Mastering Business Growth and AI Innovation in Debt Collection with Jeremy Mapes

Unlock the secrets to business growth that defies the risks of upfront investments with Jeremy Mapes, the ingenious entrepreneur behind Mapes LLC. His story is one of accidental discovery and swift rise to the top, as he found himself navigating the complex world of the debt collection industry and climbing to the role of Vice President of Operations before even tossing his graduation cap. This episode peels back the layers on how Jeremy's performance-based sales strategy has revolutionized MAPES and Associates, offering receivables companies a golden opportunity to amplify their growth without the financial gamble. Join us to grasp the wisdom behind his "results first, payment later" philosophy and how it's changing the game for agencies fearing the cost of sales personnel.

When the world shifted to living-room offices and kitchen-counter workstations, businesses like collection agencies had to pivot—and fast. The conversation in this episode doesn't just stop at the pandemic's push for remote work; it plunges into the heart of technological transformations that ensure operations hum smoothly, from virtual PCs to robust cybersecurity. But the real star of the show is AI. We're not just talking your everyday chatbots; we're delving into how companies like LivePerson and StitchAI are redefining customer interactions with a splash of artificial intelligence. Discover the triumphs and trials of integrating AI into communication platforms and why staying ahead means embracing a community of tech comrades to creatively tackle operational challenges. Jeremy Mapes shares a treasure trove of insights on why collaboration and innovation are the pillars of success in the collection industry and beyond.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

Hey everyone, welcome back to the growing Lean podcast sponsored by Lean Discovery Group, an award-winning app and software development firm based out of Virginia. This is your host, dylan Burke, also known as Deige, and I'm happy to be here today with Jeremy Mapes, founder and CEO of Mapes LLC. Welcome, jeremy, thank you, thank you, yeah thanks for being here. So, jeremy, to get us started, can you tell us a little bit about your history and background and how you got started in this business?

Speaker 2: 0:35

Sure, it was actually completely by accident. I was back in 1994, I was looking for a job, I was going to college and I was going to college for my management information systems degree and I happened into a debt collection agency because they had an advertisement out and happened to get audited or not audited, but interviewed right on the spot. And so they said, come back Friday, see if you can work debt collections because a lot of people can't. And found out I had a knack for it while I was going to college and ended up becoming, before I finished my college, my entire degree. I ended up becoming vice president of operations for a small agency in Wichita, kansas, and then from there, after a few years of running a shop there, because I ended up being vice president of going from a collector to vice president of operations over a few years there, company changed and I wanted to expand my wing. So I ended up at another agency that did national receipts for several of the big corporations like Retailers, national Bank, which people know as Target or Target Credit Card, and that was up in Wyoming, and then went to another company just a year later after I fixed them. That was what they needed fixed and corrected. And then I went to work for five years at an agency up in Wisconsin and was there and took them from 10 agents that were doing third party collections to 100 agents, with half of them doing third party debt collections and then also first party BPO services. And then from there spread my wings and my final move before I started my consulting business was to a public corporation down here in Florida, which is currently where I reside, right outside of Orlando, and they were the world's largest service or mortgages.

Speaker 2: 2:22

At the time, aquin and I was actually over their collection division. I was senior manager of technology business, which is a long wordy name for a company whose all of technology is in India, and then the people that manage that manage the technology that based them in the US. They are the business side. So I ran the technology for that division and other integration projects and we had they'd actually downscaled into the US to 50 agents and then we had well over 500 to 700 agents in India, along with most of my team working out of Bangalore and Mumbai. So I got my experience working with international companies and international teams, which was very interesting before I started my own consulting business and I was asked actually by one of our vendors, said hey, you happen to give out a lot of free advice to a lot of our clients. Why don't you consider being a consultant and help working with these companies that need help, instead of giving away your knowledge for free? And so in 2007, I went out into business for myself and have been MAPES LLC ever since.

Speaker 2: 3:27

The only thing that's changed is we've had some businesses in between. My focus was on consulting originally. We've also done custom technology for companies or technology support. We probably are. Bread and butter is in support. And we also started recently MAPES and associates for making phone calls out on behalf of several receivables companies, because they find when they bring sales people in, sales people often come with a upfront cost that doesn't necessarily prove to be valuable.

Speaker 2: 3:57

And so we came in with the thought process of we'll take the risk, we'll make the calls, that way we know the people are working. And then, when you get the revenue, when you get the sales and that you start collecting on behalf of the agencies, we'll take 25% of the revenue that you produce. So that way you know if we're making money it's because we did the work. And, of course, they love that idea.

