NARS 2012

I attended NARS this past week and found it to be very informative, and a great opportunity to meet old and new friends, to do some business, and to stay informed about our industry. I'll be better prepared next year so I can attend more of the discussions as the one's I saw were well organized and informative. Great job by Les and the ARA and the article below by Kevin Armstrong really says it all. See you at NARS 2013! http://blog.cucollector.com/hot-topics/nars-2012-a-huge-success/?utm_source=CU+Collector.com+Subscriber+List&utm_campaign=a0ec5dbbc1-3_30_12_Newsletter&utm_medium=email NARS 2012 A Huge Success! Las Colinas, TX – March 27, 2012 – If you weren’t at this years North American Repossessors Summit (NARS) held at the Omni Mandalay in Dallas, you missed without a doubt, the most important meeting regarding the future of the repossessions industry that’s been held to date. With over 500 Repossession company owners, employees and vendors, this was probably the largest meeting in the industries history. This massive attendance can be largely attributed to the tumultuous times the industry has been going through and this years NARS delivered with some lively and timely debate and conversations from industry leaders addressing many of the important issues facing the industry today. The two day seminar was highlighted by two separate sessions with a panel of industry leaders. Representing their respective associations were Mary Jane Hogan (ARA), George Badeen (AFA), Patrick Altes (TFA), Ed Marcum (RSIG) and Jennifer McDaniels (NFA). They appeared before an energetic audience armed with some pointed questions. The session was moderated by Auto Sales Trade Association leader Jack Tracy, with an open question and answer period on the topics of “Acting on the Challenges of Our Industry – From Talk to Action” on Friday and “What Should You Expect from An Association or Industry Organization?” which was conducted on Saturday. Starting Friday afternoon, after introductions, was the “Technology Innovations and Opportunities” panel that focused on ALPR and remarketing, which featured Zach Hollowell, Business Line Director of OPENLANE, Rick O’Connor, Director of Remarketing of Sales of SMARTAUCTION, Kyle Kolsky, VP Marketing and Brand Management of LEAP Auto Loans, Inc. and Chris Metaxas, CEO of DRN. Each explained their market edge and shared some conflicting views on several points. Zach Hollowell of OPENLANE and Rick O’Connor of SMARTAUCTION disagreed on whether or not online auctions have truly gained acceptance in the industry, while Scott Jackson of MVTRAC spoke of the virtues lenders expanding of ALPR on portfolios before assignment for repossession. Some of the attendees laughed out loud when Chris Metaxas, CEO of DRN apologetically stated “I don’t think we’ve done a very good communicating with our affiliates.” Ed Marcum of RSIG followed by Joe Taylor, VP and Stamatis Ferarolis, President of RISC spoke of the critical contributions their respective companies play in compliance and education play in the industry in their session “RISC/RSIG: Why it’s Critical to Your Business”. There was a private meeting for DRN Members held before finally breaking out for the evenings cocktail party hosted by DRN and finishing for the day. Did you go to NARS? If so, please take this survey If not, Why? Please take this survey On Saturday morning, Keynote speaker Mike Goins, Head of Deficiency Recovery for TD Auto Finance made a presentation to the industry called “Déjà vu, is this the Future?” and presenting “Direct Forwarding and Facilitation Models; Know, Understand. Educate and Adapt” was a panel consisting of Steve Norwood, President & CEO of Consolidated Asset Recovery Systems, Inc.; Scott Jackson, CEO of MVRECOVERY and Debra Durham, owner of Midwest Adjusters, Inc. who discussed the many issues both good and bad about the forwarding industry. A panel of industry professionals like Michael Eusebio, Owner of Digital Dog Auto Recovery and Premier Recovery Service and (CA), Clark Thomas, PHD of Texas Hide and Seek Recovery (TX), Dave Kennedy, owner and CEO of First Credit Resources, Inc. and John Lewis, founder of MasterQueue and Find John Doe provided their views on survivability and profitability in these profit thin times called “Additional Revenue Opportunities”. Each spoke of cross selling opportunities existing in additional services as well as the importance of understanding exactly what it costs to repo a car for agency owners. After a great lunch hosted by OPENLANE, Attorney Michael Dougherty presented, what I felt was one of the more illuminating sessions of the seminar regarding the industries future expectations of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau called, “The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) – Is It a Legal Minefield.” With the rumor of clandestine attendance of one or more persons from this Federal Bureau, it highlighted the important role that this bureau may play in shaping the future of the repossession industry. While largely feared the industry might be regulated or licensed by the bureau, Mr. Dougherty reported that a source close to the CFPB advised him that the focus would be on education, certification and compliance from the industry, which would be enforced through more stringent due diligence requirements placed on the lenders creating a need for the industry to follow suit. Aside from the superior speakers and information provided, the networking and catching up with friends old and new was worth the trip to Texas alone. The 2012 NARS transcended being an association event, it was a true gathering of the industry. While not everyone agrees with each other on exactly how to accomplish it, industry unity is alive and growing. Every year the event gets bigger and every year it continues to improve. If you’ve never been to NARS or had once before, be sure not to miss the NARS 2013. Whether you are a lender, collector or repossession industry professional, you owe it to yourself to participate.

