In this episode of the Business Brokers Podcast, Chad Peterson interviews renowned business credit expert, author and fellow podcast host, Ty Crandall.
About Ty Crandall & CreditSuite
Ty Crandall is an internationally known speaker, author, pod show host, and business credit expert. With over 18 years of financial experience, Ty is recognized as an authority in business credit building, business credit scoring, and business credit repair. Ty is the author of two popular books on credit named Perfect Credit and Business Credit Decoded. He is often interviewed on radio and news shows, TV programs, and magazines including Entrepreneur and Inc. Ty currently serves as the CEO at Credit where he has helped create and grow one of the biggest and most credible business coaching operations in the United States.
Connect With Ty Crandall Online
Ty Crandle’s Blog
Learn How To Get a Business Loan Without a Personal Guarantee and More
Chad Peterson: Hello, and thank you for listening to today’s podcast. Today’s guest is Ty Crandall. Ty Crandall is an international known speaker, author and business credit and financing expert. He is the CEO at Credit Suite, where he oversees the biggest business credit coaching operation in the United States. With 16 years of financial experience, Ty is widely recognized as an authority of business credit, building business credit scoring, and business financing. He is the author of two popular books, Perfect Credit and Business Credit Decoded. Ty is a frequent contributor to radio and news shows, TV programs and magazines, including Entrepreneur, Inc, and Forbes, as well as the host of the popular podcast, the Business Credit and Finance Show. Ty is a powerhouse guests with vigorous co-promotion of each and every show appearance with his 40,000 email subscribers, 30,000 Facebook fans, 5,000 Twitter followers, 13,000 YouTube subscribers and active Periscope and Instagram following.
I personally have had the pleasure of being on Ty’s show. He’s an absolute workhorse. He’s very much so a professional at what he does. And I welcome you onto the show, Ty. How are you?
Ty Crandall: Chad, thanks for having me on man. I’m excited to be here.
Chad Peterson: Absolutely. So if I could Ty, you and I have had talks on podcasts before. Like I said, I’m always impressed with where you’re headed with your business and the things that you’re able to ask the pioneers and the greats out there within their own industry, what it is they do. So you can then turn around and bless your audience with that information. So could you tell the audience a little bit more about you today?
Ty Crandall: Sure. I mean, my passion is helping business owners really obtain corporate credit. So at Credit Suite there’s a few things we do. We help business owners improve their fundability and fix the things that help make them lendable or appealing to lenders and credit issuers.
And then we help them build business credit, their EIN that’s not linked to their personal social. So that’s corporate credit. It doesn’t require personal guarantees and credit checks. And then we also have kind of pulled together all legitimate funding sources to one place. So then that way, in one place speaking with one person, you can find all the loans and all of the credit lines that you can qualify for it. So my ultimate passions is helping entrepreneurs get money, and that’s how we do it. Especially focusing on helping them build business credit that doesn’t require cashflow or credit or collateral to be able to qualify.
Chad Peterson: Okay. Wonderful. And with that being said, do you find that most people are using your expertise to build the business? Or is it startup? Or is it putting money back into their business to continue growing? Or do you find sometimes that people were borrowing money because they found themselves in a tight spot and they find themselves not having credit, so now it gets their attention. And then now they need to start listening to you.
Ty Crandall: I think it’s all of the above. I mean, our typical client comes from a few different buckets. There’s the people that are starting a business. And they don’t yet have cashflow, they don’t yet have collateral. And a lot of them might not have good credit. So they just don’t qualify for conventional, and they don’t qualify for alternative financing. And I call that my three C’s formula for loan approval, which means cashflow, credit, or collateral. Anybody that’s going to go and get money from a bank, or even an alternative lender, one of those three things is always going to be looked at. The better money you get looks at more of those three things, the cashflow, the credit, the collateral. What’s nice about business credit is that you don’t need any of those. It’s one of the only ways you can get money to grow a business without having cashflow, even as a startup, without having collateral to offset lender risk, without having good credit.
