Consider these staggering statistics: In March 2009, the Gallup organization found that only 30 percent of employees were engaged at work, 52 percent were not engaged, and 18 percent were so disengaged they regularly work against their organization’s goals.

In addition, research conducted by Brand Identity, Inc., shows that “Nearly 80 percent of leaders don’t feel that employees consistently demonstrate drive, energy and a focus on results.” This is also supported by 70 percent who don’t believe that employees are as committed as they should be to the growth of the business and increasing sales.

The message is clear—employees are unhappy at work, and companies are paying for it.

“We are at a time when company employees need to care more than ever about the success of their enterprise. Much more focus on results is necessary to help companies make it through these difficult times,” Lederman says.

Though the ever-looming bottom line is a concern for many small business owners,

culture and hiring can impact your return on investment more than you may realize.

“The greatest companies in the world, big or small, don’t worry about the bottom line because it is so epically good that there is nothing to say about it,” says Dave Logan, cofounder and senior partner of the management consulting firm CultureSync, and author of Tribal Leadership. “If you are really building a great company around values and vision that is going to make a serious impact in the world, you’re not going to have to worry about your revenue or your growth. Your challenge will be how to keep up with it.”

You should think it’s important for people as a whole to be bold and daring (but not reckless). You should want everyone to not be afraid to take risks and to not be afraid to make mistakes, because if people aren’t making mistakes then that means they’re not taking enough risks. Over time, you need everyone to develop his/her gut about business decisions. You must encourage people to develop and improve their decision-making skills. Encourage your people to make mistakes as long as they learn from them.

Do not ever become complacent and accept the status quo just because that’s the way things have always been done. We should always be seeking adventure and having fun exploring new possibilities.

By having the freedom to be creative in our solutions, we end up making our own luck. Always approach situations and challenges with an open mind.

Sometimes our sense of adventure and creativity causes us to be unconventional in our solutions (because we have the freedom to think outside the box), but that’s what allows you to rise above and stay ahead of the competition.

You must believe that inside every employee is more potential than even the employee himself/herself realizes. Your charge is to help employees unlock that potential. But it has to be a joint effort; you have to want to challenge and stretch yourself in order for it to happen.

We grow as a business because we take on new challenges, and we face even more new challenges because we’re growing. It’s an endless cycle, and it’s a good thing; it’s the only way for a company to survive. But it can also at times feel risky, stressful, and confusing.

Sometimes it may seem that new problems crop up as fast as we solve the old ones (sometimes faster!), but that just means that we’re moving; that we’re getting better and stronger. Anyone who wants to compete with us has to learn the same things, so problems are just mile markers. Each one we pass means we’ve gotten better. Yet no matter how much better we get, we’ll always have hard work to do, we’ll never be done, and we’ll never “get it right.”

That may seem negative, but it’s not; you must do our best to “get it right,” and then do it again when you find out that things have changed. That is the cycle of growth, and like it or not, that cycle won’t stop. It’s hard. But if you are not doing something hard, then you would have no business. The only reason we aren’t swamped by our competition is because what you do is hard, and you must do it better than anyone else. If it ever gets too easy, start looking for a tidal wave of competition to wash you away. It may seem sometimes like you don’t know what your doing. And it’s true!. What I have learned over the years is that the devil is in the details.

Strong and positive relationships that are open and honest are a big part of what differentiates your company from other companies. Strong relationships allow you to accomplish much more than you would be able to otherwise.

A key ingredient in strong relationships is to develop emotional connections. It’s important to always act with integrity in your relationships, to be compassionate, friendly, loyal; to make sure that you do the right thing and treat your relationships well. The hardest thing to do is to build trust, but if the trust exists, you can accomplish so much more.

In any relationship, it’s important to be a good listener as well as a good communicator. Open and honest communication is the best foundation for any relationship including with your clients. But remember, at the end of the day, it’s not what you say or what you do, it’s how you make people feel that matters the most. In order for someone to feel good about a relationship, he/she must know that the other person truly cares about them, both personally and professionally.

