Wilson Cole's Podcast From The Road

One of the best and worst things about our modern business world is that people who are looking for specific services can find them with a quick search on the internet. The first page of results that they see will most likely be the only ones that they click on and explore. This has led us to start working hard on our client’s websites and our own website to make sure that we are in the top of every Google search. Question: How is this done? Answer: by getting it SEO. SEO means that it pulls up in searches by strategically creating content on your website that has keywords which Google will find and use to pull your website up in the search results. If you just shuddered at the phrase “creating content”, you are not alone. There seems to be this deep-rooted hatred from companies in regard to writing articles to put up on their websites. The most common question from our clients is: if I write an article, who is going to read it? Every company is trying to work as efficiently as possible and content creation s

We have spoken in the past about counter suits and the various reasons that they can occur, but this article will go a bit deeper into how we work to help prevent them. First, it is important to note, that about 80% of our collections are done in house and no attorney is every involved. For most agencies, 30% to 35% of the collections will be given in attorney fees for outside counsel. We do not have that problem because of our in-house counsel that is included in the initial fee; this is one of the ways that we provide an additional safety net for you. At any point in time, our company is dealing with about four hundred active lawsuits and three counter suits. Notice, our counter suits account for about 3% rather than the standard 10% of other companies. This is because we work hard to watch for situations that may lead to counter suit and advise our clients on how to avoid them. Sometimes, we can see them coming from a mile away and those are generally ones that involve employees with harassment issues or o

Wilson Cole, President of Adams, Evens, & Ross (AER), and Ally Cole, brand manager for ELOC Global, explore lead generation using LinkedIn. Ally says that LinkedIn is such a good place for lead generation because when people log in to LinkedIn, they are typically already in a business mindset. While people may log in to Facebook to post pictures of their family, Twitter to read the news, or Instagram to document their dinner, the general consensus is that LinkedIn is for business. It is also more efficient to target people on LinkedIn because of the information that people post to their profile: the school they went to, the company they work for, their specific position, etc. Ally says that LinkedIn can also be used to stay current with pain points of a specific person, company, or industry, which can of course be used as a segue to offering your services. Wilson says that at AER, they combine LinkedIn marketing with telemarking, but not telemarketing in the form of robo-calls. Wilson does not believe tha

Wilson Cole, President of Adams, Evens, & Ross (AER) and Samantha Cole, in-house counsel for AER, give advice on some things they’ve found in client contracts that can be “ticking time bombs” which prevent successful collection down the road. The specific example that Wilson and Samantha are eager to warn clients to keep out of their contracts because they saw it in a contract recently and it made them scratch their heads is something similar to “the prevailing party will have their court costs paid by the other party.” Wilson likens this language to an open invitation for the debtor to sue you if the court does not side in your favor. When cases are escalated to AER, those that go through the collections process that need to have a suit filed are sent to AER’s forwarding attorneys. In all but one type of scenario, the suits are filed on a contingency basis and doesn’t cost the client anything other than court costs. The one scenario where the suit is filed but the attorneys bill by the hour is when there

Wilson Cole, President of Adams, Evens, & Ross (AER) and Samantha Cole, in-house counsel for AER, revisit the important topic of getting a signed contract. Samantha explains how disheartening it can be to receive a case that looks perfect for collections in by all other indications but then it turns out the contract is not signed. If you’ve had clients give excuses for not signing the contract or putting it off, she says you would be far from the first. Some of the popular excuses include “the fax machine is not working,” “we don’t have a scanner,” “the printer is out of ink,” or the catch-all “we were just too busy last week to sign.” Samantha says that even though all of those excuses don’t really count since cell phones can basically replace all of those machines when it comes to signing a document, the bulletproof solution is to use a service like Docusign. For a nominal monthly fee you can upload any document to Docusign, drop in as many signature, initial, or other boxes as you want, and email it to

Wilson Cole, President of Adams, Evens, & Ross (AER) is joined by Ally Cole, brand manager for ELOC Global, to look further at positioning yourself (or your company) as an expert. Wilson believes that a good tool to position yourself as an expert, even though it may be a little old school, is regularly sending out an e-newsletter that provides good value and is not too self-promoting. That is not to say you can’t add in any information about promotions you might have going on with your products or services, but that should definitely not be the focus of (or distract from) the newsletter. Ally says that when thinking about the content to put in an e-newsletter, remember the first rule of a good marketing campaign: put yourself in your customer’s shoes and ask what they would want to read about. Next, Ally says it is important to make the content easy to understand. Wilson says that if you have multiple clients ask the same question in a period of time, such as a month, answering that question could be grea

Wilson Cole, President of Adams, Evens, & Ross (AER) and Ally Cole, brand manager for AER, are talking about customers’ websites (staffing firms’ websites) showing up as unsecured, after just finishing their annual travel season. Ally explains that this is in no way a small or insignificant problem, though unfortunately some clients may view it that way. First, the URL is going to notify potential visitors that such websites are not secure. That’s a credibility hit right off the bat, on top of the fact that even if the content on the website is high quality and a person would consider making a purchase, they are less likely to give their information to a website their browser/search engine is telling them is unsecured (aka untrustworthy). To be clear, it is not only one specific type of browser that has made it a point to notify users very clearly they are about to visit an unsecured website; this is basically all browsers (Chrome, IE, Firefox, etc). People fear, and rightfully so, that unsecured websites

