Picture this: you’re a business that just made a sale, and you’re excited because soon you will receive a payment vital to your survival. However, the payment never seems to clear, and your customer won’t pick up the phone. If this sounds familiar, how do you respond?
Well, many businesses, due to their limited bandwidth to litigate, acknowledge the loss and do nothing further. Jeremy Crane, the founder of Retrievables, thinks there may be another way to collect on delinquent accounts. The New York-based entrepreneur, after a short stint in law, has developed a marketplace connecting collections attorneys with businesses who desire to collect on delinquent accounts.
“Finally, business owners have an easy way to collect what they are owed. In exchange for their services, attorneys receive a success fee of sorts,” Crane told Benzinga during an exclusive chat.
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Crane began working on the idea more than a half-decade ago. He was super hands-on at the start and, later, tapped investors including Capital Innovators, a Missouri-based accelerator, as well as Lightbank, for about a million dollars in funding to bring the idea to market and create a support network based in Europe and Asia.
“Since then, our growth has increased substantially. Up until that point, there were times when I was making hundreds of cold calls per day to attorneys and businesses,” Crane elaborated. The growth comes mostly, now, from referrals and paid advertising.
When asked about the success prospective users of Retrievables may see, Crane pointed Benzinga to the testimonials on the Retrievables website. He explained that the stories are, in part, what inspired him to keep working so hard at the idea.
“We’ve got attorneys on the cusp of retiring who don’t want to retire. Because this is such a new space, many people see this as a land grab. Their hesitation to retire is indicative of the positive way they feel about Retrievables.”
Typical collections range in the thousands, but could get into the millions, Crane implied. “We get cases up to $200,000 attorneys are pursuing and collecting.” When cases are resolved, for their efforts, attorneys are paid “a fee based on their success.”
This isn’t the first time a startup has taken a shot at accounts receivables, to note. “A difference between us and competitors, like a CallBox, is that they are more focused on being an accounts receivable management system,” Crane explained. “This means that they don’t do anything with collections, and they don’t have a marketplace.”
Within the next year, Crane is looking to add more team members and lines of business.
“We provide demand letters in-house for companies, and we would like to see that grow a lot. We want to be able to get larger enterprise clients with this and, this next year, I think we will become the go-to place for collecting on delinquent accounts receivables.”
Interested in learning more about Retrievables, visit their website.
Image and article originally from www.benzinga.com. Read the original article here.