Embrace diversity in thoughts, opinions, and backgrounds. The more widespread and diverse your relationships are, the bigger the positive impact you can make on your company, and the more valuable you will be to your company. It is critical for relationship-building to have effective, open, and honest communication.

As your company(s) grow, communication becomes more and more important. Everyone needs to understand how his/her team connects to the big picture of what you are trying to accomplish. No matter how good the communication is, it’s still one of the weakest spots in any organization, You need everyone to always try to go the extra mile in encouraging thorough, complete, and effective communication.

The best leaders are those that lead by example and are both team followers as well as team leaders. I believe that, in general, the best ideas and decisions are made from the bottom up; they’re influenced by those on the front lines who are closest to the issues and/process. The role of a manager is to remove obstacles and enable his/her direct reports to succeed. This means the best leaders are servant- leaders; they serve those they lead.

The best team members take initiative when they notice issues so the team and the company can succeed. The best team members take ownership of issues and collaborate with other team members whenever challenges arise.

The best team members have a positive influence on one another and everyone they encounter, they strive to eliminate any kind of doubt and negative interactions; they focus, instead, on creating harmony with each other and whoever else they interact with.

I believe that the best teams are those that not only work with each other, but also interact with each other outside the office environment. Many of the best ideas I have seen were the direct result of informal interactions outside of the office, playing golf or having a drink together after work.

You need to be more than just a team though; you need to be a family. You must watch out for each other, care for each other, and go above and beyond for each other because you believe in each other and trust each other. To create this, we must work together and also play together. Your bonds must go far beyond the typical “co-worker” relationships found at other companies.

Believe in hard work and putting in the extra effort to get things done. Believe in operational excellence, and realize that there is always room for improvement in everything you do. This means that your work is never done. In order to stay ahead of the competition, you must continuously innovate as well as make incremental improvements to your operations: always striving to make yourself more efficient, and figuring out how to do anything and everything better. You must understand mistakes are learning opportunities.

You must never lose your sense of urgency in making improvements. You must never settle for “good enough,” because good is the enemy of great. You should set and exceed your own high standards, constantly raising the bar for competitors and for yourself.

Passion and determination are contagious. You should believe in having a positive and optimistic (but realistic) attitude about everything you do, because you realize that this inspires others to have the same attitude.

There is excitement in knowing that everyone you work with has a tremendous impact on a larger dream and vision, and you can see that impact day in and day out.

While you celebrate your individual and team successes, do not be arrogant or treat others differently from how you would want to be treated. Instead, carry yourself with a quiet confidence, because you believe that in the long run your character will speak for itself.

Most of my clients think of the sales calls, difficulty negotiating contracts, interfaces and most of all fear of change. In fact my research says that most of you only look for new vendors at conferences. One of my clients told me “Phil in the old days we never even considered how much a vendor costs we just knew we needed them and tried to make more money than we spent”.

I have been doing operational consulting for over a decade with collection agencies, law firms and credit issuers and the majority of my clients have not been diligent in vendor effectiveness evaluations and the procurement of new vendors. In almost every case I have been able to suggest new vendors or other waterfall improvements that made the vendor experience much more cost effective.

What if I could turn the vendor experience into an easy process and guarantee your satisfaction? ARMVend is a membership based buying club for the ARM industry. All the vendors in one location and a vendor professional to guide you through the selection process, while using group purchase power to reduce the cost by 2-10%.

ARMVend’s members enjoy platinum level service while saving money on the vendor costs you expend daily.

To find out more visit www.ARMVend.com now as the initial enrollment will fill up fast.

ARM-Vend is a group purchasing organization composed of ARM companies that are looking to reduce vendor costs by using “group purchase power”. The power of the group will allow ARM-Vend to negotiate with ARM vendors for reduced rates and special vendor pricing for it’s members. ARM-Vend is a service of Lighthouse Consulting, LLC and Phillip W. Duff.