Getting SBA Loans
Ty Crandall: So we have a lot of people that come in on a startup to get business credit because they could capitalize their business. They can get the money they need to grow their business and let their business fund itself, even without having those things. Then there’s others that are very well established, million, $5 million type companies. They’re now moving on to get SBA loans. They’re getting longer form term loans. They’re looking for longer terms and lower interest rates. And as they go to get those better loans, they’re running into barriers because they never built their business credit. Business credit has to be built very intentionally, meaning you don’t just accidentally build business credit because about 97% of trade vendors and the people that you make payments to, they don’t report those payments. So you have to be very intentional with building business credit, getting business credit with sources that do report.
Ty Crandall: So we find a lot of people that just missed that step. Now they’re trying to get an SBA loan, the lenders turning them down because they have no or bad business credit. And now they’re coming to us to try to fix that problem. And then we have that third bucket, which is just kind of everybody looking to get capital. Some are in trouble. Some aren’t in trouble. Some are pre-planning. But they’re just generally looking to get capital to take their business to the next level, whether it be marketing, expansion, hiring, they have one of those needs typically or another where they actually need money to do so. So those are probably the three different types of customers that we see most.
Chad Peterson: Okay. And now how does Dun & Bradstreet play in this?
Ty Crandall: Well, Dun & Bradstreet in the business world, there are three credit reporting agencies that are the major ones, just like in the consumer space. You have TransUnion, you have Equifax, you have Experian in the United States. If you go to other countries or even in the United States, there are thousands of other credit bureaus, but those are the main ones we’re familiar with. In the commercial world there’s Dun & Bradstreet, and Equifax and Experian. So Equifax and Experian, who are also popular on the consumer side, are very big in the commercial side as well.
Ty Crandall: But the vast majority of credit reporting really has to do with Dun & Bradstreet. They have like 230 million records on file. And what they do is they’re a reporting agency that, all over the world, they congregate business day data, and then they basically populate that data into credit reports, give it scores based on risk, and then lenders, credit issuers, suppliers, and many other types of people and institutions and investors use that information to make all kinds of decisions about you and your business. So when it comes to corporate credit, when it comes to building business credit profiles and score, Dun & Bradstreet is the biggest of the reporting agencies that you really want to build credit with.
Chad Peterson: Sure. And you know as well as I knew, because you and I have spoke, I do a lot of lending. I sell businesses and they’re usually driven by the SBA process. And the SBA process, it really is less about credit. It’s more about cashflow and collateral. But yet you still do have to have credit. And I know that most of the time, because they’re buying a business, they don’t have that credit established as being the buyer. But are you saying that if you were to have a real strong Dun & Bradstreet number that that would help you in the underwriting process at a bank?
Ty Crandall: Sure. I mean, look, you can’t get an SBA loan without it. The way that SBA loans work is they’re guided by a score called FICO SBSS. So this is the FICO small business score. In order to get an SBA loan, you have to have a minimum of 140 FICO SBSS score. Well, the way that the FICO score works for businesses is it looks at your business data first. Then it kind of goes down into your consumer data. So you can’t have… It’s impossible mathematically to have a 140 score to get an SBA loan without having business credit. It’s just absolutely not possible. So that means in order to get an SBA loan, you have to have a 140 FICO SBSS score. In order to get a FICO 140 SBSS score, you have to have business credit established.
Ty Crandall: So the way SBA works is that you have to have all three. They’re going to expect you have collateral to offset the risks. Now, you know it because you sell a lot of businesses and buy a lot of businesses, when people are using SBA to buy businesses, they’re looking at collateral. Typically account receivables is the most popular kind of collateral used for SBA loans, especially if somebody is looking to buy a business. But then the owner needs to have good credit. They need to have good consumer credit. They need to be managing their bank account, the business that they’re buying and personal bank accounts need to be managed. They have a good bank score. And they have to have high enough business credit scores as well in order to have that FICO SBS score to qualify. And as you just mentioned, the business of course has to be cash flowing as well. So you’ve got to have that credit on the business and consumer commercial side. You’ve got to have that cashflow. You’ve got to have that collateral in order to qualify for that kind of loan.
