INTERVIEW Brave | Curious | Resilient / www.cicm.com / <strong>April</strong> <strong>2024</strong> / PAGE 12
CREDIT MANAGEMENT QUALITY CONTROLLER Sean Feast FCICM speaks to Alan Davis MCICM about the importance of quality in collections and how regulation can be a barrier to progress. ALAN Davis always knew he wanted to run his own business, and it wasn’t long before his wish came true. And like so many others in the world of debt collection, it wasn’t ever something he imagined doing at school; he just found it he was good at it. Brought up in Milton Keynes before moving to Surrey in his teens, Alan’s father worked in a local factory while his mother was a receptionist at Pergamon Press. Never particularly interested in his schoolwork (“the best thing about school was not being there,” he says) and having received nothing in the way of careers’ advice, Alan left at the age of 15 to start work on the production line of a factory manufacturing, among other things, tiling grout. Productive path It was an opportunity to work in sales that set Alan on a more productive path and led him to his first job in debt collection at Allied in Teddington: “There were a few steps in-between,” Alan admits, “but I joined Allied at 20 and never really looked back.” Most of his clients were commercial businesses with B2B debts which helped build his knowledge of commercial recoveries. He also gained experience in the water industry, working extensively for the Thames Water account not long after the industry was privatised and the first debts were outsourced. Ironically, when he left to join the CCI Group, he again found himself working on Thames Water business. Alan spent several happy years at CCI (it was ultimately sold to Equifax in 1998 by which time it had revenues in excess of $11m), having been enticed across by the founder with whom he had worked previously. But it was not long before another opportunity presented itself to join JB Debt Recovery led by Jim Brown and another happy period until he became semi-retired and moved with his family to Cornwall. “I’d visited Cornwall in 1999 with the family and remember the eclipse,” he laughs. “I then spent the next two years working out a plan for how to get down here. The children were still very young when we moved first to Perranporth and later Truro.” Although taking on consultancy work, he decided in the summer of 2007 to take the plunge and start his own business, MIL Collections: “I suppose it was a case of sticking to what you know,” he explains. “I’d stopped wanting to be a one-man band and decided to start a proper company. I’d always kept in touch with the industry and knew quite a few people and that helped get me started. I guess what none of us knew was that there was a financial crash coming!” Challenging times Alan admits, with the benefit of hindsight, that it was a terrible time to start a business. The collections environment, which until then had been relatively productive, changed virtually overnight: ‘Regulation was fairly relaxed, and people were effectively borrowing their way out of debt into more debt, so collections was relatively easy,” he says. “Then it got hard, and very quickly!” Despite the challenges, Alan stuck with it and weathered the storm, emerging in a good place: “In setting up the business, the mission was to always provide a quality service,” he explains. “Being in Cornwall, I could attract a higher quality of talent because I was prepared to pay London prices and focused on bringing in a smaller number of higher paid people, rather than simply churning ‘call centre fodder’. “Having better people helps deliver a better service and paying them well supports staff retention which in turn supports higher performance and enables them to build their experience and client contacts. This builds on our mission to excel in commercial collections.” Brave | Curious | Resilient / www.cicm.com / <strong>April</strong> <strong>2024</strong> / PAGE 13 continues on page 14 >
Change language