At ARM-Vend we offer an array of the highest-quality ARM vendors available from around the world. We are confident in the quality and value of our vendors, and we stand behind them with our guarantee of satisfaction.

We’re proud of the savings and benefits we offer our members, and are constantly looking for ways to help you make the most of your membership. That’s why we also offer substantial savings on services that you use every day in your ARM business.

We invite you to try ARM-Vend today so you can take advantage of all of the savings your membership has to offer while receiving platinum level service.

• Advantages of membership:
• Group buying power
• New vendor on boarding assistance
• Free annual vendor evaluation
• Reduced vendor costs
• Shared interface costs
• Shared vendor effectiveness
• New product evaluation
• Debt purchase group
• Platinum level service fro all members
• Vendor Segments represented:
• Dialer and Long Distance
• Letters
• Skiptracing
• Asset location
• Compliance scrubs
• Litigant debtors
• Operational Consulting
• Payment vendors
• Portfolio scoring
• IT automation
• Call recording
• Insurance and licensing
• Debt sales
• And more..

Membership Costs:

The cost of membership is $495.00 annually. Arm-Vend will guarantee your satisfaction by offering a refund at any time if you are not satisfied with your membership.

If you are interested in this program please complete this application, this does not obligate you to the $495 payment it just provides an application that can be approved by ARMVend and then a membership package with all the terms will be sent to you so you can make a decision as to whether to join in your own time. Membership enrollment starts March 1st 2012. 

MONEY BACK GUARANTEE we will refund your money at any time if you are not pleased with the membership.

Atkins & Ogle was named as the client of the year today by Phillip W. Duff the president of Lighthouse Consulting. Atkins and Ogle is a full service law firm in Hurricane, W.V. serving the West Virginia area. Mr. Duff said ” Atkins & Ogle have been a pleasure to work with in 2011 they have been eager to learn new and better processes and have a great staff that embraced the change and ran with it something I do see everywhere I go”.

James B. Atkins Esq. was pleased to hear the news and stated  since working with Lighthouse Consulting “there is a greater comfort level, increased excitement amongst our staff and a genuine sense of greater things to come. We are pleased to be named Client of the year by Mr. Duff”.

Atkins and Ogle are moving into a new building this month and we want to say congrats on the award and the new digs!

Learn more about Atkins & Ogle at http://www.atkinsoglelaw.com/

I have learned from my research that most businesses in the ARM industry do NOT hire consultants to help build the business, project management or improve processes. And I have wondered why over the years it is such a long sales cycle to sell my services. I believe it stems from a belief that it is too expensive and will take cash away from the bottom line when the truth is any good consultant should increase profits and strengthen processes quickly adding to the bottom line.

So lets discuss the bottom line question, I charge $5000 to do an initial evaluation of a law firm or collection agency. In almost every case that process will provide improvements far exceeding the cost. And many of the changes will continue to feed the bottom line every month for years to come.

The consultation includes 1.5 days onsite at your call center and will provide you with a document with staff evaluations, process improvements, vendor suggestions, system improvements and long-term projects.

I know you have questions I have answers; quit wondering.

Lighthouse Consulting will produce a video each month that will highlight opportunities for collection agencies, debt buyers and law firms to find efficiencies that will increase profits. Each month you receive a video that you can watch at your leisure and re-watch to learn valuable profit enhancing techniques.

Each video will be about 45 minutes in length and will feature guest and industry veterans. We will explore topics like;

Judgment enforcement

Process automation

Debtor location

Portfolio scoring

Payment processing

Success planning

Staff development

New technology advancements

Hiring

Lighthouse Consulting has been teaching its clients how to increase their profits since 2003.

If you are interested in receiving these FREE videos please sign up at http://www.lighthouseconsultinginc.com/keep-profits-alive-sign-up-page/

In this article, I am going to cover a topic that is not going to be popular with many attorneys. It will not be popular because I am going to recommend that you, the boss, take them out of their comfort zone to make more revenue for the organization. The first premise is that almost no one goes to law school and wants to become a collection attorney when they pass the bar. Most people that go to law school have visions of grandeur when they enter and by the time they leave have a belief that they will be the first person to make partner in a year .

