencies go), or one of their clients arbitrarily decided to reduce their contingency rate with no notice, or staff felt no loyalty to the company because the owners treated them like an expendable resource.
When we started this company, we were determined to not be like other collection agencies, to treat our clients as equal partners, be as transparent as possible, engage in social media (where agencies are hated), and treat every single one of our team members as part of the management team, and I think we have mostly succeeded. We haven’t compromised on our ethical standards, we have pushed back when clients have asked for just a little too much, and we’ve hired people who are pushy, vibrant, and aren’t afraid to say what’s on their mind.
This blog isn’t an ego trip – I'm certain everyone reading this, regardless of where they work, would want the same thing. Who wants to work where their voice isn’t heard? Who wants to be taken for granted by clients that think one collection agency is just like another?
We’ve done some pretty daring things – some big, some small. Cartoon advertisements, sharing what everyone makes with everyone in the company, writing blogs where we call out outdated or foolish behaviour from our industry, letting clients go when it was obvious they wanted ‘leg-breaker’ tactics. Any one of those decisions could have been a bad one. We’re incredibly lucky to have hired the people we have who have been with us many years and have no intention of leaving, and having those who work with us stick with us through all the rollercoaster events thrown at us, and we are also incredibly fortunate to have clients that have faith in us and allow us to speak up and be part of their process.
A lot of companies don’t make it to ten years. Random things happen, mistakes are made, wrong people are hired, pandemics come along and wipe out your clients. I've noticed that a lot of collection agencies have closed their doors over the last couple years, and I’m grateful we made some good decisions along the way that sometimes were accidental. But sometimes, those decisions were meaningful.
A while ago, we had an opportunity – a big client, that would have added $50,000-$60,000 a month to our revenue stream. We had agreed to work together, and we just had to do the compliance audit – and the compliance team came in with their clipboards, surveyed our office, and tisk tisked over their checklists. We didn’t have little lockers to have our staff lock up their cell phones when they came into work. We could have compromised our principles for money, changed our environment and implied to our staff we didn’t trust them any more, and added to our bottom line. We didn’t even agonize over the decision and told the client we weren’t interested in working with them. The client ran into me in person later, shocked we would turn them down – I explained that we had ample business, and our culture was more important than any contract, and I valued their trust and partnership over any amount of money. It’s one of my favourite moments of my ten years in business, because I got to choose for myself and my team, and make us the masters of our own destiny, the captains of our own ship.
But, on the other hand, that’s how you get a culture where a team member in a pink flamingo costume ambushes you as you come into the office.
Want to have a conversation about being the master of your own destiny and setting your agency apart from the cookie cutter competition? Always happy to chat.
Thanks kindly,
Blair DeMarco-Wettlaufer
KINGSTON Data & Credit
Cambridge, Ontario
226-946-1730
blair@receivableaccounts.com
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