The FEDS laid down the gauntlet

The FEDS have laid down the gauntlet, and its about time. Owning a skip company can be risky business if you don't insure your employees are in compliance at all times. This means not only the obvious things, like...no pretexting, no breaking phone numbers, no threatening people, no harassment, no profanity, etc. This also means the things that have not been as obvious, and things I've never seen a client audit, but given the statement below, the lenders will likely start rethinking If you don't have software that monitors compliance, specifically the compliance of your employees and your vendors as it relates to how they communicate with the public, you will likely squirm a bit, or a lot, when the FED walks in your office and asks you to open up your Kimono. Many software's claim to monitor compliance, but if that software is not also your workflow software, how can it tell you when a call was placed to a person who the law says cant be called, how do you know what your people are doing when you let them go to Facebook, how do you really know what your vendor is doing if you cant fully audit their actions as you are not familiar with the software they work in so you have to take them at face value when they deny they did what your customer has accused them of doing. masterQueue addresses these areas and many more, and given what the Chief said yesterday, if my employees or my vendors were operating out of compliance, I'd be looking for a solution in a pro active manner instead of waiting for the FED to walk through my front door. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Chief Richard Codray stated yesterday: "Through our supervision team, we examine non bank providers of consumer financial products and services, many of them for the first time at the federal level. The enforcement team that I helped build can commence actions against market players who cheat consumers – and their competitors – by not following federal consumer financial laws. GOOD- and he did this last year by filing the largest suits against illegal debt collection activity in the history of the FED - and they got multi-million dollar judgments in every case. "Those who follow the law are placed at a competitive disadvantage in contrast to those who do not, and their reputations are harmed when they are lumped in with their competitors who engage in illegal activities. OMG- this is like when the State of Calif started licensing repossession activity, eventually putting an end to large scale illegal repossession activity. It's tough to compete when you know your competitors are not playing by the rules, but you dont want to rat them out as you'll sound like a whiner, but when you fire people for breaking the rules, or worse breaking the law, and they all end up at your competitors shop, you know they likely haven't changed their bad habits, but you wonder why doesn't the client seem to care? We'll maybe the client doesn't care, but now the FED seems to care. Good for the FED. Codray continues..."Our goal is to help the honest debt collectors do their jobs responsibly and see that the rest are either rehabilitated or run out of business once and for all. When this proposed rule becomes final, our supervision authority will then allow us to go on-site with debt collectors, examine their operations from the inside, and determine whether a collector is complying with the law. We will set forth our expectations through public examination procedures, encourage robust compliance programs, communicate expectations confidentially to the entity throughout the examination and rating process, and ensure appropriate corrective action where necessary. These supervisory efforts would cover more than 60 percent of market activities. By comprehensively assessing large collectors, as well as many of the bank creditors who originate the debt, supervision would allow us to understand and address the systemic problems posing risks to consumers. By proactive coordination among federal and state law enforcement, we can help Americans dig themselves out of the residue of this financial crisis, without being plagued by the indignity of illegal debt collection tactics." Good job to whomever set this agency up.

