Imagine for a moment you’re a credit repair business owner and it’s Thursday afternoon.
You’ve had an explosively good month so far - your affiliates came through with tons of leads, all your marketing efforts are on point, the phone has been ringing off the hook with people needing your help, and every few minutes you hear your favorite sound…
The notification that another lead just dropped into your Credit Repair Cloud account… life is good.
It’s even better because your team has worked SO hard to crush your sales goals for you. Each team member has kept their cool and gone above and beyond in spite of a CRAZY serge of new customers.
In fact, you’re so proud of them you’re thinking of adding in a bonus to their paychecks tomorrow.
After all, they’re the reason you’re able to grow so fast, and you know a couple of your team members are waiting on payday to fix their car, throw a birthday party for their kid, and buy groceries for their family.
So you sit down to transfer your funds from your Paypal and Stripe into your business checking account so you can process payroll for your team - who really are more like family than employees…
Suddenly, it feels like your stomach dropped to the floor and your blood rushed to your head…
ALL YOUR MONEY IS BEING HELD by Paypal and Stripe for at least the next 21 days because you violated their terms of service.
You can’t use even a PENNY of it...
Payroll is due and it doesn’t matter that you had a record-breaking month because NONE of your funds are available to use!...
WHAT. A. NIGHTMARE.
And the worst part is…
It could have been SO EASILY avoided.
When you own a credit repair business monthly-recurring payments are the key to profit and growth.
It’s so simple, you can even make money while you sleep!
How?
A recurring revenue business is kind of like a subscription where the customers pay every month, like a magazine, or your cell phone bill, cable bill...
It works like this…
Your revenue will grow LARGER every month!
For example; if a credit repair business gets 30 clients paying them $99 a month, that’s about $3000 in revenue in the first month. And if that same business just adds 1 new client every day, you can see how quickly that starts to add up. By month 6 your revenue could be over $17,000 a month — and over $33,000 by month 12!
All a credit repair business owner has to do is add more clients every month to keep the business growing!!
...AND have a way to legally and ethically process and manage all of those payments. Right?!
So, here’s why this is important and how to go about collecting payments:
Understand that credit repair is considered high risk so it’s important to use the right merchant account that allows you to charge for credit repair.
Yes, a MERCHANT ACCOUNT! Not PayPal, or Stripe or square or any 3rd party processors. You need an actual merchant account.
You NEVER - EVER want to use PayPal, Square, Stripe or other similar services to collect money from your clients!
These are not Merchant accounts, they are all called “Merchant Aggregators” and aggregate all its seller data into one large merchant account which is not controlled by you!
I’m so passionate about this topic because I have seen too many horror stories where a ton of hard earned revenue gets frozen, leaving the business owner in a really scary place financially.
If you’re using any of these 3rd party merchant aggregators and they catch wind of it, they’ll ban you and hold your money…
And guess what… there’s basically nothing you can do about it!
Don’t believe me?
If you read Paypal's terms of service, you will find their stance on “Credit Repair” flat out says “In general, PayPal does not allow Credit Repair or Credit Restoration. In special cases, certain certified organizations may acquire approval via business contract with PayPal.”
So basically… they don’t want anything to do with credit repair organizations but they may make an exception if you jump through the hoops and happen to get a contractual approval.
I recommend, you just don’t take the risk because really - if they approve of you, then change their minds, or consider you high risk, they freeze your money.
It may be weeks, or months or in some cases they may keep your funds in limbo or worse - never release your money!
Even just a couple minutes on Google and you’ll find that Paypal customers have complained for years about the nightmare of trying to regain control over frozen funds.
They routinely freeze funds for 180 days.
So, whatever you do, don’t let this happen to you!
In order to accept credit card payments, you need a merchant account and a gateway…
What is a merchant account and what is a gateway?
A merchant account is a type of bank account that allows you to accept credit card payments for your business and the gateway helps facilitate the online transactions and allows you to process them.
There are a lot of places to get a merchant account, but before you go applying all over town and adding hard inquiries to your personal credit report…
I had a chance to sit down with Tarek Kamal, the owner of 5 Star Processing which many of our #CreditHeroes currently use. He had some great tips to share.
First, he wanted to make sure you understand that merchant accounts for credit repair businesses are considered high risk, and a little more difficult to get.
The reason for this is because the clients that credit repair companies interact with often have a high charge-back ratio and reversals so you'll need to find nontraditional payment processing companies specializing in the high-risk sector like 5 Star Processing and some of our other preferred vendors.
There are also a lot of common misconceptions about credit repair merchant accounts that he said you should know about.
Placing the word “credit repair” in your business name will not prevent you from establishing a merchant account.
When applying for a merchant account, merchant processors will do their due diligence by going on your website, by looking at the marketing material and taking all the necessary precautions to validate your business.
So, there is no problem having the word credit repair in your company name.
Now, in an industry like the credit repair business, you are bound to get chargebacks, it’s not uncommon. However; there are a variety of ways to lessen chargebacks.
All these will significantly reduce chargebacks.
One of the reasons why Credit Repair Cloud recommends 5 Star Processing is they take the time to educate their clients in detail going through the merchant application because it's important to understand it all.
They have a free class that goes over the required documents, rates, and the entire process and they even help connect your new merchant account with Credit Repair Cloud so you don’t have to.
To apply for a Merchant Account, visit creditrepaircloud.com/merchant
Now that you have your merchant account, next you need the ability to automate monthly recurring payments.
That means you’ll need a recurring payments platform to automate the process.
A recurring payments platform is software that creates the billing plans for your clients and collects monthly recurring payments from your clients. It also sends “dunning” letters when cards decline or are about to expire.
You can’t automate your credit repair business without this.
Once you have it all setup, your merchant account will automatically charge your clients each month and deposit the money into your bank account.
That’s it!
You're now in business AND can sleep better at night knowing your funds won’t randomly be frozen!
Plus, did you know that each and every one of our Millionaires Club Members process all their millions in revenue through an actual merchant account?
… Not Stripe, or Paypal, or Square.
So when you hear rumors or misinformation about how to scam the system, how to use one of these third party processors - you set the record straight and tell them exactly WHY that’s taking on HUGE unnecessary risk!
And whatever you do - DON’T follow suit! Because now you know better!
So if you’re ready to quit your 9-5 and make money in your sleep - all while changing alotta lives, then I want to invite you to join our upcoming Credit Hero Challenge!
We’ll hold you by the hand as you launch your own credit repair business! We’ve got another one starting in a few days so grab your spot today at creditherochallenge.com