How can someone go from a negative bank account and a high 300 credit score to a credit repair business owner with 11,000 active clients and 24 employees?
The short answer: you bet on yourself.
The long answer: you work hard, train, scale, hire well, and outsource!
In this week's podcast, new Millionaires Club member Nicole Ashley shares her inspiring story and some essential tips for building a successful credit repair business.
Nicole Ashley is focused and driven…even by Millionaires Club standards.
Her journey to credit repair sounds like a story of love at first sight…
The way she tells it, “I was sick and tired of being sick and tired. So while at my little office job, I went on Google and what pops up? The little smiling cloud…Credit Repair Cloud. And I kid you not, I turned to my coworker and I said, I know what I'm gonna do. And he's like, what? I said, I'm going to start my own credit pair company. And I have not stopped since that day.”
But saying that was easy.
What came next was hard.
Nicole reviewed the training and learned how to fix her own credit.
Then, instead of building her business slowly, as a side hustle, she immediately quit her day job (SOMETHING SHE DOES NOT RECOMMEND)...
She focused on her new company full time.
She didn’t listen to the people who doubted her.
And in four years, after trials and tribulations, she built a thriving business and learned a ton of DOs and DONTs.
On this week's podcast, Nicole shared a bunch of that great information and dove deep on several key topics. Here are a few of the highlights…
Okay, so you started posting on social media and that started to get you some clients. How did you get more clients?
I went out and just did the good old-fashioned footwork. I would hand out business cards…I would go to like the little barber shops, the hair salons, the liquor stores, and I would have little magnets and I would ask the owner, “can I stick this here? Can I put this in your window?” I would leave my cards in the dentist. My kids would go to school and I would put my business card in like the Valentine's Day bag, the Halloween bag. And that's how I was getting clients. It was the mom and dad's like me. I was getting my clients that were just like me…And they would find me on Facebook…It was just the good old-fashioned face-to-face type of work.
What were some of the greatest struggles you had when you were first starting?
Being really hard on myself. I'm definitely very hard on myself. I still am…I didn't have a lot of money to start up…I didn't have the best equipment. I didn't really have any equipment…I was just doing a lot of things by hand…Not getting help when I could've…and just being really, really critical of myself. Even when I did accomplish something, I still wanted to do better…when I should have just sat for a minute and been happy about that success…Cuz baby steps are still steps forward…and a lot of us forget that…we want the big thing. We don't remember that baby steps are still forward movement. And a lot of us are afraid to fail. I was afraid to fail because you're thinking again of the bigger picture. You're not thinking that you have to fail forward. If you don't fail, then you're not even trying. You have to try to fail. So I think just being scared, fear was in my way a lot. So I had to get outta my own way, knock all that off and just fail forward.
How long were you doing everything alone and when did you start hiring?
I started it 2018…I started to finally hire in 2020. So I was doing it for the first few years by myself. And then I started to hire an assistant. And I started to separate different departments for things because I started to grow very rapidly…Consumers were hitting me up, but also, other credit repair owners were hitting me up. So I started to grow incredibly rapidly and I had to start separating my help…I would always say hire slow, not like don't take your time to hire somebody, like hire somebody as soon as you know what you're doing. Hire help, but hire that person slow…Hire the right people, but fire quickly because your reputation is on the line.
Can you explain what outsourcing is and how it works?
Sure…I'm someone that always has said: “you can't work on your business if you're working in your business.” You have to go out and be the face of your business, go to meetings, bring in your money. If you're not working on your money, making activities, let us do it. So my company will do that for you, will be your entire back office for you. So you can go out and be the face of your company or take a day off, take a vacation, do whatever…I have a dispute team. They just do disputing and processing. And then I have a customer service team…So if a credit repair owner wants to hire us to do one of those two things or both, they have us to handle those things. So they can go out and they can be the face of their company and bring in more clients or they can venture off to other streams of income within the industry...
How many credit repair companies are you currently working with?
Right now we're just under 600 individual companies.
I noticed on your site, your company tagline is the original Metro2 outsourcing company. We've never talked about Metro2 here on the podcast. So this will be a first, what exactly is Metro2 and how does it work?
Metro2…Just to explain Metro2…there's not enough time in a day…What I like to water it down for people is…When you send off your dispute letter…they're putting it into a machine. That machine is in a language…it's in codes…That is Metro2…Metro2 is basically the language that the credit repair bureaus use to code and speak…So when you're sending off a letter to the bureau, Metro2 is the language that the bureaus and the agencies use to read your letters.
So are you looking for errors in the code, errors in the way that it's reporting?
Well…when anyone sends off a letter it's going to automatically be coded and those codes are going to be read in Metro2…and there's five points of compliance that Metro2 will be coded in…that will need to be followed. So, that's when the letter will go in and it will be either coded…or it'll be spit back out and sent back…to either the agency, the original creditor and right back to the consumer.
Nicole also discusses removing collections, late payments, inquiries, and strategies for deleting a bankruptcy!
Watch the full interview with Nicole so you can learn how to build your business from nothing!
And if you’re just dabbling in the credit repair industry and would like me to hold you by the hand as you launch your very own credit repair business over just a couple of weeks - I wanna invite you to join our upcoming Credit Hero Challenge!
It’s an amazing program where you’ll learn the processes that have made millionaires, and it costs less than you'll spend taking your family to McDonald’s for dinner.
We’ve got another challenge starting in a few days so grab your spot right now at CreditHeroChallenge.com!
Until then, get into the Millionaire mindset…and keep changing lives!