HEADLINE RISK 2012

As we enter 2012, it still amazes me that companies are not moving faster to mitigate HEADLINE RISK. HEADLINE RISK? It’s the risk that a major event or story will spread throughout various media publications, and will negatively impact a company’s stock. The risk is due to the harmful nature of the story, even if the news is not justifiable. • CEO OF XXX Bank resigns after vendor loses laptop with two million customers social security numbers. “I take full responsibility” says John Doe of XXX Bank. I should have: 1. Paid more attention to my Risk and Security teams 2. Hired better people to manage my Risk and Security teams 3. Asked tougher questions so our customers identities were always protected to the best of our ability 4. Hired better vendor managers to audit our vendors. They made the audit trips, but in hindsight, (after seeing the pictures of them golfing and partying on Facebook) I may need auditors to audit my auditors in 2012. When I started Find John Doe in 2007, I spent Ten Grand to have Fulbright & Jaworski give me a legal opinion in writing on what I could and couldn’t do when it came to skip tracing. I started the first skip company in 1998, and ten years later, I knew the rules had changed, and so had the www dot playing field dot com, so I figured I’d lawyer up and get an opinion. As we enter 2012, it amazes me the now obvious things I was told then that I couldn’t do are still common occurrences by companies that range from Large First Party Lenders, to their Servicers, and mostly, by the vendors whom the large, medium and small lenders hire. Why don’t the lenders pay more attention to the HEADLINE RISK they face? • No “PHONE BREAKS”, as now the person requesting it is just as liable as the person providing the info, thanks to Private Investigators hired in 2006 by Hewlett Packard leaking details to the media about how they allegedly were hired by the Chairwoman of the Board of HP to access the phone records of the other Board members and Nine Analysts who covered the company. After Congressional Hearings and President Bush Signing the Telephone Records and Privacy Protection Act of 2006, hiring companies to break phone numbers is just as illegal for the person doing the “break” as it is for the collector, or his boss, who authorized it; wink…wink. • No “UTILITY BREAKS”. Yes Mister CEO, your collectors still do request this information brokers who illegally access the utility records of public and private utility companies to see if your customer still lives at the last known address. This should make every CEO, VP of Operations, Risk Manager and anyone accountable for the protection of their company to ask and INSURE their company, or the companies they hire are not doing this, or THEY might be the one the DA goes after and puts in jail, and it’s a ten year sentence, BTW. This leads to the obvious question…Is your Collection Supervisor or those accountable really on top of Privacy, Risk and Security when it comes to how you manage risk and how you work your higher risk accounts? As we hit 2012, those still breaking phone numbers have significant issues, but ladies and gentlemen, the bar has been lowered, and if you are not in the fire yet, get ready, because it’s scary, and it should be as there are bad people out there and they will mess with you, AND YOUR CUSTOMERS, if you give them the opportunity. Ask yourself, and your staff some questions, but don’t take the answers at face value. Do some in depth auditing and find out the real answers, and make sure your auditor is craftier than the skip tracers, repossessors, collectors, collection supervisors, risk managers, operations managers etc. are, or better yet, promote your best skip tracer to the Risk audit team. Some other questions to ask within your organization are : Do you still access public records data on your customers via web-based sites? YES,…Oops. That’s Old school….and a huge RISK. Do you have printers, or worse, can these documents be stored and downloaded en mass on a zip drive, or emailed, and if they are emailed, do you even know what your new employee is emailing from their CPU? These reports are accessed through the data providers web site and they come in the form of a .pdf report that can be fifty pages long. It’s a challenge to read a fifty-page document on a 15” screen, so many times I see these reports printed and sitting on people’s desks, or in a “file” in their drawer. A file is a large envelope that is used to hold papers, its what people used to use in business back before there were paperless requirements put in place by the companies who avoid headline risk like the plague. Walk on your collection floor and if you see papers, you have issues. Are you tracking everything your staff is doing during the collection process? Are you auditing your vendors who do collections, skip tracing and repossession? Oh Really, good for you. How often do you visit them? Quarterly, Annually, Semi-Annually? Is it dinner and drinks, or an actual audit? How in depth is the audit? Is it a surprise, or planned with a list of what they want so it’s “easy on everyone”? I hear one of my competitors down the street knows when the audit is coming and they hire temps to make them look like a bigger company than they are to help convince the large lender they can handle their business. Would your auditors catch that? Apparently not, as they keep growing. How detailed is the audit? How do you dig to find out what they really do? Do you use vendor managers or auditors, or should you use a skip tracer or at least bring one along? What web sites do they visit? Oh, you let them access Facebook, cool. That’s a great site to get info from people who don’t protect their privacy. What about the people who mark their Facebook pages private. Do you let your employees or Vendors “Friend” people? Of course not ! Really, how do you know? Well… How do you REALLY know? Ok, let me be frank….if your people have access to Facebook and if you have no record of what they’re doing, you have …. MAJOR HEADLINE RISK. Google “Facebook Collection Agency Lawsuit” to see what I mean, lots of HEADLINE RISK opportunities here. You may still subscribe to the “old school theory” of what goes in the TOP SLOT and comes out the BOTTOM SLOT is OK, as long as “I don’t know what happened in between”. OLD SCHOOL. The Telephone Records and Privacy Protection Act says you are not only responsible to know what is happening, you also can spend TEN YEARS in the slammer if you are accountable, but if I’m a CEO of XXX Bank, I can care less about the Three Years my Ops Mgr got in the pokey, because I just lost my job because I didn’t know what was going on. How do they “Friend” people on Facebook? They log in with an account they created that is only used for finding people. Oh, you didn’t think they would do that cause you told them they might get fired? Are you giving them a bonus if they find more people? Are you in a city where there are more jobs for collectors than there are collectors? If you fire them will your HR department tell the company calling for a reference that they got you in a class action lawsuit over Friending hundreds of people on Facebook and then repossessing their cars, hammering them for payments, posting on their walls and embarrassing them? If they’re looking for a guy, your collector will have a site with a hot chick’s picture, and if it’s a chick they’re looking for, it’s a photo of some dude with a six pack; abs not beer, well, maybe beer. Chances are there are a lot of “friends” on each page who have already been repossessed, or know someone who got repossessed. Class Action. In my next blog I’ll talk about Repossession and the HEADLINE RISKS here as this is even worse as the stakes go up, and so do the lawsuit settlement amounts and HEADLINE RISK potential as people get killed, customers and repossessors.