Chad Peterson: Sure. So I’m curious. What would be the first step that you would take if somebody like myself called you and say, “Hey, I want you to take care of me and help me get where I need to be, where my business credit score and help me become more bankable.” What’s the first thing you would tell me?
Ty Crandall: The very first thing we do is what we call a fundability analysis or a fundability check. So a lot of people go right into wanting to get money. And you see this all the time in your world that when they’re trying to sell a business, for example, or buy a business, they just want to go to the action. But there’s all kinds of pre-planning that really needs to be done for the transaction to occur successfully, right?
Ty Crandall: So it’s exactly the same thing in the business world. So many people want to go get a loan, but then they’re not addressing all the things that make it difficult for them to get a loan. Their entity isn’t set up right there. They’ve chosen the wrong entity. Their business name indicates they’re in a high risk industry. They’re using a Gmail email address. They don’t have a website that’s a professional website. They’re using a home address as their business address. They’re using a home phone or a cell phone. So there’s all kinds of these errors that affect their fundability or their ability to get money.
Chad Peterson: A lot of it’s just basics, isn’t it? A lot of it’s simple stuff.
Ty Crandall: For us, it is. Because I’m in financial services, and you see so much of it, that for us, we think it’s common sense. We really do. But for a lot of people, they just don’t know that. They don’t know that they need their phone number listed in 411 and a toll free number and those things. So we go through, we do that. One of the biggest mistakes, Chad, to be honest with you, is that the information that they’re putting on an application doesn’t even match other sources like secretary of state. And so this is where people mess up. The majority of loan applications are not denied because your credit’s not good or nothing. They’re not denied because your revenue is not strong enough. They’re denied because the bank thinks it’s fraud.
Chad Peterson: That or it’s inaccurate. They’re going to say, “No, it’s not complete enough.” Or not accurate enough or fraudulent, right? Yeah.
Ty Crandall: Yeah. And that’s what they think. So, they come in, you apply for a loan and then the name of your business doesn’t match exactly what secretary of state is, what you put on the application for credit. Well, they automatically assume it to be fraud and they deny the application. So that’s a lot of what we do is we go into that fundability check and make sure that business is set up legitimately where it’s credible, where their application isn’t kicked out because of fraud, where the fundability is in line. And then once that’s in place, then you can move to the other steps of helping them obtain credit that actually reports to those business reporting agencies.
Chad Peterson: Yeah. Let me ask you a question. You know a lot of these… Help me out of the terminology. But it’s a loan based on what your monthly receivables are.
Ty Crandall: Yeah. Well, you can do a couple of things. That’s account receivable financing there. And another popular one’s based on your revenue, which is called revenue financing.
Chad Peterson: Okay. And is that a last ditch effort of financing? Is that like, you should be able to go to a bank, but if you can’t then you go to one of those types of places to get that harder, more expensive money?
Ty Crandall: It’s very interesting because when we kind of had the economic shift in 2008, Dodd-Frank was created. And this law really made a lot of changes where it was harder for banks to lend money. And we saw credit tighten up almost instantly by 15, 20% when we looked at the limits of the amount of credit that was actually being issued. So the minute that happens, the minute regulation comes in, all kinds of smart entrepreneurs come in with alternative solutions to fill that void. And that’s really what we saw a lot of is that all of these alternative lenders came in and the easiest way to explain it, if we look at that three C formula, cashflow, credit, collateral, is banking always required all three. Your credit needed to be pristine. You needed to have cashflow verifiable per tax returns that met all these requirements. You had to have collateral.
Ty Crandall: These alternative lenders started coming in this space and said, “Look, we don’t need all three. We just need one.” So those examples you gave, one as account receivable, factoring, where all you need is people paying you on terms. And you can use that one thing, collateral, to qualify for financing. And what’s nice about that is your personal credit quality doesn’t matter. Your cashflow doesn’t matter.
