Archive for July, 2010


Both my partner and I got notices from our banks that our auto repossession paychecks had been returned for non-sufficient funds. We rang the boss and he explained it away – “I forgot to transfer money from our operating account into our payroll account. I will transfer the money today and drop both checks in the mail this afternoon.” I pushed him to meet up with us to get the checks hand delivered, and offered to meet him anywhere. He whined that he could not meet us because he had a doctor’s appointment.  The guy was as old as dirt, so we decided to accept his promise to mail us the checks. Later that night we went out and repossessed four more cars.

We went out for a nice dinner with our cash tip and had enough left over to fill up our gas tank several times. We were both thinking that we had a boss that appreciated our hard work and high recovery rate. He often commented that no other repoman that ever worked for him had a consistent recovery rate in the 90 percentage rate like we had. As we rolled around checking addresses on our repossession orders, we talked about being able to retire early with a huge amount of cash in savings. If we could repossess cars for just 15 years, we would be set. The savings accumulated from our auto repossession checks combined with some other business ventures we were involved in would allow us to have a life of financial security by the time we were in our 40’s. That night we repossessed and delivered six cars – we were on cloud nine!  The next day we went to the bank and deposited our paychecks.

For several months we made a lot of money repossessing cars for our new boss. Our pick-up rate was always over 90%, and it was not because we could not find the other 10%. The ones we did not repossess usually ended up paying up and resulted in us getting a close fee. Once in a great while we had an order that stumped us, but I do not believe anyone could have gotten the car picked up. I can remember the day the boss rang me up and asked to meet with us in person. We met in the parking lot of a truck stop. He slowly got out of his car and walked towards us with an envelope in his hand. He congratulated us on a job well done, handed me the envelope and said, “There is a little extra in there for you and your partner to go out and have a nice steak. After he left, I checked the envelope and, besides our check, there was an extra $250. I guess he was expecting us to get a big steak!!

Learn more about the auto repossession business here

There is a lot of talk on our forum where a person that is new to the auto repossession business is told to go work for someone and learn the ropes of this business before starting their own company. We agree 100% with that, but our advice is to be sure you learn how not to run an auto repossession business, just as much as you learn how to run a repo company. Save yourself some headaches by learning from other people’s mistakes rather than making your own. Sure, you can gain all sorts of awesome knowledge about the repo world working for someone, but be sure you don’t pick up their bad habits, too. There are a lot of good repo agents out there that have just enough bad habits to lose all of their clients in one night, or worse than that, get themselves injured or killed.

Learn more about the auto repossession business here