Don't shoot the Messenger

OK, first off, don't shoot the messenger. In the early 90s, Forwarding wasn't even a word in our industry. Art’s points, and the logic behind starting Relliance are both spot on, in my opinion, but first, let me digress… Manheim Auctions had tried to manage the repossession process in about 1990-91 and after 1-2 years of "getting our lunch handed to us" as an Executive later told me, they had exited the process of trying to manage the repossession process to drive more cars to their auction. To my knowledge, no one else was doing this “Forwarding” practice at the time. A few sharp repo guys may have been doing one off deals with clients who trusted them, but it certainly wasn’t an industry on anyone's radar as is the case today. To understand how it got to where it is today, lets back peddle a minute. In 1988 we had started one of, if not the first skip tracing companies in our industry; Skipbusters. In doing so, we first repo'd our own cars in LA through a repo company I also co-owned called Crown. As we got locates out of our area, we subbed out the work to companies I had known through my prior experience as a Collection Manager at Chrysler Credit. After Skipbusters grew, one of our clients, VW Credit, asked if we could help them manage the nationwide repossession process they were struggling with. Between the time we started Skipbusters and when VW came on, we learned a few valuable lessons. First, you have to find qualified agents and not just the cheapest one’s. They had to be able to understand, sign and stick to the terms of a contract, and they had to be held accountable. You also needed a back up in case something went wrong. You also had to give them a healthy volume of work, they had to be able to make money, and it was a two-way relationship. VW of America in the 70's and 80's didn't have any employees as they hired Chrysler to make and collect loans for them, same as American Motors and Jeep did. Kind of like how Mitsubishi Acceptance (who I worked for later, not sure the exact name of their finance company now) does with a servicer they hire to represent them these days. Anyway, VW decided to start their own finance company after they switched from Chrysler to Deutsch Bank (wonder why they picked a German Bank?) and then realized they were no better with Deutsche than they had been with Chrysler, so then in the early 90s they hired their own employees and created VW credit, their own captive finance company. Through all this transition, Skipbusters was VW's sole skip vendor, and when they kept calling us to ask what repo agency to use in XXX city. We then worked with their Sr management (RIP George, miss ya!) and we created American Recovery Service to manage the repo process for them for a flat $75 per assignment. Before starting ARS, I called Manheim as I knew they had exited the repossession management business, and the guy gave me one word of advise..."RUN". We started ARS in late 1993 and soon after this the sub prime auto finance industry took off, and so did ARS, and Skipbusters. We sold and exited the industry in 1999, just as the word "Forwarding" was becoming a common term in repossession management. The auctions, including Manheim, had jumped back in, as did many other private companies. By the time my non compete expired and I took another look at our industry in 2004, it had changed dramatically. When we started Skipbusters in 1988, not one of the top 20 lenders utilized an outside firm to skip trace their accounts, except for their trusted repo agency whom they were willing to pay a $75 skip fee to. When we built the "Forwarding" model around VW's needs, other lenders who now use forwarders laughed at us, "You want to manage our repossession assignments? That's what we do, and we'd never outsource that responsibility to anyone!!". As lenders consolidated to large call centers, and the national management of repossession vendors and the work they did became more complex than they envisioned, Forwarding took off, as did skip tracing. Now it's almost 2012 and a great deal of large lenders now use Forwarders, and all large lenders use skip companies, so I guess we had a couple good ideas in one sense, but in another, I agree that it has been treated as a commodity and somehow the value of the service has become greatly overlooked, as pointed out in Relliance’s press release. The logic behind the formation of a Forwarding company by Repossession Agencies is a good idea in my opinion, but ONLY if they measure themselves in an agnostic manner against other companies in their service areas. I'm not saying every repo agency deserves a shot at being in Relliance, but if Relliance truly wants to be the best Forwarding company and improve the industry, I believe they, as well as any solid forwarding model, must accept applications from companies who wish to do work for them at a fair price, and the companies who do the best work should earn the lions share of the work from the lenders who hire them. If not, it would just be another association, which does not solve the problems our industry is seeing, from a repo agency and a lenders perspective. For the past five years we have been building a software called masterQueue. Some of you use a limited version of it, some have heard of it, some haven't. This is a collection, skip tracing and repossession assignment management software for Lenders, Forwarders, Skip Companies, Repo companies through interfaces with their Repossession Agency platform, and a variety of other companies associated with our industry. It's a common ground, and one of the most important things it does is show the lenders and Forwarders/Skip Companies who is doing a good job, who is driving ROI to the lenders bottom line, and who isn't, and who is in compliance with the lenders growing list of requirements and who is putting them at risk. It's not a model that's built around charging repo agencies to receive assignments, and we are open to interface with any software, as we have already done with iRepo/RePros and several other platforms, and are starting to do with lenders software platforms. What made us successful at Skipbusters and ARS back when I owned those companies is we were able to leverage technology to improve our client’s business needs. With this in mind, we created masterQueue. I believe the technology in our industry, with a few exceptions, but for the most part, is years behind the times. masterQueue helps bring it up to speed, and it provides lenders a way to see the dollar value that the repo companies who service their accounts can earn them, or cost them when they aren’t doing the job. It also gives them a way to stay compliant to help insure they keep their customers safe, and their names out of the paper, which as we all know is their foremost concern. The reason I bring up masterQueue is without a common software platform, one that really solves all of the needs for Lenders to identify actual performance and compliance, our industry will continue to struggle in my opinion, especially as it relates to working the difficult accounts. masterQueue gives everyone a fair shot at earning business because they are the best at what they do, not because they took someone to the Super Bowl or have a hot looking sales rep. A lender shouldnt care about PRICE, they should worry about COST, which is measured in Full balance skip charge offs, missed opportunities, poor performance and things no software I've seen to date does, except masterQueue.Sorry to sound like a commercial, but you don't see us doing press releases, or even attending many trade shows, but you will see us in forums like this, and hopefully you're hearing about us by word of mouth, from people who understand our industry and whose word you trust. With a little bit of luck and some good code, I think we can help bring Forwarding back to where we envisioned it could be when we first started doing it in the early 90s. Everyone be safe out there, and value your repo agents, the job they do should never be underestimated or treated as anything less than a skilled art, unless you're dealing with some company who doesnt deserve that respect, and if so, your software should be telling you that's an issue before it becomes a problem!

