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Char Cody, president and owner of Select Recovery, Inc., has been in the collections business for nearly 40 years and founded Select Recovery 15 years ago. Select Recovery is a licensed agency in the state of Arizona, which has among the strictest standards in the country. The five-person company is one of only a handful in the state and 135 in the country specializing in commercial collections. Cody has long been one of the few women in the business, and to her knowledge, Select Recovery is the only woman-owned firm in the country. Their 33 to 35 % success rate is well above the national average of 23% and in some business categories, such as insurance, ranges upward to 52%.

In addition to bucking the trend in a male-dominated work arena, Cody has spent much of her professional life attempting to dispel negative perceptions many people have about bill collectors."I think everyone has heard stories about bill collectors who call in the middle of the night, who badger people when they are down and out, or who use strong-arm tactics to squeeze the last money out of an out-of-work individual. We normally don’t deal with personal collections from individual people" she notes. "We deal with presidents of corporations, business owners and controllers. Our business is with commercial collections rather than consumer collections."

Cody’s firm works with 500 to 600 clients monthly on average, and they handle a myriad of accounts from commercial insurance, advertising and publishing to construction supply and manufacturing and wholesale nurseries. Located in Scottsdale Airpark, it’s not unusual for Select Recovery to be working with clients in the immediate vicinity at the same time they’re tracking down monies in Italy or South Africa. To Cody, that’s part of the intrigue. "It can get complicated," says Cody, "but that’s the fun of it."

Cody has the ability to call upon their attorneys to litigate, if necessary. But that’s almost always a last resort, she says. "We try to avoid litigation. It is expensive, and it is time consuming. Clients are almost always better off settling an account long before it gets into litigation."

While Cody and her team are not going to come after anyone in the middle of the night, make no mistake about it: They are tenacious in their efforts to track down any information they can which might help them recover money for their clients. Accounts are set up on the day they are received and written notification mailed, and direct contact is made within 48 hours. "You don’t collect money through intimidation," says Cody. "I believe you can retrieve your client’s money and treat debtors with respect, stay within the law and do exactly what you were hired to do without having complaints and without having a lot of unnecessary money go toward litigating an account.

Article written by Cindy Miller, published by Today’s Arizona Woman