Most lawyers believe that they have one job to do and that is to protect the client’s best interest. While this is very true, they often forget that they must figure out how to create revenue for their employer as well.         Since most collection firms do not bill hourly it is sometimes difficult to monetize an attorneys time. Well, I have the secret and Lighthouse Consulting has asked me to share it.

Lawyers for collection firms must be told by management that they are not going to be great trial lawyers, or great transactional lawyers, but plain old bill collectors. That is right, bill collectors. While collectors and paralegals are a great source of collection revenue, your lawyers are actually the best.

We had great success in retraining our lawyers to stop thinking about the law, and start thinking about collecting money.

Some them did not like it and some of them felt that asking for money was beneath them, but in the end, the ones that adopted our theories were profitable for us and also generated bonus income for themselves that was totally unexpected.

Let’s begin with the training necessary to change the mindset of the attorney. We asked all of our attorneys sit through our collector training and then through our negotiation training. While some re- sisted, resistance was futile if they wanted to keep their job. We even made them take a test at the end of the training to see if they understood what they learned.

During the collector training, they learned how to ask probing questions, how to take those answers and ask more questions. They learned how to negotiate for better payment terms and how to get larger down payments. The most important training piece for the attorneys was how to watch people face to face (like in court) to know when they were not being truthful and being able to respectfully call them on it.

Once the lawyers had passed this part of their training, they were ready to get on the phones and collect. YES, I said it, COLLECT. Every contested case that was in the attorneys work load was called by the attorney. The call was made whether the debtor was represented by council or pro se.         This call was a very smooth, customer friendly call where the attorney was told to probe for the actual reason the case was con- tested. They asked whether the case could be SET- TLED, they asked for payment arrangements or a con- sent judgment. I took this idea from a dear friend of mine in Michigan who always told me, “Work your files and avoid your trials.

e were amazed how simple a source of money this was for the firm. Can you imagine, we had collectors call for months, we sued the debtor, we served the debtor and we got no money at all. All of a sudden, the attorney calls the debtor and he gets a down payment and monthly arrangements. Wow!!!! Money may grow on trees.

Now I am a realist and I realize that not every call will end positively and sometimes debtors will ignore calls or hang up, even as the court date fast approaches. So, we found more ways to take our training and get money for the firm with the attorney as our delivery vehicle.

When our attorneys went to court, they took pads of forms that we had printed that asked for demographic information on each debtor that appeared in court. The attorney was trained to give the pad of paper to each debtor that showed up and ask them to fill out the in- formation before they talked to them so that the attorney could better under the debtor’s financial situation.

The form asked for the same demographic in- formation that our collectors were required to ask in their scripted conversation with the debtor over the phone. (I covered this topic in my last article) Once the debtor had the form filled out, the attorney reviewed it and began to negotiate with the debtor for terms, a settlement or payment in full. With demographic data in hand, our attorney had the power to turn down bad deals and continue on with the trial knowing where the debtor worked, where they live and where they banked. The information made the judgment worth almost as much as the payment the attorney did not get.

We also had our attorney trained to ask for payments with consent judgments on the court house steps so that their time in court was very limited and they could get back to the office to make more calls to more contested cases to collect more money.

Let me give you a real example that we had happen over and over and over to our attorneys. Debtor gets served and sends in contested notice to the court. Our attorney begins to call the debtor 30 days before the court date, no return call. The attorney sends a letter to the debtor asking them to call before the court date so that the attorney can better understand their dispute, no reply. The court date comes and the debtor is there ready to go. Our attorney hands the debtor the pre printed pad and says, “Fill this out and when let’s discuss your situation.”

The form gets filled out and the debtor makes a deal with the attorney and hands him/her a check as a good faith payment. WOW!!!! An attorney collected a debt!!!!! Well, they did more than that. The attorney actually got a totally filled out demographic form that has phone numbers, bank information and employer information as well. The attorney got a check and a promise of future payments.         The attorney got enough information to attach another asset if the debtor breaks the deal…….seems simple doesn’t it?