Is it just me?

Has the Auto Finance Skip Tracing business gone the way of the Auto Repo business?

It's brutal out there.

We always relied on Lenders making bad loans and then not doing a very good job on finding their skips, but that's changed. The gravy is gone.

Skip Companies- If you are not working in an environment where you can measure and manage your business every minute of every day, you can fail. If you fail, your clients fail, but I guess that doesn't really matter to you cause you failed.

Are Lenders looking as closely as they can at what Skip companies they hire; I doubt it. Can their Skip Companies go toes up, damn straight they can, and trust me, they will.

Attn Lenders: Please start lending money, and please start taking some risk, and please take a closer look at who you do business with. If your Skip Company has lost four of its five biggest clients in the past few months, there is a problem. If you google your skip companies name followed by the word "LAWSUIT" and there is more than one page of results, you are a sitting duck.

C'mon, there are people out there who need loans and you are all overstaffed and you can handle it. You may need masterQueue to help organize your collection department, but you know your people's Queue sizes are way down, and you have the people to handle the deals, so dont wait for the paper buyers to tell you its coming, force the issue, tell them you can handle it.

Of course, come of those skips will fall through the cracks, but you will make so much off the deals that pay you know that it wont matter, and our industry needs some bread crumbs.

EVERYONE will win.

Social Networking and the workplace, i.e. friendships at work, one year later....

A year ago I posted a blog about Facebook and making friends at work. Here is a follow up a year later....

Technology has affected the relationships our employees form with each other, and this is especially true as it relates to Social Networking.

While social networks have existed since the beginning of man, it is something that has grown by significant proportions with the evolution of technology. It started with computers, then email, then cell phones, then My Space, and in the past few years, it has exploded due in large part to the ability to easily communicate with more people through texting, Twitter, and the most popular social networking site to date; Facebook.

Many people spend as many or more hours with co-workers than they do with their families, and many people spend more hours in a week with co-workers than they spend in a month or more with their trusted friends. Due to this, we have seen friendships in business turning into friendships in people’s personal lives. In recent years, I’ve witnessed this happening more frequently, and with more negative effects than I have seen in prior years, or pre-technology, if you will.

