ok so. the complaint i heard more than any other as a broker had nothing to do with rates or terms or paperwork. and the day it cost me a two million dollar deal it changed everything
the call that killed the deal
let me tell you about a client. we'll call him henry
first time we ever spoke henry was days away from pulling the trigger on something big. couple mill into a small real estate project. little risky, very high reward. a chance to really expand his business, take it to the next level. we had talked it through. done the research. i knew literally nothing about his industry a few days earlier when we first spoke and now i was invested in seeing this guy win
then he calls me and tells me hes out
not because the deal fell apart. not because the numbers stopped working
because of his phone.
"im getting so many calls i feel so incredibly overwhelmed. im not gonna do it"
four other brokers had gotten to him. four different offers, all with completely contradictory information. he couldnt tell who was lying so he figured maybe everybody was. he sensed the red flag and did the smart thing. he waited
and heres the confession part. i was one of those brokers. different shop, better intentions, but from where henry sat? just another voice in the noise
"why dont you just get on the do not call list"
if you own a small business and youve ever taken an mca, or even just LOOKED at one, you know exactly what henry was dealing with. the whole industry and their mother calls you. every day. forever
as a broker i heard this complaint almost as often as my clients suffered from it. and i always gave the same advice everyone gives
"why dont you add yourself to the national do not call registry"
henry did. he registered.
the calls kept coming
and i started paying attention after that. i could name a dozen clients that i KNEW were on the dnc and every single one of them was still getting hammered. so i did some digging
what i found honestly made me a little sick
the loophole nobody tells merchants about
the national do not call registry does not protect business phone lines.
read that again. the one piece of advice every merchant gets, the thing i personally told my own clients for years, doesnt apply to them. the dnc was built for consumers. residential lines. business to business calls slip right through it. its literally an exemption. who knew. not me. not henry. not the thousands of merchants registering their numbers wondering why their phone wont stop buzzing
so the brokers keep dialing. and the worst ones, the ones pushing garbage loans onto people who are next to clueless or completely fucked, often both, they dial the hardest. and theyre not even breaking the rule everybody thinks exists
(quick side note before you close the tab in despair - if your "business line" is your cell phone, and lets be real for most small business owners it is, courts have actually said a cell number on the dnc list counts as residential no matter how you use it. remember that. its gonna matter in a minute)
but heres what i learned next and this is where it gets fun. none of this means theyre untouchable
the gap between "legal" and "leave me alone"
theres a real gap between whats technically enforceable and your actual ability to make your phone stop ringing. merchants have rights. real ones with real teeth. most just dont know what they are and the industry has zero incentive to explain it. shocking i know
heres the part almost nobody uses. once you send a broker shop a formal cease and desist, the whole picture changes. by law they have to log your request and put you on their internal do not call list. they get 10 business days max to honor it. and it sticks for 5 years. this isnt a polite ask, its a federal requirement
and it covers the WHOLE shop. not just the guy who called you. so when some other broker at the same shop pulls your number off their list two weeks later, that shop now has a problem. keep getting calls after youve told them to stop and youre looking at statutory damages, $500 a call, up to $1500 if its willful. (technically the law wants to see more than one violating call in a 12 month period before you can sue, but lets be honest, these shops dont call once)
and let me tell you something from the inside. when a brokerage actually pays out on one of those, the very next thing that happens is a company wide email. "if anyone contacts this number again you will be fired." i know because ive RECEIVED those emails
one letter. thats the difference between being on a call list forever and being radioactive to an entire brokerage
so the tool exists. the law was never the problem. the problem is no single merchant can send letters to hundreds of broker shops theyve never even heard of yet
unless they dont have to do it alone
what happens when merchants start sharing notes
thats the idea mcafax was born from
think about it. one merchant sending one cease and desist protects one number from one shop. but youre all getting calls from the SAME shops. so what if every call any merchant logged went into one shared database and everyone could use it
thats literally how it works. you sign up, cease and desists go out to the brokerages already in our database, the ones merchants before you already identified. you get a call from a new shop, you log it, and now everyones protected from that shop too. every merchant who joins makes the shield stronger for everybody else
and if a shop calls you AFTER theyve been formally told to stop? youre not the one with the problem anymore. they are
get a call from some unknown number claiming to be a broker? look them up while youre still on the phone. youll know in seconds if theyre a known shop, if theyve already been sent a letter, and whether this call just became worth something to you
the merchants whove been carrot dangled and bait and switched and blown up daily finally have a way to push back together. thats the whole play
next time
next post im gonna walk through exactly what happens when a broker calls a number theyve been told to leave alone. what the paper trail needs to look like, what counts, what doesnt, and what that company wide "do not contact" email means for your phone going forward
henry by the way? two months of radio silence, then we did the deal. hes been my client ever since. the project he almost walked away from because of a ringing phone worked out just fine
the phone problem though. that took building a company to fix