Best Places to Work in Collections Winner Traces Success to Inception

Receivable Recovery Partners, LLC (RRP), the winner among small collection firms in insideARM’s Best Places to Work in Collection 2010 program, has capitalized on the attention it has received from the award. The announcement marks the second year running for the Indianapolis-based receivable management company whose clients include mostly health care providers.

“We’re so grateful that [insideARM.com] even has the award,” says Leo “Toby” Spreitzer, founder and CEO/President. “It’s been great PR for us to be able to share with our clients and we’re just honored that our employees feel the way they do.” The two-part survey program compiles company information on workplace policies, practices and philosophies before asking employees to complete a survey measuring their own personal experiences. “It just reinforces what we do from a survey standpoint about how [our employees] feel about us, our teamwork, our family atmosphere and so forth, and we just want to build on that and continue in the future.”

Things have been moving rapidly for RRP, as the company announced only last year its expansion into the historic Fountain Square district and future growth, although Spreitzer is quick to note how his company’s success is largely a continuation of relationships and a shared history throughout the ARM community.

“We were a small company started in September 2007, but there’s a lot of history that goes into that,” he explains. “Many of the people that I have staffed with me [now] came from a defunct agency which was a non-profit, file one, mutual hospital service, and it was the oldest shared collection agency in the country.” Spreitzer says a majority of that staff was unemployed for a year or more before being hired back into the fold to manage services ranging from insurance billing and follow-up, worker’s compensation, payment monitoring, and traditional bad debt recovery.

“It wasn’t a situation where I had to go out and actively recruit, with the exception of bilingual [employees],” he says. He also notes the company’s two twenty-year veterans and seven ten-year employees as strong examples of little need to recruit from outside. “I had 140 people to pick from that were displaced, so that was an easy part for me and many of them have worked with me for many, many years.”

The mutual respect, cooperation and communication at RRP is certainly reciprocated and has proven vital to the growth and development that Spreitzer is fostering from one of six cultural districts in the city.

“I get calls constantly for positions,” he says, noting that many of the unsolicited calls are currently employed. “I just have no room for them.”

The second major change for RRP since placing second among small companies in the 2009 Best Places to Work in Collections has been the addition and affordability of employee benefits, as Sprietzer, a hospital collection veteran, notes how difficult it might be for an individual to carry a low-cost Cobra Plan, for example.

“Our group health got to a place where we could afford it,” he says, proudly, “and I think one of the things we’ve always done from the outset is make our offices very, very flexible.” Sprietzer’s goal is to operate a company where his employees want to come to work and where their opinions matter.

“Historically, when we started, we set up our agency a little differently,” he says. “We didn’t go with a commission plan. We pay [employees] a base salary — averaging roughly $34,000/year — and what we did was work in some incentives as a team.”

RRP maintains standard attendance guidelines similar to other companies, for instance, but Sprietzer understands that people have personal issues and the added flexibility and insurance plan are keys to lasting satisfaction.  “We didn’t make it a rigid place to work,” he says of the RRP’s inception from a non-profit, hospital organization into a for-profit enterprise.

“Our whole emphasis on everything that we do is being part of a team and teamwork and everyone helping each other,” he says. “We didn’t want a lot of that old school collector mentality where it’s ‘who can be on top all of the time.’” The lack of cut throat competition also comes from the industry where RRP does the most business, according to Sprietzer. “Since we’re a health care collection agency we wanted to focus on the client,” he says. “No one ever planned to have these types of bills and we wanted to have that type of empathy coming from a health care, non-profit, hospital owned agency.”

“I think that’s the image we’ve maintained moving forward,” he says of the repeat honor from last year. “It’s just part of our standards of excellence.”