I’ve participated in, managed, or encountered many types of relationships with co-workers I’ve worked alongside, or people I’ve managed, or employed, during my 35+ years of working. In all this time, and through all these relationships, I’d like to think I’ve learned a little bit about the dynamics of employee/employee, employee/employer and even client/vendor relationships.

One of the first rules I was taught, but it took me a few mistakes to understand why it’s a common saying you have all heard is……… “you don’t mix business with pleasure”.

I’ve partied with co-workers and then realized that wasn’t the best idea, especially when something happened when we partied, and now I knew more about that person than I cared to know, or needed to know, and it changed our relationship.

I’ve made decisions regarding employees that were affected by my personal relationship with them, and they’ve almost always ended up being bad decisions.

A person I thought was a good friend turned out to not be such a good friend.

The negativity of a person I got too close to started to cause me to become negative myself, and I like to think of myself as a positive person.

“Don’t they ever have anything good to say” or “Why do they work here if they always complain”?

I’ve gone out with co-workers and later figured out they weren’t someone I’d normally associate with, but when they asked me to go out I felt it would have been rude to say “no”, but then the relationship became uncomfortable at work when up until then my professional relationship at work with that person had been great. I should have just said I had a prior commitment.

Does any of this sound familiar? We’ve all been there.

Technology has given the average worker new challenges through their constant availability with their cell phones, texting, twitter, and through social networking sites like Facebook.

In doing some research, I found an appropriate comment about Facebook on a person’s blog:

“For every long-lost chum who reaches out to me on Facebook, there's a guy who beat me up on a weekly basis through the whole seventh grade but now wants to be my buddy; or the crazy person who was fun in college but is now kind of sad; or the creepy ex-co-worker who I'd cross the street to avoid but who now wants to know, "Am I your friend?" yes or no, this instant, please.”

I think the co-worker example above may seem exaggerated to many people who have co-worker friends on their Facebook page, but from my experience, it’s just another step in the direction of mixing business relationships with personal relationships at a stage that is way too early in a "friendship", and that's where the problems that can result are not worth the risk.

On the client/vendor front, I know companies have witnessed a conflict of interest when an employee of theirs and an employee at the client/vendor are friends with each other, and it can or does affect their business relationship. We see some clients who can not even accept a box of chocolate from a trusted vendor at Christmas, which may be a bit over the top, and we see some who recognize that when the sales rep or owner of the vendor takes the vendor manager or decision maker to the Super Bowl, that may influence their decision to give that company work, and rightfully so, they put the kibosh on those types of activities. For this reason we do not allow our employees to be friends with our clients outside work, even on social network sites. It's a conflict of interest for our company, and likely for the client in most cases.

As technology evolves, I now see a new twist happening through social networking sites. A few years ago, clients and vendors interacted on social network sites, but now that has moved to professional sites like Linked In, where conversations are kept to a professional level. Most vendors want people to use their services because they do a good job, not because they like how they look in their profile photo, or because their people socialize with that client’s employees outside work, and are friends who converse regularly on Facebook or Twitter.

I have a Facebook page, and at first I felt awkward when a person at work “friended me”, asking if I’d join their social network on Facebook. I kind of looked at it like when a seventh grade friend of my son sent me a friend request on my personal Facebook page. I like the kid, and didn’t want to seem rude, but I think it best if my relationship with this kid remains as my son’s father, and not as a friend of mine on my personal Facebook page.

I saw the person at work the following day and told them I appreciated their asking me to be their friend on Facebook, but I preferred to keep my Facebook page separate from work. They said ok, and I think they understood.

When I go back and read the “friend” definition on Webster’s, I realize I have personal friends, business friends, family friends, etc. Sometimes my family or personal friends cross over into people I place in my social network, and I have them on my Facebook page, but when it comes to work, I prefer to keep my work relationships at work, or on Linked In or other work sites that contain some social elements, and to me, those are almost always relationships with “business associates”, otherwise the mix of business and personal becomes to consuming. It’s already become more difficult to separate work and personal with the availability of email on cell phones, etc. and adding Facebook and otehr web sites makes it even more challenging.

In my career, I’ve learned there is a time and a place for business, and the same goes for pleasure. I enjoy working, so I get pleasure at work or while working, but I dont do it by doing non work or non business activities. When I go to work I work, period. When I'm done, I spend time with my friends and family and I dont work, period.

