If you own a business, there’s plenty of things you can stress over. Maybe it’s hard to find suitable employees with the skills you need, maybe you have to file your taxes and your paperwork is a mess. In short: there’s a lot you can stress about, unfortunately. But luckily there are some things you can do to make sure you don’t lose sleep stressing. One of those things is hiring a collection agency when you have debtors that are late paying their invoices or don’t pay their invoices at all. In this article, we tell you more about why we believe every business owner should have the number of a collection agency on call.
What does a collection agency do exactly?
You might think that you can annoy a debtor into paying if you call every day, but a collection agency (Dutch: incassobureau) does so much more than that. For example, they’re highly skilled in finding out who owns a certain company; something that can be very hard to figure out when your one contact at a company stops replying to you. Who owns a particular company can be super well hidden. If you hire a collection agency (Dutch: incassobureau inschakelen), they have ways to figure that out.
Something that is also quite important: they can also take the next step. Often, when a debt collector calls on behalf of their client, it scares a debtor and then they pay faster. When they get contacted by the agency, they realise how serious you are. This is called the ‘extrajudicial phase’.
But sometimes even that doesn’t help. In that case, the agency has to hire a bailiff (Dutch: deurwaarder inschakelen), who can seize assets, income, and property. When the court gets involved, we call that the ‘judicial phase’.
How can someone find a trustworthy collection agency?
If you’ve decided that enough is enough, it’s time to do something about it. Unfortunately, debt collectors have a bit of a bad reputation, so we understand that it can feel stressful if you first have to go look for a partner agency. We recommend you to ask around if anyone in your circle has used an agency and what their reviews are. It’s also a good idea to check out Google reviews to see how the debt collection agency scores.
Once you’ve found an agency with great reviews, it’s a good idea to go check out the office and talk about your case. Make sure you figure out how the agency gets their fee; many agencies work with a ‘no cure, no pay’ fee, which means that you don’t have to pay them in the rare case when they can’t collect your money. This is great for you, after all, you don’t want to pay for money you haven’t received!
Good luck getting your money back!
About Carson Derrow
