I’d say I’m personally
friends with at least four other collection agency owners or agency CEOs, and
acquaintances with at least a dozen more.
Some of them call me for advice, and sometimes I call them for advice. We talk about legislation changes, our processes,
and use each other as sounding boards.
Just because we
are competitors, doesn’t mean we can’t help each other.
A couple months
ago, an agency CEO and I compared our initial collection letters – we both said ‘Oh
my god, that’s awful’ to each other – and then took the best of each other’s notices
and added them to our templates. I added an SMS option to
text ‘PAY’ to us if a consumer got the letter and wanted to pay, and I thought
it would never work – in the last two months, 73 people have texted ‘PAY’ to
our office, and of those 46 have made a payment. I would have never thought to do that, cost
my competitor nothing to share it with me, and nothing to implement.
Years ago, a competitor
was complaining about how much he paid for his new phone system at a conference
dinner. I gave him a business card with
a website to download a free Asterisk PBX architecture and told him how he
could build his own phone system in house, manage recorded calls, and use it as
a predictive dialer (if he wanted, I don’t believe in dialers), for about 10%
of his cost. Didn’t hurt me to share the
information.
Another time, talking
to another agency owner at an RMA conference we shared that we were both frustrated
with a regulator not returning our annual agency license renewal – it was late,
expired, and no one had heard anything.
We grabbed a few more agency owners at the conference and found out that
none of us had gotten our renewals. We
walked over to the RMA lobbyist, and he made a call to the government official
overseeing that department – before we left the conference we all had our
license renewals.
Going back even
further, to when I had a pony tail (and hair!) a client asked me to help a competing
agency read a mainframe tape with listing data.
I drove to their high rise office in Toronto, sidelined their Microsoft
certified IT guy, and showed them how to decrypt the data with a macro and a
shareware program. I’d say I am friends and
have shared information with those execs to this day, almost 30 years later.
It can be a bit
of an echo chamber running your own company – you and your team are just two inches
away from a problem, and you might not know there’s a better way to do
things. Maybe your ideas should be
challenged. Maybe you should have a beer
with a competitor, and decompress. I
know some agency owners are going to think that’s crazy – but there’s more than
enough business out there for everyone, and we can’t be all things to all
people. In any other industry, there’d
be a sharing of ideas in the tech space, the banking space, and so on.
Collection
agencies used to hoard industry information as a competitive advantage, but now
there’s this new-fangled internet, and everyone can google who the collection
agency is for any client, who their staff members are, what jobs they've posted for hiring, whether they are licensed or SOC-2
certified, or any other information you might want. The days of the Rolodex being company property isn't a thing.
It doesn’t have
to be a tug of war, and holding all our cards secretly to our chest. Sometimes a little good business karma (which I've written about before) goes a
long way.
Want to talk with
a friendly competitor? Drop me a note or
give me a call, happy to share what I know.
Cheers,
Blair
DeMarco-Wettlaufer
KINGSTON Data
& Credit
Cambridge,
Ontario
226-946-1730
bwettlaufer@kingstondc.com
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