Small Business Spotlight: How Lendercast is Ending Homelessness One Lead at a Time
On the surface, LenderCast is a business that helps commercial lenders grow by matching them up with quality leads looking for financing. However, the company’s primary mission is to “End poverty by hiring the homeless equipping them to chase their dreams” LenderCast aspires to be the largest employer of (formerly) homeless people nationwide. We spoke with Carl Streck, founder of LenderCast, on why its mission is greater than its business model and how the company balances its own growth along with its clients’ needs.
Tell us about your company and your employees.
LenderCast was launched in February, but the idea for this type of organization had been percolating for years. At my other company, MountainSeed Appraisal Management, we gave several opportunities to people down on their luck, people who were struggling financially and/or homeless. We thought we’d start people out with an hourly gig to see how they would do as lead generators and inside sales reps. After a few weeks, we found that these people, whose only previous work experience included entry-level or fast food work, were really talented. They were achieving 200 percent of quota. So at LenderCast, our goal is to become the vehicle in which to give great people a real opportunity to build success and opportunities for their families. We want to create a business that is not just our own success story; we want to show other businesses that they can be profitable and help a social cause. We want to prove the concept of social entrepreneurship — that there is a higher purpose beyond making money. Our vision is to celebrate the success of our employees. Moving out of a homeless shelter is a huge success, so we want to throw them a party! Leaving the company can also be a success. We don’t want to hoard our wonderful team members; we want to provide a bridge to another professional job. We have a real opportunity to bridge the gap from job to career so that they each have stable, long-term growth opportunities.
How do you find your employees?
We have gone to The Atlanta Mission and City of Refuge (two homeless shelters) on a regular basis. We’re partnering with these shelters to create training programs, where people get on-the-job skills, including inside sales functions, computer literacy, and Salesforce. In the future the shelters would do the training and screening, and when candidates are ready, they can feed right into businesses like LenderCast, MountainSeed and another partner at City of Refuge, Napa Auto Parts.
In our view there already are programs for housing, food stamps, and daycare, but this is a program for jobs, and it’s not a charity, and it’s not government-sponsored. It is capitalism solving a social issue and changing peoples lives. Currently, we have six employees total, including me and Nathan Settembrini, our new CEO and we look forward to the day when many more banks trust us with their lead generation and we can have thousands of people coming through our doors looking for an opportunity and coming out with a future full of hope
Tell us about the business side which is helping to make this all happen.
We handle identifying prospective customers, calling them and appointment setting for commercial lenders nationwide. The majority of our clients are either local, regional or national banks today however we see this opportunity extending beyond these initial customer segments. Sifting through various markets to find business owners looking to finance or refinance is time-consuming and not cost-effective, so LenderCast helps lenders save time by sending them qualified borrowers looking to form relationships. Using great systems like Salesforce.com and insidesales.com,, our employees provide the sales development and lead generation legwork and let the lenders handle building the relationship and closing the loans.
Your company has been up and running for a few months now. What are some of the challenges you’ve encountered?
Like every startup, cash flow and servicing our customers are top priorities. We want to improve on opportunity-setting for bankers so they can be more efficient. The biggest challenge so far is marrying the production need with staffing and budget. There’s a balance between wanting to grow and finding more clients, yet not having too much on our plates so as to affect the quality of our work. That’s very important to us, not only for our clients, but our employees. When you think about poverty, it’s not just a financial issue, it’s also emotional. If you come to work and you’re not offering value, your self-worth might diminish. We want to empower our employees with a valuable work environment so they’ll be proud of the place they work.
How does LenderCast approach customer service?
We’re a subscription-based company and currently it’s just me and Nathan handling customer service. At the moment, we’re afforded the ability to offer high-touch customer service, but once you have two or three times the number of clients, it becomes a totally different level of service. I believe as we grow, it will become important to set up expectations correctly and to communicate well. That will prevent many problems.
We also use Sales Cloud as our single point of contact between our team and our clients. We’ve built partner communities where lenders and appointment setters can communicate back and forth, and provide feedback to improve the process. We also use it to run reports and learn valuable insights to share with customers. We’re able to deliver real-time feedback to customers, even before they ask for it.
What’s next for LenderCast? What will success look like as you move forward?
Specifically over the next 6 months we plan to build and refine our customer acquisition process, hiring process, customer integration process and production process to a point where we can begin adding around 5–10 new users every month. At that point we would consider our first round of funding to help us scale those functions, so by the end of 12 months we have 60 customers and have offered jobs to ~90 people. To date we have never had investors and are cash flow positive with our existing customers so we feel like we are poised to hit these goals.
In the short term, We will continue to provide our services to customers, and further build and refine our process. When our customers are successful, we’re successful. We hope to keep maintaining the balance of adding new customers at our current pace, while still providing high-quality customer service. By the end of the year, we’ll have established some benchmarks and will have a very clear report on results. We’ll be able to have banking customers turn the dial on business and marketing, and provide them with valuable insights on how they’ll grow with confidence, and with those results we can continue to grow and help impact our communities and families of our employees for generations to come.
Carl Streck is a husband to his best friend Anna, a father to 5 amazing kids, a founder of LenderCast and MountainSeed and a follower of Jesus. Professionally Carl is passionate about growth through metrics driven sales and marketing and using business as a means to not only deliver shareholder value, but also serve to make the world a better place. He is passionate, personally and professionally, about giving opportunities to those that have been forgotten and left out through real sustainable relationships in business and family.
