Kearley Lewis – building strong relationships and helping clients

Kearley Lewis – building strong relationships and helping clients

JULIE LAMERS, Chief Executive Officer of Kearley Lewis Ptd Ltd provides an insight into the development of the business.

Our Story

When Kearley Lewis’s founding members set up their debt recovery business in 1993, the emphasis was on building strong relationships and helping clients, either face to face or over the phone. There was no internet and no social media and they did not wish to rely upon impersonal call centres to
service their clients.

Despite a technological revolution, we are proud to say that little has changed during the past 25 years with regard to the support we provide our clients. We still don’t believe in call centres, and whilst technology has enabled us to become more efficient and offer clients online visibility of the work we do, providing personalised service remains at the core of our value proposition.

What We Do
As debt recovery experts, we support in-house credit and finance teams and business owners in the following ways:

• collecting business and consumer debts;
• following up high volumes of overdue debts;
• undertaking collections for low-value and high-value debts;
• communicating with debtors when there have been part-payments, no payments or extended payment terms;
• negotiating payment arrangements;
• managing contract disputes and more complex issues that require legal advice.

How We Can Help

We have an important role to play when businesses are not being paid for work they have completed. We do what our clients often don’t have the time or resources to do – follow up on their overdue accounts. Businesses in this position typically face a number of dilemmas:

• They do not have time to follow up overdue accounts, although they know that the longer an invoice goes unpaid, the more likely it is that it could turn into a bad debt.
• Allocating resources to this kind of work will involve a cost, but no guarantee of recovery.
• This work can be time consuming, unpleasant, and in many cases, unrewarding.
• They don’t want to go down the path of taking legal action.

If this scenario sounds familiar, we can help.

Why Kearley Lewis?

Having a recommendation from another business or finding a firm that already knows your industry is a good way to source a partner to assist with collecting overdue accounts.

Kearley Lewis is a fairly new player to the extractive industry, having become an associate member of the CMPA some twelve months ago. We recognised that we were working with a number of businesses and suppliers in the earth resources industry, and that most of them had not been aware of the debt recovery services we offer until they were referred to us by other clients.

We made contact with the CMPA, as it made sense to see if we could support the industry further by working with more businesses to improve their collections and ultimately their cash flow.

We understand that managing your brand and public relations is just as important as collecting outstanding debts.

Anyone contacting your customers should not be damaging relationships, even if you won’t be doing business with them again. With online reviews influencing customer’s buying decisions, this is becoming more and more important in business today.

Contact us today on 03 9629 8777 or email sales@kearleylewis.com.au to discuss how we can assist your business with commercial debt collection.

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60 Seconds with an associate member . . .

 

1. What is your name?

Julie Lamers

2. Who do you work for?

Kearley Lewis

3.  How many years have you been involved in the Industry?

I’ve been working with Kearley Lewis for two years, prior to this I worked in the banking and finance sector, working with small to medium sized businesses structuring cash flow finance (debtor finance) and asset-based finance facilities for them.

4.  What is your role at the company?

I am the CEO, working hands on with all our new clients.

5.  What is on the radar for 2018?

Earlier this year we migrated to a new operational platform, which means all of our clients have online visibility of the debts we are working on with them. This year we will be working closely with our clients and our teams to maximise efficiencies and improve the service we provide our clients. It’s always great to seek feedback from our clients on how we can improve what we do.

6.  What do you love about your work?

I’ve always loved working directly with clients to understand their needs and structure up solutions
for them. What’s great about providing debt recovery services is that for many clients, having an escalation point is often sufficient to re-open the doors of communication with their debtors. It’s really rewarding when we can assist our clients in being paid, sometimes a week is all it takes, which is great. Obviously it can take longer also, and this is where we have a good team of experienced people who can guide and advise our clients on the best steps to take.

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