Wilson Cole, President of Adams, Evens, & Ross (AER) and Samantha Cole, in-house counsel and wearer of many hats for AER, finish their series on the top excuses for back door hires. On top of these podcasts, AER is also hosting a free webinar on the topic of back door hires. If you want more information about the webinar, feel free to send an email to Wilson@aercollections.com. Excuse number 7 is when the company says “we didn’t hire the candidate as an employee, we hired them as a consultant” and excuse number 8 is “we hired them for another position.” These two excuses are different, but at the same time very similar, so Wilson discusses them together. For excuse number 8, Wilson has seen that sometimes it turns out to be an honest mistake due to poor communication or poor processes internally at a company, where a candidate was accidentally hired for another position. Of course he as has also seen where it was not an accident, but a company intentionally trying to avoid paying placement fees. For excus

Ally Cole, brand manager for Adams, Evens, & Ross (AER) and Wilson Cole, President of AER, discuss creating hype for your webinars to make people want to watch them. Ally says that laying the ground work for successfully marketing your webinar is similar to the concept of dating. In dating, instead of asking the person to marry you on the first date, the odds of a successful relationship are much better if you gradually build anticipation and excitement over time and after several encounters. So for your webinar, you can increase the odds of successfully marketing it by going over bits and pieces with clients weeks or months in advance. This way the clients are looking forward to watching the webinar instead of having it “forced on them.” Wilson says this process of previewing pieces of or themes from the webinar is similar to a trailer for a movie. It makes people want to watch the movie, and given the resources that go into creating a webinar, you want people to watch it of course; as many people as pos

Wilson Cole, President of Adams, Evens, & Ross (AER) and Samantha Cole, in-house counsel for AER, continue the theme of the previous podcast; “excuses debtor companies give for back door hires.” First up for this podcast is “we hired the candidate, but they did not last the 90 days.” When Wilson hears this excuse, his first hope is that the creditor’s signed contract with the company has a clause that says something to the effect of “our guarantee is contingent upon payment being made in a timely manner.” There are of course examples where a client honestly just lost track of time and ended up paying slightly behind schedule or outside of a defined “timely manner” window. If the client company is otherwise punctual with payments or a longtime client, it is probably better for business to just let go of honest mistakes. Wilson makes clear these are not the types of client companies being talked about here. The companies being talked about here are ones that never paid, had no desire to pay, and/or ignored

Wilson Cole, President of Adams, Evens, & Ross (AER) and Samantha Cole, in-house counsel for AER, sit down to discuss 2 more excuses companies give for back door hires. The top phrase that Wilson looks out for when evaluation whether the back door hire was an honest mistake or specifically planned by a person who never planned on paying the staffing or recruiting agency is “we never signed an agreement.” Wilson does not get surprised when an attorney says that phrase because it’s a standard procedure for creating a defense, which is their job. But if that phrase comes from anyone else, especially the owner of the company, it’s a totally different story. Wilson and Samantha both emphasize the importance of the recruiting or staffing agency having a signed contract. Half of the cases that AER receives are ones where there are no signed contracts but AER is still able to collect, however AER is able to collect 50% more (on average) when there is a signed contract, on top of their being an overall higher coll

Wilson Cole, President of Adams, Evens, & Ross (AER) and Ally Cole, brand manager for AER, run down a list of SEO hints and tips to improve your marketing. Ally said one key component is using content to boost your SEO. To do this, you would write content and then post it to Facebook or other sites and create backlinks from the content to your website. The way the Google algorithm works with SEO is that it’s all about credibility; credibility is built by having your website referenced in more places. One of the benefits of using Recruiting and Staffing Solutions Magazine’s (RSSM) services is that you can publish content to the magazine and create backlinks to your website, on top of the exposure you get from the magazine article in the first place. AER itself utilizes these SEO techniques and the proof is in the Google search results when you search for such things as “staffing debt” or “past due debt” and the top results are AER and ELOC Global pages. Ally says that SEO is similar to how a spider-web is

Ally Cole, brand manager for ELOC Global, and Wilson Cole, President of Adams, Evens, & Ross (AER) discuss marketing to different demographics using different strategies on today’s podcast. Different audiences on different social media platforms respond differently to the content that they experience. For example, skilled marketers would communicate to audiences on Facebook differently from how they would communicate to audiences on Instagram. Skilled marketers can also pick which of their social media posts are worth the extra effort to get them promoted or boosted, which will help them reach a larger audience. Advertising can be deployed alongside social media posts. Ally says it is also important to remember what part of the buying process someone is in when they see your advertisement. For example, a banner advertisement on Facebook is a gentle reminder of who your company is, while a Google AdWords advertisement is more active because at that point the person is searching for someone to collect their