Ty Crandall: So now all of a sudden people can get low interest rate financing based only on one C, collateral, and they don’t need those others. The same as what we talked about with revenue lending or cashflow financing. Hey, with that, you only need cashflow. You don’t need collateral and you don’t need good credit. The other benefit there is it’s super fast money. An SBA loan’s a month to two months. With cashflow financing, 72 hours the money’s in your bank account. So a lot of those, it just kind of comes down to the need of the borrower. If they want something that’s faster to get, then these alternative financing deliver money much quicker than longer-term SBA loans that take many months to be able to get. And the other is just simple qualification. It’s easier to qualify based on one C than it is to have everything, your whole house in order, to qualify.
Chad Peterson: Absolutely. Now do those programs, does that type of money, are they going to report to Dun & Bradstreet and the other reporting agency?
Ty Crandall: It’s an amazing question because that’s a question a lot of business owners don’t ask that should. And the answer is it really depends. Cashflow financing, some sources report, some sources don’t. SBA loans, some sources report, some sources don’t. So we always teach our clients, “You should always ask that question.”D Whenever you apply for a credit card or a credit line or a loan, you want to ask them, do you report my payment history and who do you report to?” And you have to be very careful because a lot of them report a UCC filing, alerting others that you have a loan, but that doesn’t help your payment. They’re not reporting your timely payments that help your payment history or your credit scores. They’re just telling people you have a loan. So you should ask that question.
Chad Peterson: Well, and to my point, is that let’s just say you don’t have a good score, you’re not doing things right. You’re running your business out of your house. Your application doesn’t look strong. You get denied by a bank. So you go with some of those cheaper, let’s just say harder money, that’s higher interest rate, fast turnaround. Well, if you’re going to do that, you might as well get the most bang for buck and make sure that they do report so it can actually have more benefit than just the money to where you can show that you’ve had good credit history. So next time you have a better chance of walking into a bank and getting what you want. Is that correct?
Ty Crandall: Absolutely. Yeah.
Chad Peterson: Okay. Okay.
Ty Crandall: Yeah you definitely want to do that. And I tell a lot of people to not even be focused on the interest rate, because a lot of that stuff is based on risk. And to give you an example, we had a client that paid 65% interest rate on a credit loan.
Chad Peterson: Whoa buddy. Whoa.
Ty Crandall: It’s crazy, right? But what’s interesting in his world is that he used it to buy a tree de-stumper, which didn’t know existed, but he’s building golf courses. And this machine pulls tree stumps out of the ground. Well that saved him over $10,000 a month from paying manually to have that work done. So, he writes off all the interest. He still saves 10 grand a month. That’s a make sense transaction. And speaking about higher price money, that’s what you have to look at. If you’re trying to get through a low season, a low volume season, that’s not what that money’s for. That money is more intended to use for something that you’re going to make a strike, and that strike is going to produce a near immediate, significant return that’s vastly more profitable than the cost of the money. So an expansion of what you said, but you got to be careful when you’re looking for the higher price money. Make sure you’re investing into something that’s going to give you a near immediate and substantial return, or it just doesn’t even make sense to look into it.
Chad Peterson: Right. I mean, it has to be a good bang for the buck. No doubt. And I can understand what you’re saying, that that guy can pull trees out of the ground quick. He’s cutting down his labor. He’s saving 10 grand a month and the interest rate just doesn’t matter. But I see this a lot in my industry Ty, where people are down on bended knee with their business because they don’t have their marketing right, their management right. They don’t have their message right. They’re just not doing what they need to be doing. And so now they find themselves in a tight money crunch and they believe that if they just had money, that they would succeed.
How High Interest Loans Don’t Fix Internal Problems
Chad Peterson: And it’s a huge misconception. Money is a tool and that’s all it is. And if you’ve been in business for many years and all you think is your answer is more money, you’re usually wrong about that. So I can see a lot of people that seek out money because they’re doing something wrong in their business. They don’t need money. Like you just said, that guy was pulling trees out and it saved them 10 grand a month. He needed money. He needed that. A lot of people would probably go and borrow these types of money at a high interest rate only to put themselves in a worse position because they haven’t corrected their internal problems in their business. Do you see that as well?
