McAbee Beats the Odds: Building Her Own Woman-Owned Million-Dollar Repo Company
Woman owned national repossession company, A1 Nationwide, LLC, hits the million dollar revenue mark
GREER, S.C., Feb. 4, 2019 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- A woman-owned business is the minority. While about 30% of U.S. businesses are owned by women, just 2% of these women-owned businesses ever pass the million-dollar mark in revenue. Renee McAbee of Greer has done just that with her company, A1 Nationwide, in an industry typically dominated by men. A1 Nationwide, LLC is a national repossession forwarding company headquartered in Greer, SC, with a satellite office in Wilmington, DE.
Growing up Renee McAbee never imagined she would own a nationwide, multi-million-dollar repossession company. Sometimes, she still can't believe it. Since the night in 2002 when she decided to start a local repossession company, she's grown her business to the point that she's hired employees, opened two offices, and passed the million-dollar mark in revenue for the first time in 2015.
How Renee Got Into the Business of Repossessing Cars
A lot of people ask Renee: "How did you get into the repossession business?"
The answer winds her story together with the story of how A1 Nationwide came to be.
Renee explains, "I never planned to open a local repossession company, and definitely not a national repossession brokering company. I worked for 15 years doing collections, private investigations and process serving – before I even started working for the local repossession companies. I got my start as a repo wrecker driver and drove for several companies before eventually becoming an office manager at one of the companies." The office manager job taught Renee how to communicate with the lenders. The job driving the wrecker taught Renee to treat people respectfully, which is really important in the repossession business where people often imagine them as shady mercenaries who swoop in at night, dressed in their darkest clothes, to hook your car to their tow truck before speeding away under the cover of darkness.
"You never know what people are going through in their personal lives," Renee says. "Yes, some people just stop making their payments on their car loans – either because they just lose interest in making their loan payments or they've made poor choices, like splurging on big-ticket items to the point that they can no longer afford their car loan payments. But, what I've found is that most people want to pay, but can't. They've fallen on hard times – often through no fault of their own."
A couple of years ago, Renee was assigned a repo where she met a gentleman who had recently lost his job. His plant had moved to Mexico. Then, two weeks after losing his job, his wife was diagnosed with cancer. It broke her heart to hear his personal situation, but he agreed that he didn't really need to have two cars anymore. And he admitted that he did not want to keep something he wasn't able to pay for.
In the end, people just want to be treated like people. "You just have to be able to talk with people, not to them, but with them," says Renee. "Most importantly, you have to be willing to listen. Not all repossessions can be a grab and go where you get the car in the middle of the night and no one notices until the next morning."
How Renee Grew an Idea Into a Million-Dollar Company
Renee still remembers the night, in 2002, when she sat across the table from her husband, Joey, and decided she could do repo differently, if she just started her own company, and ran it her way, to her own set of standards.
That October, from her living room, she opened her own repossession company. It covered Greenville, Spartanburg and Anderson. Joey and Renee built a repossession lot on their property, where she stored the vehicles. Soon after, they added a small 12x24 office building. Less than a year later, the company grew to cover the upstate of SC and western NC. Joey, who had been working as an industrial electronics technician, got laid off and joined Renee's repossession business.
He has never looked back.
Eight years later, a client suggested that Renee become a forwarder. Repossession forwarders get clients, vet and contract with agents nationwide and then forward the work from the clients to those agents. They're the 'middle man' in the repossession industry but do not repossess themselves. "I knew this meant I would have to transform my local business into a national company. I had done some work for a few forwarders, but had never considered starting one myself. But, the client kept after me, and she eventually convinced me to try it," Renee explains.
In 2010, Renee started A1 Nationwide, a national repossession forwarding broker and she moved into a commercial location in Greer. She hired office employees to help with the day-to-day administrative work. Although they stopped driving wreckers themselves in 2010, Renee and A1 Nationwide still have a monumental amount of administrative work that has to be done daily to keep up with their clients, the client's vehicles and their 604 subcontracted agents nationwide.
Today, Renee and her husband are both involved in the day-to-day operations of A1 Nationwide. They've grown to include two offices, one in Wilmington DE, and the corporate office in Greer, SC. They proudly remember 2015, when they hit the $1-million-dollar mark in revenue for the first time. "We had kept our heads down and worked hard towards achieving that first million in revenue," Renee proudly recalls.
Now, as Renee looks to the future, she's proud that she's built A1 Nationwide into what it is today: a national repossession company for all types of collateral: passenger vehicles, heavy equipment, semi-trucks, boats, campers and motorcycles. Many people view repossession as the ugly toe on the foot on commerce in the automobile financing industry. Consider this, if the banks and credit unions had no way to enforce their car loans, would they still lend people money so they could buy cars? And, without car loans, how would the vast majority of Americans be able to afford their cars?
SOURCE A1 Nationwide, LLC
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