13 Nov November 13, 2019 – Are You F—able? Merrill Chandler and Super Brand Publishing Juliet Clark
“The audio file was removed when we switched hosts. Sorry. The cost was prohibitive. If you need the file, contact us and we will send it.”
Merrill Chandler – CEO and Chief Strategist at CreditSense.com – Founder and Chief Strategist at FundingHackers.com – Read interview highlights here
Our behavior is what they are monitoring now, not waiting for
proof. We are now in control of our own approvals for cars,
business lines of credit, loans. We are in charge of approvals
by knowing what they are measuring.
Merrill Chandler, CEO and Chief Strategist at CreditSense.com, has been an influential player in the credit restoration industry for over 21 years, and has co-founded numerous successful credit restoration firms around the country, including Lexington Law. Unsatisfied with the results of credit repair alone, Merrill has used his extensive knowledge of credit reporting and credit profiling to single-handedly invent and dominate the credit profile optimization marketplace. Since 1997, Merrill and his staff of advisors have assisted real estate investors, business owners, entrepreneurs, and savvy consumers nation-wide to create FUNDABLE Tier 1, and even 800+ credit profiles. Today, CreditSense’s credit profile optimization process has no equal, especially for clients who want to leverage their financial reputations towards wealth and prosperity. Through superior client relations, Merrill and his team have maintained an A+ Better Business Bureau rating for over 21 years. Merrill is a compelling and knowledgeable keynote speaker and has addressed real estate investment conferences and businesses forums around the country where he has delivered his popular credit-empowerment forum, “Insider Secrets to an 800+ Credit Score.” with its basecamp in Utah, FundingHackers.com helps entrepreneurs, real estate investors, and business people, supercharge their personal and business borrower profiles and reach their funding goals.
Juliet Clark – CEO of Winsome Media Group – Author of Pitchslapped
Producers laugh at people that claim to be Amazon Best
Sellers. You can completely cheat.
Juliet Dillon Clark is the Founder of Super Brand Publishing. Their expertise-first approach to publishing stems directly from Juliet’s disillusioning personal experience with her first book back in 2008. She thought her background with traditional publishing would make self-publishing easy. Nothing could have been further from the truth. The existing process did nothing but take advantage of unsuspecting authors, who didn’t know that there was a better way. I decided to make that better way available, through the creation of Super Brand Publishing.Over the years Juliet brought her expertise to corporate clients like Mattel, Nissan, Price Stern Sloan Publishing, and HP Books. Before long she realized that what she really wanted to do was help individuals, not corporations, further their success and find fulfillment. Since then, she has helped more than 600 entrepreneurs and authors share their work with the world and has published more than 60 books, turning more than 190 authors/entrepreneurs into best-selling experts!
Highlights from Merrill’s Interview
I believe I’m the first in a long line of f*able awesome people here at credit sense. And by f*able, we mean fundable. I don’t know where you guys went with that, but it is. I am determined to make fundability being fundable your new favorite F word. Because we didn’t invent the word, but we certainly have put meat on its bones, because this isn’t about just having good credit or bad credit anymore. The system that lets people get approved in 30 seconds or less for $20,000 credit cards, those are called automatic underwriting systems. And they’re looking at all kinds of data, not whether you have good credit or bad credit. They’re measuring like 40 different characteristics, and they’re doing it in milliseconds. To be f*able means to be fundable, and fundable means that I don’t care what your credit score is, someone is a lender willing to give you money at the best rates and terms possible. That’s the only question that matters in this new generation, this f*able generation of automatic underwriting systems.
We do a lot of educational opportunities at GetFundable.com, because there’s so much to this. It’s not like you can watch a 32 second commercial and know what’s going on. So we have web classes that are free online, and we have super inexpensive boot camps. People can spend a weekend with me, me myself, learning how to stop stepping on the funding landmines you don’t even know exist out there. All you know is that you get denials for business lines of credit or you’re paying too much for a mortgage or an auto. It’s horrible in this entrepreneurial space. We all want more money to do more deals, expand our businesses, and fund our enterprises. Most of us don’t even know what the rules of business funding are. And there’s so many myths out there, so many wrong reasons to decline, that if you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re going to blow yourself up.
There are 241 data points across FICO, and across lender underwriting systems that they are evaluating over a 24 month look back period. That’s what your listeners need to understand. It isn’t that they want to know what you’ve done for them lately. They track it over 24 months, and they look at all of these characteristics and decide whether or not to give you money.
Some of your listeners may have already experienced the automatic limit increases where they didn’t pull a credit report, and they didn’t ask for income. There were no inquiries or anything. You just got an automatic limit increase to your personal credit card. Most people think that happened because they paid their bills on time. It’s not so.