Samantha Cole, in-house counsel for Adams, Evens, & Ross (AER), and Wilson Cole, President of AER take a few minutes today to talk about top excuses companies give for back door hires. Annually, AER interacts with about 3,000 staffing and recruiting firms globally (about 1,500 staffing and about 1,500 recruiting). The terminology for back door hires differs slightly depending on the industry and can also be known as “tempnapping” or “conversions.” Excuse number one is that the company “already knew the candidate.” This could be that the candidate used to work for the company, the candidate worked with the company on a project some time in the past, or the company just knew the candidate due to their visibility within the industry. This specific excuse is vague and just plain not good enough. Samantha goes on to explain that companies know a lot of people, and ironically, she gets to “know” the attorneys of other companies when they try to use this excuse. But what does that even mean? Just because a compa

Ally Cole, brand manager for ELOC Global, and Wilson Cole, President of Adams, Evens, & Ross (AER) discuss lead magnets and engagement on the podcast today. Wilson says that lead magnets used to be known as direct response advertising, but while the name has changed over the years, the function is the same. Instead of a company advertising directly to customers to buy their product, they advertise for other goodies that will get the customers in the door (or in this case onto a website), such as a free whitepaper or a free report on a topic that would be of interest to the customer. Once the customer is looking at the website, the rest of the sales funnel hopefully guides the customer to making a purchase. Each sales funnel that follows a lead magnet is custom-made for the types of customers that would be interested in the specific lead magnet they chose. For example, a client who chose a lead magnet related to finding back door hires would enter a corresponding sales funnel that would lead to a probable

Wilson Cole, President of Adams, Evens, & Ross (AER) takes a minute to go over marketing and its importance to those who wish to succeed in the collections industry. The person who plays a big role in marketing related to AER is Ally Cole (ally@elocglobal.com), Wilson’s daughter. In this and future podcast episodes, she and Wilson will explain the marketing processes that AER employs to land clients. AER has over 3,000 staffing and recruiting clients (which translates to a large market share). AER coordinates with Recruiting and Staffing Solutions Media (RSSM) to build and maintain its list of clients. RSSM can help your company with SEO, branded magazines, websites, and other marketing services too if you so desire. The main marketing lesson for this podcast is videos and their effectiveness at conversion (of potential clients into paying clients). Video marketing’s increased effectiveness lies in being more visually and verbally stimulating than a long marketing emails filled with hundreds of words that

Wilson Cole, President of Adams, Evens, & Ross (AER) and Samantha Cole, in-house counsel for AER, explore the specifics of what happens when a debtor makes an offer to settle part of their debt with a client. First and foremost, Wilson completely understands that these offers can frustrate clients even further, after already being frustrated from having to jump through hoops to get money owed to them by the debtor in the first place. But he says AER is legally bound to present the offers to its clients, even if they are low offers, most of the times an offer is made. Samantha goes on explain it is important to relay offers to clients if the debtor has substantially changed the offer since the last time or if a long period of time has elapsed since the last offer. It is important both legally and ethically. Something important for clients to consider when hearing offers from debtors, even if they are offering below the minimum the client has said they are willing to accept, is the potential net gain if the

Wilson Cole, President of Adams, Evens, & Ross (AER) and Samantha Cole, in-house counsel for AER, explain the importance of never telling a client you have voided their contract. First of all, if a staffing agency is turning over a case for collections they should always turn over all information they have related to the case (good, bad, or indifferent) at the onset. Failure to do so can lead to the collections firm being ambushed and ultimately sink the chances of collecting on the debt. Lately AER has encountered an uptick in the number of cases where clients have for whatever reason failed to include a key piece of “bad” information initially or at all (until it was too late). Wilson has begun asking clients “is there any documentation or information that is not going to help your case?” in an effort to get out in front of such situations. One particular example of “bad” information that is regularly left out by clients is that the contract between the staffing agency and the client was voided. This in

Webinars as marketing tools are what Wilson Cole, President of Adams, Evens, & Ross (AER) and Ally Cole, brand manager for ELOC Global, expand on during this podcast. For the purposes of this podcast, Wilson specifies that he is talking about longer webinars, such as 45 minutes or longer, not short videos, such as those under 5 minutes long. Ally points out how webinars can be part of the content portfolio that a person or company can put together to help position them as an expert in their industry or field. Assuming the value is sufficient enough, people will come to you for the content, instead of you having to go to them. Content such as webinars will also help build rapport between you and potential or current clients.

Wilson Cole, President of Adams, Evens, & Ross (AER) Ally Cole, brand manager for ELOC Global, sit down to talk about positioning yourself in your industry/market as an expert. Wilson explains how he learned years ago the importance of positioning yourself as an expert in your industry, so he has been doing the same thing for himself and AER for years. According to Ally, one of the best things about being an expert in your industry/market is that it increases the odds potential clients will come to you instead of you having to go to them. There is an important difference in the dynamic because when it comes time for the sale, people feel like you’re offering them something, which increases the odds of a sale more than if you have to go to the client and people feel as if you’re asking them to buy something.