When I started out in my land investing business, I had a few awful options for handling it. I’m guessing you do to.
The first option? Do it yourself.
This always winds up being soul destroying.
You have to spend Sunday’s manually entering in customer payments into a spreadsheet.
Worse, as the spreadsheet grows, you never are sure of the math! Early payments? How do you handle them? Missed payments? Let’s go digging around for that formula again…
The absolute worst is when customers call you up to ask what their current balance was. The response? “Hi Chuck, I’ll have Mary (my made up assistant) call you back in a minute. I don’t have it right in front of me.” Hours later the document is found, the numbers are double and triple checked, and you follow-up.
The most frustrating situation is having to make collection calls and sending emails every time a customer is late. Forget to send an email or make a call? Suddenly more payments go missing.
Granted, we’re always told that we should be grateful for our thriving business. However nobody ever told us that success was a picture of my head stuck in a filing cabinet. Sunday used to be family time, which is far more important than business. But not with the wild success!
So I hired a fancy note collection company to solve all my problems…
Problem is, they have a monthly fee, note setup fees and worse they never solve your customer’s problems… You still have to deal with late payments, paperwork to the 3rd party and unhappy borrowers.
So, for “a mere” $829 per note per year you are “beaming” with confidence in your math and now have automated payments. Pretty pricey setup and still not saving that much time.
“Why can’t I Just get a computer to do it for me?!?!?”
With software you’d be able to:
- Have your Sundays back
- Likely have your Saturdays back too 😉
- Guarantee that you aren’t overpaying an accountant who always manages to charge a hefty fee each tax season despite doing a mediocre job
- Avoid dealing with a note servicing company which is doing approximately half of your job while leaving you stressed out about the rest.
This is the point in our lives where we turn to the almighty GOOGLE!
The first five or ten solutions that pop up look like they were built back in the 90s. Why on earth can you speak to a speaker in the corner of your room that turns the lights off and on but can’t find a note servicing or payment plan software that doesn’t require a floppy disk?!?
One of the companies I found had a relatively decent solution but they wanted to charge me $40,000 just to get set up!!
I don’t know about you but despite business going well I’d rather buy a new self-driving Tesla than put down $40,000 just to get started with some software!
Finally I found one that came close but their fees were all over the map. It wasn’t clear to me when I’d get charged and after some initial testing realized that I’d quickly rack up thousands of dollars in hidden fees.
I had enough of the searching, decided forego my self-driving robotic Tesla and instead built a software solution from scratch.
Call me crazy (because anybody who decides to follow-through on their promise to build software is) but one year later and I finally have the solution I’ve always wanted.
I wanted software that would:
- Automatically charge customers on their due date,
- Automate the accounting around interest, principal, and service fees,
- Provide customers a dashboard where they could login, view their balances, and make payments with ease,
- Give downloadable reports at the end of the year that you could just send over to your accountant
- Manage collections messages without having to rely on an army of virtual assistants
- Timely support when I couldn’t figure out why on earth the software wasn’t working!
So here’s the deal. I’m not going to charge you the cost of a Tesla to save you the headaches of note servicing.
I’m also not going to stick you with some hidden fees because you are suddenly wildly successful (although I totally would take a ride in your newly purchased helicopter).
