Want to push your credit repair business from a small startup to booming success?
Well, on this week's Podcast, Millionaires Club member Bruce Politano invited me on his new show, Credit Repair Junkies, and we dove deep into what it takes to scale a credit repair business to 7 figures!
It's Daniel Rosen, coming at you from the rock concert of marketing events Funnel Hacking Live in Orlando, Florida!
The energy is through the roof, and I'm hard at work with some of the best minds in business, developing new tools and tactics to help you run and grow your credit repair businesses!
That's why, on this week's Podcast, while I'm out of town, I wanted to share an interview I recently did with one of our most successful credit heroes.
I had the honor of being one of the first guests on the Credit Repair Junkies Podcast hosted by our Millionaires Club member Bruce Politano.
Bruce, Keenan, and I dove deep into what it takes to scale a credit repair business to 7 figures. And guess what? I'm going to share that entire conversation right now!
I know you're going to love this interview!
So grab a pen and paper because you'll want to take notes!
Here are a few of the highlights…
Daniel, how long has it been that you guys have been in a credit repair space?
DANIEL: "Well, credit repair cloud's been around for about 10 years, but I've been in the credit repair space about 10 years prior to that, so it's about 20 years.
It's kind of a crazy story. When I was a kid, I didn't have a very good home life. I wasn't very good in school, but I was really obsessed with juggling. I was so obsessed with juggling. It's all I would do, and I got really good at it, which came in handy because when I was 13, I left home, and I would juggle on street corners to make money to eat. I was homeless, and that's how I made money to eat.
Then I learned that if I could make people laugh, they'd put more money in my hat. I just kept obsessing and obsessing and getting better at this, and I started to have a little career in show business. My first gig off the streets was in the Icecapades, which was kind of weird. I wasn't an ice skater, but I went to the skating rink and said, "I'd like to have ice skating lessons, please, because I'm going to be in the Icecapades."
They said, "Have you ever skated?" I said, "No." They thought I was crazy. So I started practicing. I got into the Icecapades and realized I didn't like that so much. I missed the comedy from the streets. So, I decided I wanted to get really good at comedy. So I obsessed on that. I just obsess over things, and I worked in all kinds of crappy comedy clubs and all kinds of things. I worked my way up till, eventually, I was doing shows like Johnny Carson and things like that, and I had a pretty long career in show business and on television. My last longtime gig, I was the announcer on The Price is Right. I was the guy who said, "COME ON DOWN! "A NEW CAR!"
It looked like I was doing a lot, but a career in show business really means you're broke all the time.
I had big gigs, but then there were long, long gaps between them where I was always living on credit cards, and you get those credit cards, and then you get those things in the mail with those blank checks, and I'd use those to pay my rent and other things, and it just kept getting worse and worse and worse during the price is right. That was my longest gig. So I managed to buy this messed up little house, and it had no kitchen or bathroom for like nine months. I was living there like I was camping.
I slowly fixed it up and again racked up my credit cards, but I was so proud of that little house. I felt like I had finally really achieved something. But then, one day, this bank error destroyed my credit overnight, and all my bills shut up. I was on a break between shows again, and my bills doubled overnight.
The error was I had both my first and second loan at the same bank, a big loan and then a little HELOC loan, and some clerk there typed in the wrong thing. And they were both the same amount, making me look hundreds of thousands of dollars over a revolving line of credit. So that sent up red flags. All my bills shot up. I didn't have the money. I almost lost my house. I almost went bankrupt. It was just horrible. It ruined my life. I called the bank, and they said, "Sorry, we made a mistake, we'll fix it." But I couldn't fix that domino effect on all the other cards.
It was months of letter writing and calling, and this whole time, I was pretty into computers on the side. I would make websites for people, other comedians, and performers. I realized I was writing all these letters. I was studying about credit repair and how it works, and I'm writing all these letters and making these calls and keeping track of everything, and I'm going, this is a lot of repetitive work. There's got to be software for this. And I started searching for it, and there wasn't any.
This was the early 2000s, and there wasn't any, and I went, "AHA! I found my way out of show business! I'm going to create the world's first credit repair software!"
But I didn't know anything about business. I don't have a degree in finance. I didn't even graduate high school, so I had to start learning how to code. I kept trying to learn how to code, and it wasn't working eventually. But I kept drawing the software, so I drew it so many times.
Do you remember the movie Close Encounters, where the guy keeps drawing this mountain and doesn't know why he's obsessed with it? That's how I was. I kept drawing this software that I wanted to build that I couldn't build until eventually I figured out you hire somebody. And so by doing a gig here or there or making somebody a website or whatever, I managed to pay for a developer to help me, and I made this little download called Credit Aid.
I finally got this launched in about 2004, and it was $20. I sold a few, but nobody really cared. But that was me in the doctor's suit. I was the Credit Doctor. But it actually did what it was supposed to do.