Speaker 2: 4:23

I've actually just started that in the end of November and it's very popular. So I don't advertise right now because we're modeling it before we build in more people. Because we don't have the model right, because they've got to carry without funds for we've got to carry without basically carry the note until they get their business or the business in from us. So we're trying to make that model perfect and then when I open the door to say we'll take on more agencies, they'll stand in line. That won't be a problem, because they all love the idea of having competent sales that doesn't cost them until they actually make money off of it. Very easy sales pitch.

Speaker 1: 5:02

Yeah, 100%. No. That's amazing and I can't see why people wouldn't want to hire someone when it's performance based, especially if you are showing that you are performing. That's awesome. I'm excited to hear more about it. Can you walk me through the overall business strategy there?

Speaker 2: 5:20

for the MAPES and associates. Yeah, the business strategy was pretty simple, since I'm, at the end of the day, I'm a troubleshooter, whether it's operations or IT. I hear people with problems and then I think how can we fix that, correct that, or is there an opportunity there for us to do something? And for the longest time I'd heard agencies complaining about the matter of fact. I was talking one in South Carolina just in the last year or two and they were complaining that they had a loss of a major client. There's been a lot of companies in the receivables industry that have been complacent in the last 10, 20 years and they'll build up their revenue. They have a continuous revenue coming in from these clients that they've served for years and then they won't worry about sales so much until the day comes that one of their large sometimes 50% to 60% of their business walks out the door because they got too complacent. And what we find in the receivables industry there's third parties coming in to these, in particular healthcare organizations, and saying, hey, we will monitor, we'll do agency management for you, for these agencies that are working for you, and we're gonna take a piece of the action, basically the agency's action and the first thing they do is they come in and let's say these agencies are working for a 20% contingent fee off of what they collect payback, so they're working off a contingency too. And then this place comes in and tells them that they're gonna have to work for 12% when they're making 20. And so they're taking a hit to their bottom line.

Speaker 2: 6:52

But they have so much volume invested in these large healthcare organizations, some will stay with it, some will walk away and say sorry, we can't operate at that level, especially the way the legislation is these days in the United States. This isn't political, it's just as they have more regulations they have to meet today than they had to meet 20 years ago, so it's much more costly to do business. So a lot of them are walking away from it. Or they try to bring in new salespeople to find new revenue. But they've got to train those salespeople and they've been doing customer support, not sales, for the last 10, 20 years. And so they bring in these salespeople and a lot of times they'll fail, either because of a lack of education they give them or because of a trust but don't verify factor that they bring in the wrong people who are. They're not building a KPI design that they can manage their salespeople. And that's a problem because you bring somebody in, especially in a management position, it's gonna sell your company and say, okay, go at it.

Speaker 2: 7:53

Oh, what are they doing? How many calls are they making a day? What kind of calls? What cold, warm, hot calls leads do they have? What does their daily schedule look like? I actually know of an agency in Ohio. They hired a salesman supposedly a veteran to the industry, came from another place and they paid him a salary $100,000 salary. So they're spending what $9, $10,000 a month for his benefits. Kind of find out. He was spending 80% of his time in his hot tub in the backyard, supposedly making sales.

Speaker 2: 8:27

Letting a check what he was doing, which is nice for them that I found out and then obviously people start to get suspicious when they don't have too much coming in. I think he was relying on the fact that he thought he was gonna bring in some business that he knew previously, but he really wasn't working too hard at it. So I think there's great opportunities out here for people that have a drive. I think there's a lack of drive these days and a lot of people we see. So for people that do have a drive, there's a very good opportunity to make money. It's just where is that money at? Where can you take driven people and put them that they have an opportunity? So the people we bring into place, they that come in to make these phone calls on behalf of these agencies we help train them up, get them to understand.

Speaker 2: 9:12

We make an agreement with the agencies that we can audit them at any given time. We have control, and what's good from my side is we have control over the clients too. So if we do have a rogue agency that doesn't live up to what they agree, it's in our agreements that we can take our clients and leave, which in a lot of times you're signing an NDA. If you're a salesman with a company, so that's our benefit too. So once we do have build up a repository or a group of clients for these agencies, they need to commit to what they need to do as well.