There are all of these characteristics that are being measured to determine whether or not somebody wants to give you credit. The greatest transfer of power has occurred over the last 10 years, because lenders who always needed external third party documentation and proof to verify that what you put on your application was true, instead of requiring proof, they’ve now empowered software with the ability to give you a 30 second or less approval. Our behavior is what they’re monitoring now, not waiting for proof. It costs them too much money to do manual underwriting. But if we know what the lenders are looking for, what that behavior is, and we align ourselves with that behavior… I am telling you, that’s where the power is. We now are in control of our own approvals. We’re in charge of our approvals by knowing what they’re measuring, and then aligning our behavior. They don’t care about proof anymore, it costs too much money to get that proof.
I am a fan of automatic underwriting systems. To show you why, let’s go back to manual and writing systems. You’re sitting in front of a person, they fill out an application, you bring all of this data that you have to go collect. Then we have to prove that we make this much money using tax returns or financial statements. We have to prove that we’ve worked here for this long. We have to prove all these data points. I trust and love the automatic underwriting system, because they’re monitoring in the background how long I’ve been working in a particular place, how long my automatic deposit has been going into a bank account for X number of years, how long I’ve been paying my bills on the due date instead of randomly through the month, etc. All of those metrics, they are measuring. And in every way that I understand, it is extremely fair.
But what’s powerful to me is that now I know, and so I don’t need a lender to approve me. I need my behavior to match their lending guidelines. And I got this. I, myself, the leader of this charge, just got another $75,000 approval, $25,000 on a business credit card from Wells Fargo, and a stated income $50,000 Business Line of Credit unsecured, because I know what they’re looking for and align my behavior. And when I say align your behavior, you can’t game the system. You can’t just say, “Let’s figure out how to hack the system.” This isn’t about hacks. This is about supporting ourselves, and actually behaving in a way that supports lender safety. The second we’re what I call a professional borrower, not a deadweight consumer or rookie borrower, the second we’re a professional borrower and we show up on their metrics that way, then they will give us money hand over fist over and over again.
It is not gender specific. It is not ethnicity or race specific. All they’re looking at is data points. They don’t care what your name is, as long as it’s the same name across all three bureaus. They don’t care what your addresses are, what zip code you live in, as long as it’s the same perfectly described address so that doesn’t trigger any of their fraud alert systems or their “Oh, someone’s trying to get away with getting credit out of a PO box.” Those become less fundable. Knowing that they don’t fund PO boxes as an address means that we just need to figure something else out. And we know what they do fund. We have it, we’re a legit entity to be funded, especially our businesses. So there’s a whole bunch to it. But in essence, this is true blind approvals. They just want to see the data, and we’re in charge of that data.
Between the three bureaus, FICO is the scorer and the bureaus are reporters. We’ve got to keep those separate. One of the major things we’ve got to know is that there’s differences between credit reporting. You may have something on your credit profile that says ‘paid as accurate’ or ‘paid as agreed,’ that’s credit reporting. FICO comes through and it looks at the 40 or so characteristics that it’s evaluating. What your listeners need to understand is that ‘paid as agreed’ can count 30 points for you or 5 points for you. If it’s positive, let’s say it’s an unpaid collection on your score, that unpaid collection says ‘unpaid collection,’ so we think, “Oh, that’s bad,” but that can count 30 points against you or only 5 points against you. If you optimize the other data points, the age, the balance ratio, the consistency and accuracy across all three bureaus. All those other things give you an opportunity to have less negative drag against that unpaid collection. Credit repair looks at everything like a nail because it’s a hammer. It’s scorched earth policy. Oh, it’s negative, delete it. No, I co-founded Lexington Law Firm in 1992, and I left there because they just wanted to beat everything on the head like it was a nail. There’s a finesse to optimization. And so the whole idea is how do we create. In this example, we want to maximize the positive reporting of good accounts and minimize the negative drag. I have clients, numerous clients that have over 800 plus fundable credit profiles, not just the score, but fundable profile. They get money from lenders, and they have derogatory listings and negative accounts on their credit profile still, and they’re over 800 and are getting money. It’s not about good credit or bad credit. It’s about optimization and squeezing every point juice out of every single one of these metrics that we’re discussing.
It’s what your value set is. I have people who have been fans of cash only get out of the system with no debt. Then they come to me saying, “I want to become a real estate investor, and nobody will lend me money.” It’s because you don’t have any history of borrowing and paying back successfully. You’re not stupid, ugly or mean, what you are is someone who’s not going to be able to get a loan unless it’s venture funding or you have established relationships with lenders for whom your name alone is enough. Commercial lenders are not going to give you money, because you don’t have a financial reputation. They can trust that; they can measure that. You are fundable, not ugly or mean or stupid. But it’s weird.