Some people bought it, but it was so hard to get a customer, and then I'd get $20 for this thing, and then I'd never see that person again. Eventually, I made a little bit bigger version for businesses, but still, that was the end of the sale. I didn't know how to create a business from it. A good week, I could make maybe $100 or a couple hundred dollars. It was terrible. But credit repair companies started wanting bigger versions, mortgage brokers, realtors, and people like that. Tax people started wanting bigger versions, and that's when I realized, "Oh, I've got to make it for businesses, and in order for it to really be a business, it's got to be in the cloud so that we can keep making it better!"
So, Credit Aid was for consumers? For people like you, who got the runaround from the credit bureaus.
DANIEL: "Yeah. In fact, it even got into stores. It was in a chain called Fry's, so I made thousands of them, but then Fry's never paid me. So it was a disaster. I ran TV commercials, but it was just like flushing money away. I didn't know how advertising worked."
How was that transition from Credit Aid to Credit Repair Cloud?
DANIEL: "Well, the little bit of money I was making from this, I got this idea, but I knew it was going to be really expensive, and it was before people were even calling this the cloud, the internet. But I got this idea, and I started pitching to investors because I knew it was going to cost a whole lot of money, and they all said no.
So I just thought, okay, I'm not going to leave this room until I figure it out. And I sat in a weird little sad room for about five years, and I just worked on it. I mean, occasionally, I'd leave to, if I could paint someone's wall or watch someone's cat or do something to get money to keep paying developers and slowly cobble this thing together, and I still didn't know how advertising worked, so I would just write articles all night until the sun came up and that started to create a blog and that started to bring traffic.
And then, after five or six years in this weird little room, I was able to launch Credit Repair Cloud. And because I'd written all the articles, people started coming, and it started getting a little traffic and traction.
The first year or so, I was doing everything. I thought it'd be easy once there were customers, but suddenly, I was dealing with people, too, and that was really hard. I'd never done that on the early website. You'd probably remember Tammy. I had little pictures on the site of the people I was pretending to be. I was still in sales. I was Tammy in support. Everyone hated Tammy. Tammy was a b***h. So it was just horrible trying to get this thing going. But little by little, it started to grow, but I wasn't getting any sleep, and it was very stressful. At one point, I gained almost a hundred pounds from the stress, and that's when Keenan came into the picture."
Keenan, what was it like for you to come into what Daniel had started and then see how your input helped develop what Credit Repair Cloud is today?
KEENAN: "The whole experience was a lot of fun. I've always been into tech and always been kind of an entrepreneur at heart growing up. I think Daniel and I have a lot of similarities with some of our early stories of him hustling, doing people's websites, painting the wall. I was in high school doing video editing for people, building people's websites, running around in my car to different people's houses to do it, support and always freelancing with a ton of entrepreneurial stuff.
So then it gave me a vehicle to do it in a business, and I started giving a bunch of advice on marketing in the early days. I came in doing support, then grew into marketing, and now a product of the company."
Keenan, what was one thing you wish you knew now that would've made a world of difference for CRC?
KEENAN: "Well, before I go into my first item, just something tactical from Daniel's advice of just hiring and getting people to help. One of our mentors, Dan Martel, he's in the software world, but he just wrote a book recently called Buy Back Your Time that is all about getting help. But very tactically, you don't have to run a software company.
It could be for any business, and it teaches you the right mindsets and right processes to get you out of the business and get you into building the business.
I think the biggest thing that I wish I would've known at the beginning and know now is to model success in general. Go up and out there who's one step ahead of us and go model them. And it doesn't have to be expensive. I think in the early days we were buying some books, buying some courses.
You're now a fan of ClickFunnels. So we were buying to get better at marketing. We bought a bunch of Russell Brunson's books of the founder of ClickFunnels and learned a lot about marketing. And those books can be like 20 bucks to buy. You don't have to invest a ton. And then, we were able to model what they were doing successfully. And then, over time, we were able to hire more expensive mentors, get into masterminds, get into bigger business groups, and then we were able to start modeling the success of others.
Instead of doing the tactics of marketing and sales and building products, now it's more leadership and learning from other companies how do we delegate more? How do we become better leaders? But the investments have come more over time. So you could start smaller again. You don't have to get into a really expensive mastermind at the beginning. We started with just some books and courses and grew from there."
And that was just a tiny part of the interview!
We had such a great conversation with Bruce! You have to check out the entire episode and take notes!
To learn more about Bruce, check out my interview with him: Behind the Scenes of a Million-Dollar Credit Repair Business.
You can visit his WEBSITE or subscribe to the Credit Repair Junkies Podcast!
I'LL END BY SAYING
If you still need a Credit Repair Cloud account, check it out. It's the software that most Credit Repair businesses in America run on. Sign up here for a Free Trial!
And if you'd like to change lives and grow your Credit Repair business, check out our Credit Hero Challenge!
It's an amazing program, and we've got another challenge starting in a few days, so grab your spot right now at CreditHeroChallenge.com!
So take care, Credit Hero!
And Keep Changing Lives!