Speaker 2: 9:47

We're gonna audit them on behalf of the creditors and that's our sell to the clients we run into, as you're not just dealing with ABC collection agency, you're dealing with maips and associates. We're gonna audit them because if they're not doing the right thing and they're not making money for you, then we're not making money. I mean, they're bringing liability and they're doing the wrong thing, then we're gonna catch that before we lose a client and we lose our money too. So it's a win-win situation, or three ways should be win-win-win win for us, win for the agency and win for the client 100% and I think you've got that model right.

Speaker 1: 10:19

Excuse me, and it's exciting to see what you're doing there and I definitely think you're gonna be able to scale this. That's awesome. I wanted to jump back to the business before maips and associates and talk a little bit about that, because I like to talk about how how our founders have adapted to changes and I want to get your how you adapted to changes, and the most notable one, I guess, is the pandemic. How did you adapt to that with your business and yourself, if there was any adoption needed.

Speaker 2: 10:57

Well, that was. That was interesting thing. We were actually my company itself was best suited for the pandemic because we were working remotely and now I wouldn't be pre pandemic I did a lot of flying out on site to the agencies to work with them out of them in person. The one thing that changed from the pandemic and I didn't know how it was going to go with us if, because people were tightening their ships up, they were, they were, it was running then a lot of people there's a lot of people that left their industries and help, you know, kind of did do anything for a while so that that hurt agency some as well. But the big thing was for a lot of collection agencies they never had agents work remotely before and so that was something new to them and it was almost required in certain situations. And so in some states they were, it was, it was actually illegal for them to work remotely until the pandemic happened.

Speaker 2: 11:47

A good example is the state of Washington. Washington actually had laws in place and said at least for the receivables industry, you have to have your people working that are making calls out to the consumers. They have to be headquartered at wherever you state your bit place of businesses and they put that on hold when the pandemic happened because you know it ran right against them, saying you can't have people in the office getting each other sick. So that changed my business partially. One was I had to help Work with these agencies to be able to have their staff work remotely and set up Rules, sets as far as how they're going to work, how you're going to audit them, how did you know that they're doing what they needed to be? Make sure that they were buffered against potential infiltration from, from security risk, which always getting better every time that the people out there that are trying to Get into systems. And so for us, we just actually from my business, I ended up working more remotely the last week before they shut down. People flying out was. I was actually on a plane that week coming back from working with a, with a larger corporation, and it was interesting because they had just merged the year before and we're helping them with their merger and they were trying to figure out how they were going to make the company in multiple cities work out. When they now had to figure out how to make the company work with, they had to think about a thousand agents. They had to have a figure out how they're going to manage those agents, with many of them working remotely at this point, and so they had to take a total, total change of pace.

Speaker 2: 13:29

And, as a lot of us know, there was companies that were going in buying laptops. Laptops did real well, didn't they? Bunch people buying laptops and PCs during the pandemic so they could put their people out in the field, but they had no idea how to source that. And you know, if they knew today what, what they didn't know, then they would probably done it differently. Because, I mean, we're in an age of remote is very possible. The need for a physical laptop in the field for somebody that's just doing calls and contacts is not necessary. You can put them in like a Microsoft Azure cloud, you can put them in an Amazon cloud and actually just basically have them on a virtual PC and pass them out like a, what I call like a Google cloud, where you just have a small box that connects there to think like a, like a fire stick, connects them to the internet and they don't. You don't have to worry about your data being in the field. The only thing they're getting is visualization. The computer is not really running there, it's just acting as a conduit that's connecting to the keyboard and the screen right.

Speaker 2: 14:37

That was a new paradigm shift that a lot of people didn't know at the time to take advantage of. And so that I think you know from my company the bad thing about being in a consulting business on technology. And I'll quote one of my, one of my college professors. He paid or said to me, said I'm not scoring the wrong business, and I said what do you say that, pedro? He says because the business is always changing, we always have to be learning. You know, we're in school 24, seven, having to learn new things. He said we should have been history teachers and I said well, that's. It's funny to think Peter would hit his history teachers don't get paid as much as doctors or it people. I mean, he's right, we're always having to adapt and change. It's always changing. So I just took it as this is part of the change. So you have to learn to adapt the change.