Ty Crandall: I absolutely do. And I think you broke it down very nicely, where whether it be debt financing, venture capital, whatever it may be, when you’re looking for money, a large part you should be looking for that money for expansion, to grow, to take advantage of opportunities. If you’re looking to borrow money to survive, you’ve got fundamental problems with your business itself. Your margins aren’t right. Your costs are too high. You’re selling your product for too low. And money’s just going to buy time before the inevitable, which is that you’re going out of business. So you should never have to borrow money just to keep yourself afloat. If you are, then like you said, you have to really take a hard look at your business model to figure out why that is. And it’s usually an issue with your margins. And it usually has to do with your expenses or your cost of goods sold being too high, or your price is being too low. But regardless, you’re not keeping enough of the money that what you’re selling your products for.
Chad Peterson: And I know that you educate people on how to do these things, but do you also help people find the money? Do you help them do that?
Ty Crandall: Yeah, we do. What we do is we work with over a thousand different lenders and we evaluate every legitimate funding source that’s out there. And I say that because there’s a lot of funding out there that’s fly by night that doesn’t make it because it’s just not legit. But the funding that’s legitimate, we kind of go through, evaluate all that and then pull together all funding in one place. So somebody could come in half cashflow, credit, collateral, whatever their strength or weakness is, and find the right capital solution for that.
Chad Peterson: Sure. And we’re going to keep going here on this podcast because we’re not done yet. But I just, real quick to my audience. I want to make sure that you understand it’s Ty Crandall, right?
Ty Crandall: Yup.
Chad Peterson: Okay. And it’s spelled T Y, his first name is T Y. Last name C R A N D A L L. And you can find him. Just Google Credit Suite, Ty Crandall. You’ll find him. And it’s at www.creditsuite.com. I just want to plug that in there in the middle of the podcast here, just so they understand who we’re talking to, just to anchor that in.
Ty Crandall: I appreciate that.
Handling Bad Credit
Chad Peterson: So Ty, a couple of things. I know that if we had some… Let’s just say I had bad credit. Let’s say I didn’t pay a credit card. Let’s say ’08 crisis hit me really hard. I know how to go to TransUnion, Experian, and Equifax. And I know how to play their game. I know how to talk to creditors because all they really want is money. Let’s just say that I defaulted on something. I can settle on it or I can pay it in full. And then I can request that they remove it from my credit report. And then I can go to the three major credit bureaus and I can have it removed if I need. How does that look in a business type scenario with business credit?
Ty Crandall: Well, if you’re going to do that in the consumer side, my advice is that you work with somebody that actually understands that process pretty well. There’s a lot of legitimate credit repair companies out there. And I’ve spent a lot of time with credit. I’ve looked at tens of thousands of credit reports, consumer, commercial, in my career. And I can tell you that the majority of consumer credit reports, 80 to 90% of the derogatory items are to be deleted by law because they’re just not accurate. Everything on a credit report must be 100% accurate, verifiable and timely to be on a consumer credit, per the Fair Credit Reporting Act.
Ty Crandall:
And that law was created in the 70s to protect the integrity of data that’s being reported on people’s consumer credit reports. If you work with a credible expert, then there’s all different kinds of ways, as you mentioned, you can fix consumer credit, including the fact that you’re working within the FCRA to be able to get those items. And there’s laws like Tela. There’s laws like the Fair Billing Act, the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, that could all be used as leverage to get credit issuers to delete derogatory items that might not be accurate in lieu of all the other things that they have to do compliance wise with those laws. Whole other conversation, and I’m not the guy to do it. But my advice there is to find a reputable consumer credit company that can help you.