You can be cash rich and credit poor, because lenders are the consummate version of, “What have you done for me lately?” They want to measure your behavior, how you treat other people’s money. More importantly, they want you to be able to establish a relationship with them that they can depend on. Then they will give you more and more and more money over time, but you have to show that they gave you money, and then you paid it back to them.
This depends on what your value set is. You want to buy a car or a house with cash, Godspeed. God bless those of your listeners who can do it. Amen. But if you want to fix and flip houses at the least possible interest rate and terms instead of using hard money, then you need the cheapest money available, which is commercial money, a tier one, tier two bank money. If you want to expand your franchise, and so you’ve tapped out SBA, you need to go to banks that are going to have a relationship with you. And this relationship is what the metrics they get to measure on how you’ve treated their earlier or previous loan, as well as those of others. I call them sister banks. Both tier one banks look at the other tier one banks and how you’ve treated them. All tier two banks look at tier one and tier two banks to see how you’ve treated them. So there you are.
Since 2008, there is not a lot of what you’re calling corporate credit. Corporate credit is usually reserved for $5 to $10 million annual revenue outfits that for 5 to 10 years have had significant relationships with banks. Those banks will then extend further credit without having a personal guarantor or small business owners since 2008. Now we will always be the financial guarantor of the business lines of credit, the business loans, the business credit cards that we engage. The reason is because they are measuring our personal credit behavior, because as the folks at FICO—I’ve been to FICO World two times. I’ve spoken with the CEO and the score development team and met with them and asked them literally 100 questions, and they said that 80% of all business lending decisions are based on the personal credit profile, the personal reputation of the principal or the owner. And since they’re measuring that, that’s who they’re funding. They may give the money to the LLC, and it may not report to your personal credit profile on a monthly basis, like a personal credit card would. But if it goes delinquent, then the principal, the signer on the bottom line will ultimately be responsible for it. Those are the rules of engagement. There are outfits out there to say, “Oh, I can get you corporate credit,” but the corporate credit there gets us Staples cards and Home Depot cards and FedEx accounts where it’s only in the business’ name, because the vast majority of those are not cash cards; they are merchandise cards. So a $1,000 credit limit is literally $100 on the line for them. So they will put it in the name of the business only. That’s different corporate credit that people use all the time. That corporate credit is when you have a Standard & Poor’s credit rating, not an Experian or Dun & Bradstreet credit rating.
Lenders naming your LLC will stand in line as one of your creditors to collect from you. You signed on the bottom line, so ultimately the view is the business owner is responsible for it. It’s been that way for 10 years now. What you hear out there, which pisses me off, is that there are individuals who are trying to sell you the idea of corporate credit under the premise that my home is going to get me a $50,000 business line of credit or business loan based on somebody’s reputation, that’s just absurd. One of the other things, Dave Smith was the SBA, Small Business Association liaison at FICO, in one of my meetings with him, he said that business credit reporting today, the credit reporting businesses today is what consumer credit reporting was in Mid ‘80s. That was even before FICO came out with consumer scores. It is archaic. The only data that they can trust to fund is our individual, because our individual record, the individual recording and scoring is phenomenal on the personal side. So that’s what they’re looking at. But if you go look at a business credit report, they’ll tell you that there’s a credit card. It doesn’t say that it’s a Chase card with a $20,000 limit and an 80% balance. It doesn’t have any of those data points. What’s untrustworthy about it is it just says credit card, it doesn’t say that it’s a tier one banker, or a Shell Oil card. That’s what they’re battling, and my job is to inform the business owning public what the rules of engagement are and how to prosper in this system, how to actually get the life, but they are responsible for whatever you engage, and you are responsible for payback since 2008.
The center of the fundability universe is GetFundable.com. You can go there, you can check out my book. It’s about the new F word, Are You F*able and do a deep dive there. I’ll cover the book costs if you will throw in for shipping, we’ll get that in your hands. You can get at least the principles of how to become fundable by checking out my bootcamps. Every month I do a bootcamp that you can attend online. It’s live. These are not recorded. These are live bootcamps. And it says that you are there because I don’t let anybody go until all the questions are answered. Those are monthly. You can sign up for the next boot camp. You can also go there, and you’ll be able to find all my podcasts. Now don’t stop listening to Jim, keep enjoying his, but I have a podcast that is exactly about this, every episode is covering those points. What am I going to say when I’ve covered 241 of the points? I’ll have to start over and do it again.
GetFundable.com is the place is the place to start. There’s something for every price point and every level of trust. Check out my frequently asked questions and you’ll get more answers than you could ever dream of. You will learn more just in the FAQs than you would ever thought possible. Then imagine the bootcamp and the book and all the other things that we do, like our coaching program. We have everything for every person who wants to truly receive vast quantities of other people’s money to do your deals, expand your businesses, or engage your entrepreneurial desires. I’m here to help.