How to Start a Million-Dollar Credit Repair Business

With just over three years of using Credit Repair Cloud, Jeff Rubens has helped more than 1,000 clients with Lightning Credit Solutions and achieved more than a million dollars in revenue by focusing on what he considers the key ingredients to a successful credit repair business:

• Exceptional customer service
• Calculated sales effort
• Scalability
• Automated process

Learn how Jeff and his team applied these philosophies to grow Lightning Credit Solutions to the reach their current level of success.

How Jeff Built His Million Dollar Business

When Lightning Credit Solutions first started, Jeff ran into his fair share of trials and tribulations which forced him and his team to rethink and refine their strategy. When reflecting on his growing pains, these four behaviors are what helped him achieve his Credit Repaid Cloud Millionaire Club status.

1. Focus on Customer Service

Before Jeff owned his own credit repair business, he worked for a larger, nationally known credit repair company. In that role, Jeff found himself frustrated by the lack of passion and service his company offered to their clients. Specifically, he was concerned about the number of customer service calls left unanswered or to which there was no response.

Jeff started his credit repair business with the belief that customers deserve better service than what existing companies offered.

The importance of customer service in credit repair

Every minute counts for credit repair clients. And, every day that a derogatory mark or error is left on their credit report, they go without the ability to:

• Secure a loan
• Buy a car
• Land a job

The stress and hardship that transpire from poor credit scores can actually lead to PTSD.

Those real-life consequences aren’t taken lightly by Jeff. Any successful credit repair specialist will find, they must be passionate about helping their clients overcome financial obstacles over any other aspect of the business. That means responding to every single client call with urgency.

Customer service significance, by the numbers

There are numerous data points that back up the importance of customer service for a successful business, from a financial standpoint, too. Most notably, there is a direct correlation between customer satisfaction and increased profits.

Here are three good reasons to give incredible customer service to your credit repair clients:

1. Did you know that it costs five times as much to attract a new customer than to keep an existing one? Offering consistently comprehensive customer service can help a credit repair business retain their clients, and therefore grow their bottom line.
2. Data suggests it’s much easier to sell to an existing customer than a new customer. The likelihood of selling to a new customer ranges from 5-20 percent, whereas cross-selling or upselling an existing customer is closer to 60-70 percent.
3. Exceptional customer service can lead to word-of-mouth referrals. According to the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, 67 percent of people spend money after getting recommendations from their friends or via reviews on social media, and happy customers tell 4-6 people about their experience.

Customer service makes it easier to grow a business with a steady (and happy) client base, and also makes a business more profitable.

2. Fine-Tune Your Sales Pitch

The sales pitch is a core component as you secure leads for your growing credit repair business. Your sales pitch should:

• Speak to the immediate need of your audience
• Set expectations for the relationship
• Add value to your customers

As Jeff and his team found, adding a special twist can improve your conversion rate, too. Consider the following:

Know your audience’s pain points

Apart from needing credit repair, do you know the specific reasons that brought your client to you? Credit repair is a complex industry that affects people in different ways. Poor credit can translate into:

• Inability to secure a mortgage
• Interest becoming too high to purchase a car
• Difficulty securing a job
• Losing a job

And what got your clients into their current position will vary as well:

• A hardship
• Natural disaster
• Victim of identity theft
• Money mismanagement

Every client you work with will have a different story, your sales pitch or outgoing marketing efforts should be agile enough to cover each of these bases. By understanding the crux of your client’s needs, you can help serve them and relate to them better.

Summarize and set expectations

Start with the initial contact and remain consistent throughout the entire client lifecycle. It’s imperative to set clear expectations with your clients at every step in the customer journey.

Credit repair can be a time-consuming process that requires multiple iterations of dispute letters to credit bureaus and creditors. After each call or meeting, summarize what was agreed and discussed. This practice eliminates confusion or false expectations that can lead to a dissatisfied client.

Offer something unique that your competition doesn’t

For Jeff, one of the unique value propositions that demonstrates his team’s emphasis on customer service is the Simple Audit credit analysis feature provided by Credit Repair Cloud. Simple Audit gives clients an overview of negative items on their credit reports to address within seconds of uploading their credit report to the software

Jeff says, “We offer the credit analysis as a complimentary add-on to our clients, and it’s become a component of our selling technique. People are always impressed they are going to get that.”