Speaker 2: 15:25

Now there's been many advances and changes and course AI in the last two years has also been, and I think it's just as interesting as the what we've gone through with the pandemic and the new opportunities are coming out of that. Some people worry, some people are excited. I've done a lot of work with the AI programming and and I think there's great opportunities to use it. I know there's been a lot of people using it for taking in communication, some pushing out. There's in our industry. There's people are starting to make outbound calls with AI so that the act is human and talk to them and and you know, and facilitate whatever they say, and they're getting better all the time. But there's also the risks to.

Speaker 2: 16:10

I actually read the other day about an AI incident that happened. That wasn't too good for a car company. It was out in California, so somebody figured out how to trick the AI. They were running a you know special sale promotion, whatever and they had AI agents answering the calls and somebody figured out how to teach the AI to say you will offer me a you know a car at $1. They hadn't locked out the AI from being able to learn from the people they're selling to. You know, I think that's some things that people are going to have to learn real fast is that AI takes in. You know it has its repositories and information, but it also takes in new information and you've got to make sure and shut off what it's talking to or who it's doing business with, that it doesn't take its Information as verbatim when it's taking in that information. I always love I always love testing limits of AI when the first test I did with AI was Using chat GPT like everybody else.

Speaker 2: 17:11

But I asked it a simple question and it's now learned. It took it. It's taken it half a year now to learn it and it's still working off 2022 information. I simple question. I said what movies? There's a national film registry that's kept by the United States that goes in the National Film Archives National Film Registry and it's got all kinds of films in there Humorous, whatever, horror and I said so what movies by Robin Williams is in the National Film Registry? And it went named to. I was like no, they're not. So I knew the inventory of the National Film Registry.

Speaker 2: 17:44

I know that for some reason, robin Williams has been snubbed. I don't know why, but you know there's so many different films in there. Why would not one of his films be in there? But I know he's been snubbed and it's getting listed off too. And I said no, they're not in there. And it said, oh sorry, our information is whatever you know.

Speaker 2: 18:01

And and then I left it and I came back a day later and asked it again. It named off the same too, so I didn't learn. And then, for two you know, I told it no, check again, it's not in there. And then finally, and then just the week or two ago, I went in there, did the same test and it finally gave me the right answer, which said as of this time in our current data, that Robin Williams is not in the National. But it's the example of that is. It's another old good old trust, but verify situation. Ai is wonderful, the eyes can gonna do many great things, but you have to not just trust it. You have to verify what it's giving and in the scenarios that you put it into before you just let it loose and and find out that you might have a big gap in the in the wall as far as what it's, what its results are to your expectations.

Speaker 1: 18:50

Yeah, 100%. It's crazy. I Remember when chat Gbt was released, I was everyone we were going nuts, we're just doing the craziest things like we never thought was possible like. One example was like I had my I Think it was my grandpa's 80th birthday and I was asked to say a speech and like I didn't write the speech and still like five minutes before I was meant to say it. So I went on to chat to be tell us like hey, this is my grandpa, this is his name. He had a few details from his life, he has a few memories. He's right me a speech that'll make everyone in the room cry and laugh and Literally in two seconds, I had this beautiful speech that had everyone in the room crying and laughing. It was, it was amazing and, yeah, that's just like surface level things you can do with it. It's, it's super cool.

Speaker 2: 19:38

Are there any specific tools?

Speaker 1: 19:40

Are there any specific tools that you use in your business operations? A I tools.

Speaker 2: 19:46

Hey, I tools. I'm actually working with some different companies right now testing their tools. So there's one out there. It's big company and I don't know how to pin the industry necessarily yet, because they they're used to doing with dealing with the you know, million-dollar contracts. The one bad thing about the receivables industry there's there's a handful of large companies and the rest are medium to small, so that that companies live person and they do AI, that they.

Speaker 2: 20:12

They are originally Communications, their, their focus was the number of communications that you could talk to a customer through. So they have your messengers, your chats, your slack, everything so that, irregardless of the channel the customer wanted to use, they'd have a channel that they'd be able to reach the, the office and be able to communicate with them. And they started to introduce AI into it. Which was the big reason why I was looking into it, because I had customers coming to me going. We lost a deal because we didn't have an AI solution for chat and I said, great, what about AI solution for IVR, interactive voice recognition? What, as far as voice, what other communication types do you need a AI solution on? And they were just. It's funny to listen to customers because they're so focused on what we lost on this. We just need to start with this, okay, well, we need to start with this, but you're gonna lose the next one on whatever else you don't have if you don't think about it.