Ty Crandall:
In the commercial world it’s different because there is no Fair Credit Reporting Act. So the commercial world is not regulated like consumer is. There is no FCRA. There is no law that says, “This is how creditors and the bureaus must act.” So it’s pretty much wild west in our world. Now we still help a lot of people come through and fix their credit with the reporting agencies, and the best way to do so is first get a copy of your credit reports. So you can go to creditsuite.com/monitoring for 24 bucks, get your Experian and D&B credit reports. It’s 90% cheaper than going to them direct. If you see derogatory items on there, then you want to do one of two things. You want to either go to Dun & Bradstreet with iUpdate for the big derogatory items with them. Or with Experian or Equifax, you go to their own credit monitoring platform and you could dispute there. So either dispute with Equifax, Experian on the credit monitoring platform or with iUpdate with Dun & Bradstreet to get those derogatory items corrected.
Chad Peterson:
That’s wonderful information. And I just assume that the Fair Credit Reporting Act is really just like one of the consumer protection laws. So that’s why they don’t venture into business. It’s more typical consumers, whereas business, now you’re like you said, wild, wild west. There’s nothing really from a lobbying standpoint to protect business owners from erroneous information, things that are too old on the credit report, or something like that. So you’re on your own in business, whereas on your personal credit report, there’s a ton of tools. And that probably has to do with, like I said, consumer protection laws, making sure that people, if they messed up, they can pretty quickly remedy it so they can buy a home and buy a car and things like that. It’s probably a consumer protection law, but I don’t know if there’s that company protection laws for business owners. It’s wild, wild west. I agree with that.
Ty Crandall:
And it’s kind of interesting, and the way I explain it is that when consumers get in trouble, a lot of them just go and cry. And then they’re crying to bureaucrats and bureaucrats are coming in creating laws to solve the problem. Entrepreneurs, man we just shake it off. That’s just how we’re born. We just get up and we shake it off and we move on. And so I think that because of that, you just don’t see as much whining in the business world. We just take our hits and move on.
Chad Peterson:
Oh man, isn’t that the truth? You could hit me 60 times. I’m just going to get back up. You know what I mean? That’s just an entrepreneur. So yeah, we agree on that for sure. So, listen, I’m going to talk a little bit about your success because you’ve given us a lot of information about what you do, how you do it, what to look out for. You’ve given us some real good information and educated my listeners on credit and how to get money and the difference between banks and the three credit bureaus here on first consumers, as well as Dun & Bradstreet. So we’ve got a lot of meat and potatoes.
Chad Peterson:
But I want to talk about some of your success because I think that is maybe equally, if not more important. You’ve had such success with what you do. You’ve been recognized by Inc, Entrepreneur, Forbes, FOX, ABC. You’re everywhere, and you have one hell of a presence online. And just because I know you personally, I know you work your ass off, but tell me a little bit about your success. And if you could, tell me the inflection point where you decided to do the thing that got you here. Could you tell me about that moment that you decided this and how your success has been so wonderful for you since then?
Ty Crandall:
Yeah, no. And I really appreciate that. And I think it’s a good lesson of kind of what to do to find your passion. But in my world, I owned a mortgage company. The whole mortgage industry collapsed. I was the wrong place, the wrong time, lost everything on the personal side, foreclosures, repossessions, everything that goes with it. And as I took that hit, I started a consumer credit company and really legitimately wanted to help other people solve their consumer credit issues as I had. I went from having very good credit to very bad credit in short period of time, saw a lot of misinformation, really got passionate about wanting to help people do that. And as I did that, a lot of people asked me about business credit building and I didn’t know much about it. And then enough people asked me that one night I decided to settle in and kind of figure out what business credit was. And it took me really into what I call the bowels of Google, which is like page five, the place nobody goes on a Google search, five and beyond.
Chad Peterson:
They say the best place to hide a dead body is on page number two of Google. Right? Nobody ever looks.
