Credit risk is in my DNA. I’ve lived it my entire adult life.
It started in 1988. My best friend’s father owned a collection agency in the NYC area, and he gave me my first job as a college intern over the summers of 1988, 1989, and 1990. I did street collections in the boroughs of New York City, collecting face-to-face for food distributors and manufacturers, mostly from the restaurants and distributors who owed them.
And I was hooked.
Watching the transactions between businesses, watching them make credit decisions, watching them struggle to collect their receivables, and negotiating to get companies to pay what they owed my clients. That’s what pulled me down this path.
That internship became a full-time job after I graduated in 1991. By 1992, my friend’s father and my father started F&D/RetailStat; I joined them to help build it, and a few years later my father and I launched CreditRiskMonitor. From there, it was credit and collection scoring and modeling for several years, then 14 years back in commercial collections for the Fortune 1000 with AGA/Cadex.
Now I’m back in the credit information space, my first true love, this time focusing on the cannabis industry.
Close to 40 years later, I’m still at it.
Some of my earliest credit education came in the bankruptcy courts of the Southern District of New York, where I sat on the creditors’ committee for more than 50 restaurants and food distributors and watched, up close, how good companies, whose owners cared deeply, made bad credit decisions that cost them everything.
From the streets of New York to the boardrooms of some of America’s largest companies, I’m bringing everything I learned to the cannabis industry.
So many cannabis operators today are just like those SMB food distributors from the late 80s. Good people, working hard every day, trying to make good credit decisions and get paid.
It’s not rocket science, but it’s also not clear as day.
Many didn’t check how a company paid its bills before extending credit. Many didn’t have a credit and collection policy to protect their risk and manage cash flow.
On one side, when the cash crunch came, restaurants had to pick and choose which vendors got paid, and some kept buying products on terms they either couldn’t pay or never intended to. On the other hand, those who were owed had no strategy for the day a customer didn’t pay, even after doing everything right.
The information was available. The tools were available. The process was available.
That’s what we’re building Reklaim Credit Solutions to do: bring credit intelligence to the cannabis industry so operators can make better decisions, get paid, and stay profitable.
Just like what I saw on the streets of NYC in the late 80s and early 90’s, if you don’t make good credit decisions, you might not survive, and I want the cannabis industry not only to survive, but flourish; that’s our goal at Reklaim Credit Solutions.