While I think there is a time and a place for mixing business and pleasure, based on my personal experience, I’d try and limit my outside of work relationships with my co-workers to company events that are not work related, i.e. company picnics, holiday parties, etc. As the owner, or as a manager or a person of responsibility over others within a company, it is a different landscape than with a co-worker-to-co-worker relationship. While we realize people will become friendly and over time will develop friendships at work, and those may carry over to outside work, the best advise I can give is to take your time, and really get to know the person and make sure that your relationship with them outside the job is based on their being a “trusted friend”, and to me anyway, it takes a significant amount of time, usually a year or more, before I place a friend in that "trusted friend" category.

For this reason, I personally do not consider it a good idea to mix your friendships at work with your friendships in your personal life until a significant amount of time has gone by. I can give you a hundred examples where things went wrong, and in almost every case, it was when a person rushed into a relationship with another person without really knowing them. They placed the person into a position of trust, and many times they got burned. I’d have to think really hard to come up with examples where a business relationship turned into a personal friendship within a few months of the people knowing each other and it benefited both parties, and the company.

On the other hand, I can think of a small amount of examples where a relationship built over a significant amount of time, mutual respect, and trust, evolved between two co-workers and it carried over from work into their personal lives and both employees, and the company, benefited. It’s rare, but when it happens, it really adds value to his or her jobs, and to the company.

This is a difficult rule to keep. I enjoy working with everyone at my company, and I’m sure I’d enjoy skiing with many of them, or going out for dinner, playing a sport or just going to lunch and chatting, however, if I do that, then in my situation, others may feel as if I am playing favorites. Also, what if we become close friends and I have to discipline the person, or promote someone over the person I have become close with and that move upsets them?

From a co-worker standpoint, you have the same issues. “Why does she go to lunch with him every day?” What if you see someone you become friends with doing something you know is not right, will that influence your decision to say something that would be in the best interests of the company? If a joke goes to far at work and it carries over to Facebook and now the whole world can potentially see the joke, is that a good idea?

Oh, that will never happen, I have my privacy settings so only "my friends" can see what I do on facebook. If you check your privacy settings every day, you're half way there, but Facebook makes changes daily and some of those changes have affected people's privacy settings, or lack of privacy settings, and then its wide open. Googling "Facebook privacy" gets you hundreds of pages about Facebooks privacy issues.

What if a "friend" copies and pastes the post you thought was private, or their privacy is open and people can see it, then its not private any longer is it? It happens, believe me, we see it as that's what we do when we're developing tools to gather info off the web on people using their open source web based info, which in many cases they thought was private. The best rule to follow is that if you post something you think someone would have a problem with, then you better not post it cause once you do, its permanent and it can and many times will come back to bite you.

There are other problems with social interaction in the workplace that have been around for ever, but are magnified with on line social networks. If the time comes for a promotion, will your boss feel as if you have developed too many personal relationships with people you’d be supervising and then you get passed over? Will someone spread rumors about you because they are jealous of your relationships with co-workers, or they misunderstand your intentions, even if they are completely trustworthy and honest? Those are just a few examples of the risks involved with developing relationships that move from business associate to friendship at work. When they happen in a matter of weeks or even months, the risk of a problem is elevated. When they happen as people really get to know each other, and as each person cements their position within the company, the risk becomes reduced.

Another reason I feel the mixing of your personal and work life should be approached with extreme caution is the simple fact that you need to charge your batteries when you’re away from work, and the best way to do that is to leave work at the office and come in fresh the next day. If you spent an hour on the phone at home after work speaking with a current or an ex-coworker and work was discussed, yours or theirs, that’s not usually a healthy phone call for your psyche. Are you talking about good things? “Oh, I love my job” and if it’s an ex-employee you’re speaking with, what do they think of that if they are no longer there? Are you complaining to each other about something that bothers you, and how does that negativity affect you? Or what if you’re happy and your new personal friend from the office isn’t, will they call and tell you how they love their job or will they call to bitch, or worse yet, post it on Facebook?

Here are some interesting questions to ask yourself when making friends at work :

• If your friend left the company, would you still be in touch with her in a year?
• If you had a personal emergency, would you consider asking your friend for help?
• Do you hang out with your friend outside the office? (Weekday lunch, happy hour, and business trips don’t count.)
• Have you met your friend’s significant other? What about her friends outside the office?
• If your friend received the promotion you were banking on, would you be genuinely happy for her?
• If you ran into your friend in the grocery store, would you be able to talk to her for 10 minutes without mentioning work?
• Have you seen where your friend lives?
• Do you and your friend have anything in common besides your age and your job?

Thanks, and I hope my experience and thoughts on this challenging topic help you in your quest to become the best you can be at work!

masterQueue and Find John Doe

On May 10th, we launched our proprietary, web 3.0 software masterQueue at a conference we were selected to participate in for new Financial Services Software in SF called Finovate.