Speaker 2: 21:12

So I started reaching out to companies live person I have a relationship with. There's a newer company out of India that's doing outbound and inbound, but they started without bound of all things Communications for making consumer calls, for collection agencies and it's called stitchai S-t-i-t-c-h and they're out of India and I was looking into why India was running ahead on voice communications. From what I've been searching the states, you'll see a lot of advertisements out there for AI communications, but most it's chatbot, I think is what you'll find 90% of the time. And I was wondering why there wasn't more AI voice when we know that they can do AI voice communications. And I figured out one of the newer Chat to voice communications or AI to voice communications. India developed one called RASA or ASSA, I believe is how it's spelled. But they have RASA, so they're they're running with it. All they got to do is convince Americans to buy it, and so I started.

Speaker 2: 22:13

I started a relationship with them. They started. They actually reached out to me first because I do a lot of integrations. So they called me and said maybe we need you to be able, we want to see if you can help us connect to these collection agency databases and or CRMs. And collection agencies run on about 50 different CRMs when they'll run on when they built themselves, and so each one requires a different type of connection.

Speaker 2: 22:38

You know, be nice that they all connected through ODBC or JSON and I hope I'm not getting too technical for the people out there but it'd be really easy if you could send, send a, do a simple query through ODBC or if they all agreed to do REST API. You know, but they don't. So that's where I come in, because a lot of times the technical staff with these CRMs Don't necessarily know what they have to be able to connect and that's where I make the connection for in between the two, a lot of times on the vendors behalf. But it can go. It can go either way, but it's been. It's been interesting. So I'm working with their team, actually see them this next week in Nashville. They had a tech conference and hopefully we can come up with some new ideas on ways we can use their AI modeling. Okay amazing.

Speaker 1: 23:22

That's awesome, and I've just looked at the time. We have gone quite a bit over, but that's.

Speaker 2: 23:29

I'm sorry.

Speaker 1: 23:30

No, no worries. But before we go, what advice would you like to give to other business owners looking to succeed in today's world?

Speaker 2: 23:40

Well, business owners, especially if they're the small business world and, of course, this program you call lean they need to keep their eyes open to non-traditional methods. I mean, one thing I did back in 2007 that was right was I did voice over IP for my phone system. That's an easy one, right. But you be funny. You find it funny that people that still get a traditional telco coming into their office they don't do it at home anymore. Why do they do it at their office? You know, do you really need a fax fax number? And if you do, you know, through voice over IP companies you can get a fax number if you think you need it. 800 numbers are pretty much not as necessary as they used to be because everybody's got the ability to call Anywhere in the US. You know, for the, for there's.

Speaker 2: 24:20

Whatever their single plan is, I think they need to look at the earliest adoption. So, whatever they're doing, I think they also need to look at what they have to do manually and what. What's done manually now that can be automated, because that's where everything's going, of course. So if you like you said with your example of writing the writing the P she did with chat GPT, I think that's. You know that's going to happen a lot more and it's going to be on. If somebody spending you know we used to spend hours doing PowerPoints that's a good example. Any of those type of things you should be able to find a way to automate it. If you haven't yet, it's coming.

Speaker 2: 24:55

And I always say if it, for some reason, you don't find something out there to do it, you either weren't looking hard enough or you're stepping on an opportunity To maybe build something yourself, even if you're not that technologist. Find the right people, put them together. So keep looking, always look for the, the you know the Least costly method and the automated method, so that you spend more of your time making deals than you spend Having to do the work to, to put the communication out there or to have to do the the you know the. That's time you can be at the beach these days. So Talk to, always talk to peer groups. Who's doing what? Who's doing things more simpler. That saves a lot of time as well. 100%.

Speaker 1: 25:39

I appreciate that and Thanks, jeremy, for Everything today and your time. What's the best way for our listeners to get in touch with Jeremy mates, if you have any offers for them or if they're looking to connect and follow your journey? Sure, sure.

Speaker 2: 25:56

And so they can go to matesllccom. So my name is mother A's and apple peas and pizza he's net word. This is in sam larry, larry, charliecom or they can. They can reach out to me online my email address Jeremy. At mateslccom, we keep it all simple. That's also good examples. If you're gonna have a business, make sure everything's wrapped up in your name so it makes it for every everybody easy to find you right, exactly Well. Thanks again for your time today, jeremy.

Speaker 1: 26:20

Thanks for your time today, Jeremy. I really enjoyed chatting to you.

Speaker 2: 26:27

Good speaking to you as well down.