Ty Crandall:
It took me a while. Nobody was talking about this. Nobody was explaining how it worked. And when I really started to discover that, and it was one of those moments, if you’ve ever played video games where you sit down and then like hours pass and you’re like, “Wow, I don’t even know where the time went.” Hours had passed, it was the middle of the night, and I just remember being shocked and realizing there was a way for a business to build a credit profile and score, and then use the credit it built to be able to fund itself. And this was a concept that I dedicated my life to financial services, had been in it well over a decade at that point, and I knew nothing about it. And I realized if I didn’t, nobody did it. I became really frustrated that nobody was talking about it.
Chad Peterson:
So you saw a hole in the market, basically.
Ty Crandall:
Yeah.
Chad Peterson:
You saw something that nobody was talking about.
Ty Crandall:
What I found, and for me it wasn’t even a business sense. It was a personal frustration, where what happened to me in that moment was I said, “This is insane.” My life is financial services. I knew nothing about this. If I would have known this… What happened in my world was that the business started to falter so we started to go late on business debts. Well, that reported on my personal credit report, and then all my credit issuers lowered my limits to the credit I owed. So my whole recovery plan was, I’m like, “No big deal. I have a quarter million dollars of available credit, right? I can navigate through this thing just fine.” But as the business debt started to pull on my personal credit report, then what happened was all my personal credit immediately went away and it tanked my credit scores.
Ty Crandall:
So the business problems then ruined my ability to recover. And when I realized business credit, separated personal credit from business credit, and that it never had to happen, if I just would have built a business credit profile, separated my liability, separated my credit profiles. I became very frustrated that I didn’t know that information and that nobody had taught me. And I was raised Chad, that you don’t complain about a problem unless you’re willing to produce a solution. So then I actually kind of made the effort and said, “I’m going to start learning how business credit works since there’s no information out there. And then in real time, I’ll teach it.” And I started this YouTube channel.
Ty Crandall:
That’s what I did. I would, in real time, go study something like Dun & Bradstreet score. And then I would put it into a PowerPoint with no graphics or anything. And then would fire up the PowerPoint and teach people for an hour what I learned. And then it took me about a year and all of a sudden I realized I had thousands of followers and I wasn’t the only one. Everybody wanted to know how this worked as well. And a whole business was formed. And we basically are at $10 million now.
Ty Crandall:
So it’s kind of interesting to look back, from a startup to a $10 million a year company, but it really all comes down to really figuring out your passion. And it really should hit home. In my world was very personal of what not having business credit did to me and the impact emotionally. And that was what drove me to make sure that others didn’t struggle in that way that I did. And now I just strive to say, “Look, if you want to choose to not separate your liability, that’s up to you. But at least now you have choice.” I didn’t have a choice because I didn’t have the information. I want everybody to now have the information so they can make the best choice. And that’s what I’ve dedicated my life to ever since.
Chad Peterson:
Sure. And I’ve found, Ty, that wherever there’s pain, that’s where power can start from. I mean, there’s a lot of people that will probably listen to this podcast and they’re looking to start a business or they think, there’s a million ways to make money. And so they think that there’s a hole in the market. They think that they could do something like you. You were thinking about business credit and it was like, you looked around and you talked to people and it’s like, nobody else knew about it. There’s people out there that believe that they have the thing to go do and they just need some money to do so. Is there any way that these people that might be listening because they want to borrow money for a business, is there a way for them to reach you to have you consult with them on how to get this stuff?
Ty Crandall:
Sure. Creditsuite.com. If they go to creditsuite.com/EIN, there’s a great guide that maps out the exact steps to build business credit. If they go to creditsuite.com/consult, like consultation, creditsuite.com forward/consult, we’ll do a free fundability analysis. We’ll go in and see what credit you have established with the reporting agencies now, get you a free copy of your business credit report. We’ll see how fundable your businesses is. We’ll E\even give you a prequalification for financing to let you know all the financing you qualify for now.