Because the Simple Audit feature is unique to the credit repair software Jeff uses, he’s able to convert more leads than his competitors.

3. Learn to Scale

One of the most common questions our millionaire’s club inductees ask is how to scale their business. That’s because many credit specialists don’t realize how large the need for credit repair is before they dive into the industry.

In order to scale a business one must consider the following:

Hire help

• Outsourcing can help maintain a low overhead by acquiring staff that’s less expensive than you (or a full-time employee) and has a more diverse skill set than you.
• Hiring a team member is a great option if you’d like to have more control over the quality and accessibility of your help. If you’re at a place where you can bring on additional staff, you can start to split responsibilities and grow your business faster than if you were to manage all the tasks by yourself. This is the route Jeff eventually took with Lightning Credit Solutions.

Leverage additional resources

If acquiring clients is the primary issue, Credit Repair Cloud offers several resources:

• Learn the basics of starting a credit repair business
• Take a credit repair certification class
• Discover the best ways to move your customers through your sales funnel
• Access additional tips for scaling a business

Get a mentor

Jeff’s story is one of many. Continue to seek advice from experts who understand the industry. Many credit repair specialists are happy to share their experience to help you get started.

Scaling will look different for every credit repair business. When in doubt, ask for guidance.

4. Automation Is Key

As Jeff and his team discovered, automation is the key to pulling the entire business process together, from customer service to scaling.

Introducing automation to business helps improve several areas of operation:

Reduce errors

The definition of automation is taking a manual task and using software to recreate the steps. Automation also removes the possibility for human error, which can be a time-consuming and expensive burden for a new organization to deal with.

With automation, a credit repair specialist can take redundant processes like sending dispute letters to creditors or credit bureaus and reproduce them with a click of a button using credit repair software. Through automation, manual effort is reduced, human error is decreased, and clients receive the service they need with fewer hiccups.

Improve productivity

Automation also improves productivity for entrepreneurs and their team:

• Insights and Metrics: Automating a process allows organizations to start collecting data to analyze for business improvements. Can you see which products or services have the highest impact on revenue, should you promote these services more? Can you streamline your process to reduce the time spent on each service to maximize profit? Successful businesses have intelligence showing where they should make improvements.
• Billing: Chasing down clients who haven’t paid their invoices is a tedious task. Automating the billing cycle and offering a subscription-based payment method can reduce the time you spend chasing down payments, and the money you spend processing payments.
• Freeing time and attention: With fewer tasks for you or your staff to focus on, you have more time to spend on items that can’t be replaced through automation. Face-to-face client communication, networking, or building your brand are valid uses of your newly found time.

According to Jeff, “Saving time is a huge challenge in this industry. Everything that takes time eats into sales, eats into productivity, eats into the time we can be helping our clients,” which makes automation critical for success.

Create consistency with customer service

With business process automation, you can develop a standard level of operation when it comes to customer service. Automation makes it so that any time a customer calls in, they can expect:

• Easily accessible account information
• Insight into what occurred during their last interaction
• Undivided attention

Lightning Credit Solutions uses credit repair software to implement automation and adjust the way they historically worked throughout the day. With CRC they are able to:

• Schedule e-mails to progress client communication each week
• Set reminders to check in with clients after certain milestones like one day or one week after a dispute letter has been sent
• Automatically populating templates for dispute letters to eliminate manual work
• Import and export reports to transparently show where a client is starting, and how your services have helped them against the progress that has been made

By improving business processes, your organization will waste less time and resources. Further, you’ll improve the ability to make data-driven decisions, which promotes increased revenue.

Grow Your Own Million Dollar Business

Jeff and his team couldn’t have achieved the level of success they’re currently enjoying if it wasn’t for the features, automation and education that Credit Repair Cloud’s technology provided for them.

The credit repair software (and support) from Credit Repair Cloud is available to anyone who has interest, passion, and hunger to succeed. If you’re ready to see what it means to be a credit hero, check out our live web training.

Learn how simple it is to start your own credit repair business, and how you can grow and scale your business to become a million dollar organization.