We started Find John Doe in January of 2007 with the purpose of building a software product that could address the needs of the Auto Finance industry as it relates to the process of gathering, organizing and tracking the massive amounts of public records data a company needs to process to run more efficiently.


Once we started gathering Public Records more efficiently, we then realized we needed to analyze this process to determine what data and what data providers got us the most right party contacts, helped us find the most people, and ultimately provided us with the best ROI.


When we started getting into ROI on data, we realized that employee and vendor performance metrics also needed to be factored into the equation to see the impact of this data on our goal of locating people who did not want to be found.


Once we gathered and factored in this information, we then realized the importance of the outside vendors, from data providers to repossession agents to the software we were using to manage the assignment and recovery process. With this in mind we built a full repossession assignment platform, and instead of also building a repossession agency management platform, we approached the two largest software providers who already had repossession agency management software built, and one liked what we were doing so we identified the need to build a strategic relationship with RePros to interface masterQueue with Repros to help the repossession agencies work more efficiently using public records data, and through our metrics platform that measures the entire repossession process, soup to nuts.


It still amazes me how lenders, and the parties they outsource the repossession assignment process to, do not fully grasp the importance of using the most qualified repo agencies. Many lenders just give all their deals to a forwarder or a skip company and they don't care, or they don't have the tools, to make sure their assignments are being forwarded to a qualified, properly insured, experienced professional. If lenders could see who some of the unlicensed, unprofessional clowns who represent their companies in the field actually are doing, I guarantee they, and their shareholders, would cringe. Actually, for an idea of what likely may be happening on their assignments, they can turn in to Tru TV and watch a Repo Reality TV show.


With this in mind, we built the vendor management piece of masterQueue, so now lenders can easily see when a forwarder or a skip company, or their own internal staff when assigning direct, do not use a qualified, licensed and insured professional. For those using forwarders or skip companies to manage your assignment process, do you have a system in place to know when their vendors insurance doesnt meet your requirements, or is canceled, or they're using an agent prior to having a contract and insurance with them in place? Are they using licensed agents in states requiring licenses? Is their proof of this in the software you use to monitor them, or is it too difficult because you use five software platforms to monitor ten companies? Are the licensed agencies licensing all their repossessors, or are they having cars picked up by repossessors working off expired or questionable temporary licenses, as was the case in a recent death involving a woman whose car was repossessed a month or so ago. The civil suit on that situation will likely cost the lender a great deal of money, if the atty representing the woman digs deep enough into the practices of the lender and the repo agency and possibly into the state that allows this to happen without more stringent monitoring, and that precedence will likely open the door for more costly suits to follow.


We had also started realizing in 2008-09 that open source, web based public data that customers were providing on the internet on themselves was important in the skip process, so we began building ways to capture and analyze this data, which ranged from blogs people were posting, to the bar they were visiting that night as posted in public view on a social networking website.


Building algorithms around this data was the next step, and to make sure we had the best algorithms possible, we sought out an algorithm expert. In January of 2011 we brought on a strategic investment partner who was the creator of algorithms built around public records for a two billion dollar, ten thousand person company that successfully identified risk in the mortgage industry just before the bubble burst, something he accurately predicted well in advance of the dam bursting. Unfortunately, the wheels were already in motion and few listened to his predictions, but every top lender bought his data and had access to the information before the crash.


Auto lending is in a different environment. Lending to anyone with even a hint of risk is all but non-existent, but we all know that wont last for long. In the past few months I have visited a sampling of the largest and smallest lending institutions in the country. EVERY one of these companies has a need for a new software platform to help them better manage risk. Some of the more forward thinking one's realize this, and they are moving to masterQueue. Others are still hesitant to get off their old legacy, Dos-based systems, even though it will never be easier than now as delinquency is at twenty year lows and once the need to lend more aggressively becomes apparent, making that switch will become more costly and more difficult.


Find John Doe provides lenders an opportunity to see masterQueue operating in a test environment, with our team of talented skip tracers using the most current tools to identify and manage risk by gathering, organizing and tracking results on loans once they become delinquent, from one day late through charge off. By working your accounts in masterQueue, apples to apples to what your current vendor or internal staff is doing, we provide a benchmark for you and a view into what your company will look like if you start using masterQueue internally.


For a demo of how the combination of Find John Doe and masterQueue can take your company from Web 1.0 or Web 2.0 to a Web 3.0 environment, with little or no IT support needed, please give me a call at 916 730 3335, or email me at jlewis@findjohndoe.com and I'll set up a demo for you.


We can help you remove the fear of lending, and all you need is access to the web through a browser.