Chad Peterson:
That’s great. By the way, not to over-talk this, but you and I have so much in common. I had the biggest mortgage company in the Midwest. I had 120 employees. I was doing anywhere from seven to $10 million a year in revenue. I was killing it. And in 08, I got crushed. And I don’t mean crushed. I mean like flattened. Okay? And then ultimately, because we were… And this is going to lead into a question. But what I found was that I went out to the market because I saw that people were getting hit all over the place. I mean, people were foreclosing, they were losing their houses, losing their cars. They were defaulting on credit cards. It was a horrible time. I mean, it was horrible for everybody, but for some of us that were doing really well in the wrong industry, the mortgage industry, it was crushing.
Chad Peterson:
So what I did is I went out there because I understand credit very well, at least on the consumer side. Not on the business side, but I understood consumer credit because that’s all I did. I looked at thousands and thousands of credit reports because of what we did. So I created a credit repair software and I did pretty well with it, enough to survive. But it seemed to me, and it was my personal experience, and I’m going to get your opinion here in a second, but it seemed to me that the world didn’t wake up to rebuilding their credit until about 2012. Would you say that’s correct? Were we still in the hit of 08, say in 2011, where people weren’t… They were still holding on, they weren’t really caring about rebuilding their credit yet? They were just on survival mode? Would you say 2012 was the moment that that started to change?
Ty Crandall:
Yeah, I think so. I mean, it definitely happened post economic collapse.
Chad Peterson:
Yeah. Because it’s like, I went out there with credit repair software and a lot of education for consumers to help their credit scores. And it was just like, I showed up too early to the party. They were just like, “I’m still not paying my bills.” And so I think about if I would’ve stayed with that, at least my technology that I built because I spent a lot of money on it. And it was an incredible comprehensive system to help people rebuild their credit. I think that if I would’ve held onto it, it would have caught fire in 2012, 2013. But I just couldn’t get anybody to rebuild their credit during the collapse. And I think that collapse, we say 08, but it was really late seven, all the way until I think 11 or 12, it was pretty grim. And I think since, would you say 2013, until now has been pretty strong?
Ty Crandall:
Yeah absolutely. But I got to be honest with you. I think what I see now and what I felt with consumer credit is that look, people don’t care about their credit unfortunately. They only want it to buy something. And that’s what I always found. And you’ve found I’m sure in the software world and I found, helping people fix their consumer credit. Very rarely would somebody come to you or I, and say, “I want to fix my credit to fix my credit.” It was always, “I want to fix my credit because I’m trying to buy a home or I’m trying to buy a car.”
Ty Crandall:
And I wish that was different in both worlds. I think in the consumer and commercial world, if people were more on the preventative side and started to do things preemptively, instead of being reactionary to everything, their lives would work out to be way better. But unfortunately, no matter what, even in 2020, it’s still the same thing. People are just fixing their credit to get what they want. They really still don’t understand how much value consumer and commercial credit really can provide them if they actually get this down and do it the right way.
Chad Peterson:
Absolutely. That’s wonderfully said. And to my audience, you all know that I sell businesses. I help people buy businesses. And credit is a big part of it. Cashflow, collateral and credit. That’s really what it comes down to. And so I encourage you all to lien on time. By the way, and I’ve said it a couple of times, Ty works like a maniac like I do. And he’s always on it. So I encourage you to go to creditsuite.com and follow some of the advice that Ty’s given you today and go through his website. If you want to start a business, if you want to buy a business, if you have a business that’s even going to be sold, there are some things that Ty hasn’t talked about today, which is, if you go to sell your business and you might have a UCC lien on your business and we go to sell your business and it could be on your credit to where we go to close your business and now we’ve got a problem.
Chad Peterson:
Ty could probably help you around that as well and how to handle that as well. So I encourage you to go to creditsuite.com and check Ty out. He’s an incredible man with a lot of knowledge for you. And Ty, do you have any last words for the audience today?
Ty Crandall:
Grab your free guide. Creditsuite.com/EIN. Be on the preventative side. I mean business credit is the foundation of getting the best terms on the financing you want. So creditsuite.com/EIN, the great free guide with the exact steps to be able to do so. And thanks, Chad, for having me on. I appreciate the opportunity.