Chasing down delinquent debtors is exhausting. If you’ve ever reached the point where you feel that an account is noncollectable, there is one last strategy you can try before you throw in the towel and/or pay someone else to collect the payment for you.
This strategy is bold and, if used correctly, will hit a pressure point that your debtor won’t ignore. This strategy involves serving your debtor with a Debtors Exam Order. There are many moving parts to executing this strategy the right way, and one of the key elements is the debtor’s exam letter.
Check out debtor exam letter samples here for corporate and individual debtors.
For sake of brevity, serving a Debtor Exam Order will almost always result in your debtor paying you off. The reason for that is because the alternative— which is revealing to the court under oath each and every asset that they have— is a much less appealing option, wouldn’t you say?
There are different methods to successfully using this strategy, one of which includes these debt collection letter templates and two lists of 14 required documents (one for corporate debtors and one for individual debtors).
As someone who used to spend half of my day chasing down difficult debtors, I was getting really tired of dedicating so much time and energy attempting to get what is rightfully MINE. I shouldn’t have to spend that much time getting a customer to pay me for a service that I provided them!
I gave them what they asked for when they asked for it, and it didn’t make sense to me that I wasn’t receiving the same respect in return. And I use the word “respect” because that’s exactly what it boils down to.
It’s disrespectful to accept something from someone in exchange for payment—whether it’s a physical object or a service— and then ignore the bill when it comes time to pay. If you fulfill your promise as a business owner, your customer should fulfill theirs. Period.
The more I thought about this, the more time I spent trying to fix it, and the more frustrated I got. The moment I realized that it all came down to respect is the moment I made it my mission to fix it.
I knew that if I wanted to survive in my career without burning out, I needed to earn the same respect from my customers that I gave to them. I also knew that I was just one business owner part of a much larger group of business owners feeling the same way, so I wanted to create something easy that everybody could use.
That’s when I developed my bulletproof collection system, which goes beyond the debtor’s exam strategy. That’s the the last attempt, which most businesses never even get to because their first few attempts got the job done. This system starts with the 3 most important parts in any collection matter: the first collection letter, final demand letter, and IRS advantage letter.
This time-tested system has decreased the total amount of past-due accounts I have in half the time it used to take to collect just one. For some companies, it’s the only solution that works to get even the most stubborn debtors to finally pay. Chasing down delinquent debtors has become a less frustrating task, because, now, there is actually a reward.