We paid our attorneys well, but we paid them bonuses if they got the form completely filled out in court. We paid them additional for mak- ing a deal with the debtor in court and we paid them extra if they also got check or cash from the debtor and brought it back to the office. This program was so successful that we took this show on the road and trained all of our con- tract attorneys how to do this too. We got great information that we never had and we also got payments a lot quicker and in larger amounts then ever thought. We would have contests with our attorneys for largest collection day in court, largest single payment in court, most filled out demographic forms in a week, or month and so on and so on. Although it sounds simple to create a pro- gram like this, remember that attorneys are a different animals then your normal collector and will take more time to get used to the idea of having to work differently. Give it time, it will work.

Lets talk about an amazing phenomenon that sometimes trips up even the world’s highest achievers — getting involved in business projects that take us nowhere, while projects and activities that would bring us closer to our goal are left unattended to.

In The Success Principles by James Canfield he recommends saying NO to the good, so you’ll have time and energy to say YES to the great.

Take a look at what you’re involved in right now. Is it preventing you from pursuing greater activities?

Worse yet, do you have a list of things to do that will make the business more efficient but you have no time to work the list.

I can help, call me!

Phillip W. Duff 904-687-1687

WV Attorney general TV commercial

Have you seen the TV commercial above from the WV attorney General? It is very funny unless you are in the ARM industry.

I have been consulting with a law firm in WV and they have been very successful at collecting in WV. So when I heard that many debt collectors and legal forwarders were avoiding the State of WV I decided to post the clients letetr of reference and his response to forwarders and debt buyers to avoiding that part of their portfolio.

The collections industry is full of concerns, but none is talked about with as much astonishment as the climate created in West Virginia by the Attorney General, Darrell McGraw.  His office preys on credit-driven industry.  His ads, particularly one that depicts a greasy loan shark in a smoky room, speak to West Virginia consumers and advise them to utilize the services of the Attorney General when they have a debt they would rather not repay.  Sadly, many companies have opted to forfeit potential recovery in West Virginia.

A properly licensed company which owns paper in West Virginia and has access to documentation such as an original application or a monthly invoice which demonstrates consumer action on the account, has little to fear that would distinguish West Virginia from other states.  Atkins & Ogle Law Offices, LC has been working steadily to insulate clients from the AG, with training, security and file review.  A&O knows the WV attorneys and judges, and knows when to draw the line at filing suit, expending costs, contacting the debtor and working with the opposing attorneys. A&O has an excellent reputation for legal collection results and protection of its clients.  Don’t forfeit.  Use Atkins & Ogle!

Please accept this letter as my endorsement of Lighthouse Consulting and Phillip Duff as a consultant in the field of debt collection. This office hired Phillip earlier this year. He came to our facility, met our employees, digested our systems and quickly and clearly delivered a plan of action that we could follow to get us where we wanted to be as

a business, community member and employer.

Since that time we have a better understanding of our goals, better documentation of our policies and procedures, better visibility in the industry and most importantly – we no longer waste time and money wondering what we are missing. There isa greater comfort level, increased excitement amongst our staff and genuine sense of greater things

to come.

It is well worth your time to speak with Phillip Duff about the possibilities for your firm.

James B. Atkins

Atkins & Ogle office

]]> http://www.lighthouseconsultinginc.com/2011/10/debt-collections-in-west-virginia/feed/ 0 http://www.lighthouseconsultinginc.com/2011/10/watch-this-video-from-the-narca-fall-2011-conference/ http://www.lighthouseconsultinginc.com/2011/10/watch-this-video-from-the-narca-fall-2011-conference/#comments Wed, 26 Oct 2011 13:46:27 +0000 phil http://www.lighthouseconsultinginc.com/?p=334

NARCA conference fall 2011

Click on the picture and watch a video from NARCA Fall conference