CREDIT DEPARTMENT PROFILE: Recruiting the Talent You Need for Top-Notch Credit and Collection Team Performance

We’ve-Always-Done-It-That-Way is no motto for any organization. For credit and collection departments today, it can be a roadmap to bankruptcy. You need staff that is not only alert to risks and challenges, but constantly improving results by improving performance. Here’s how one newly hired corporate credit manager is doing just that.

By Wayne Mueller

Jennifer “Jen” Martin is a 25-year veteran of the building materials industry and a strong advocate of the “credit is an extension of sales” philosophy. She earned a BS in Business Management with honors from Regis University and is active in the credit community. Jen is a regular online credit contributor and speaker on credit best practices. In her current role as Director of Credit for Carter Lumber, Jen is focused on showcasing credit’s value as a business partner, fostering the importance of strong relationships and charting a path to receivable and cashflow excellence thru education and empowerment of credit professionals. You can keep up with Jen by following her on LinkedIn. Jen Martin | LinkedIn

The new corporate AR/Collection manager at Carter Lumber Corporation, the fifth largest lumber company in the in the industry with annual sales of $3 billion, started in February.  Since then, she has transitioned her department from a group of dialing-for-dollars, hourly employees to a team of professional collection managers, all with their own customer portfolios to manage.   

“She now has nine of these folks, and we were able to do this without intentionally letting staff go,” explains Corporate Director of Credit Jen Martin. “As things changed, or people decided to leave on their own, we reassigned them into transactional roles or used space that we had to bring in higher level skilled employees.   These are folks who have 10 years or more of experience in collections. Ideally, they’ve worked in construction credit, so they understand the importance of customer relationships. We’re no longer dialing for dollars. We live on repeat business. This person has helped me rebuild that, and we’re still in that process.”         

In her early 60s, Carter Lumber’s new corporate collection manager came from a smaller organization, and this is the largest staff she’s managed. “She has years of credit and collection management, and she understands the foundation and best practices that need to happen, which was very important to me,” Martin continues. “Implementing best practices allows you to have creativity down the line. You’re working off a good base.”

Martin found her new collection manager on Linkedin. “I connected with every collection professional in Ohio who was willing to connect with me,” she says. “We’re in a suburban, rural section of Akron, so there are not a lot of folks right around us. Her commute is about 45 minutes. Her career plan    is to work for another five or 10 years.”

Reinvigoration

For Carter Lumber’s new collection manager, this isn’t so much a second career as a reinvigoration. “It isn’t going to be a cake walk,” notes Martin. “It’s not nine to five, but I hope it to be a year from now. We’re going to put our heads down and turn this ship around, and she’s 100 percent on board.   

“She approaches things very directly, and she’s done a fantastic job. Age, experience and confidence have allowed her to do that. We have direct conversations, and she knows that it’s not like I say one thing, and the sky falls.  We’re going to talk and work through this. We’re in this together.”

Martin’s searches also lead her to a somewhat younger woman who has now joined Carter Lumber in a leadership role in the special billing area, where turnover has been high. She came in from a 17-year career as office manager in a building supply company where she was the go-to person for a much smaller office, on call 24/7. “She’s moved to work here, and quality of life is very important to her,” says Martin. “She wants to work for 10 more years but doesn’t want to be on call 24/7.

“From my standpoint, that’s easy. I have someone with a tremendous skill set and understanding of how business comes together. Her experience and skills are much broader than the tasks she’s doing every day, and that helps her educate our younger folks.  Don’t be afraid of applicants at advanced ages. If you can meet their requirements, they can more than meet yours.”

Working Remotely?

What about job candidates who have grown used to being allowed to work remotely and demand that accommodation?    “We don’t have a remote culture,” Martin replies flatly. “We struggle with a robust training environment, so it’s hard right now to bring green folks in and just turn them loose. I aspire for things to be totally different in three years, but that’s where we are today.   

 “I want to have a definitive training program. We’re already embracing external training, partnering with NACM, on-line resources, doing different classes and encouraging folks to participate as a way of leveling up their skill sets, although, as yet, there’s no requirement.”

Martin herself came on board last November and became corporate Director of Credit in January.  What she walked into, of course, was an economy dramatically shifted by rising interest rates.

“If people didn’t make money in the three years preceding 2023, they had no business being in business,” she notes.   “Money was growing on trees. We saw a huge turn last October, coinciding with what was going on with interest rates.        

“The construction business space is very hand-to-mouth with so much depending on a customers’ ability to sell and turn projects. Most of our customers do not have significant assets or large corporations behind them. They work project to project. When the money flow starts to slow or dry up, we quickly run into problems.”    

Not 2008-2009 Again

The biggest issue right now is that the industry is in the middle of that cycle. “We’ve seen it many times. It’s not as bad as 2008-2009, but project money flow is slowing down, and things are harder right now.”

One of Martin’s first priorities was to stabilize the workforce.     Carter was experiencing a tremendous amount of turnover centralized in Credit, and she had to put a tourniquet on that.  “The company as a whole is very mature,” she says. “It’s not out of the ordinary for folks to have 20 to 40 years with us. There are 250 in the corporate office and very few like me who have been there less than a year.” 

Part of the turnover problem was people refusing to return from working remotely. The other is that there had been an effort to assembly-line process by hiring very low skilled workers, who would get frustrated and leave. She is working on educating and empowering her people, bringing them into the decision-making process. “I want them to see what’s happening    and then starting to let them run a bit on their own,” she says.     “There’s a very big focus on that.

“I don’t think that anything can be successful if just one person is relied on for leadership.  I’m finding more of the folks I want to hire and encourage to join our team. We want to be their employer of choice; with the credit team they want to work for.  I spend a good deal of time trying to find and recruit those employees. We recognize this is a marathon, not a sprint.  We’re trying to build a team that aspires to be successful over the long term.”

For her own part, Martin has been looking for a position that she would want to stay in for a long time. “That involves a lot of things for me,” she says. “It has to be an organization I’m proud to work at. It has to be full of people with whom I share similar values, people who want to do the right things. And, it has to be robust enough that they challenge me and pay me.

“That’s not as easy to find as one might think. I think a lot of people have the same goals. But in most organizations these days folks stay five years or less. One of my previous CEO’s told me that if I stayed longer than five years, I’d be doing myself a disservice.   

“But I’ve come from a different background,” she continues. “Here at Carter, the average employment tenure is over 20 years. That was a selling point when they talked to me. They believe in what they’re doing. They believe in their team. They take a long-term approach. They’ll say: ‘Things might be bumpy for a little while.  We may have to throw some money at this to fix it. But let’s do that.’ The next 20 years is more important than this year. 

“I wasn’t used to that, so, for me, it was a really refreshing attitude. And that’s part of what I sell to these employees. We’re going to be another success story.”

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