Pros
Work from home position, work your own time schedule
Cons
48 Factoring Inc., where do I even begin with this mess? I should have trusted my instincts when I saw my first red flag which is the contract they make all of their "agents" or contractors sign before getting on the phone. There is nothing in the contract regarding compensation for your work, which means they can just change the terms at any given moment whenever they feel like it. I'm pretty sure this isn't abiding by the law. Not only does this mean that they can just change the way they want to pay you whenever they want, it doesn't legally bind you in any way to get paid for your work at all. Pretty sure this is illegal, and I'm sure the IRS and/or the department of labor would take this pretty seriously. The company is just looking for trouble in that regard. The position looked intriguing due to the fact that I had experience working at home on the phone, and even in the same vertical. The ad stated that it was an hourly plus commission position starting at $8 an hour, plus $80 for a "valid" transfer or lead. After 30 days of work, they would move you up to $12 an hour, same commission structure as long as you were in good standing with the company. When I got my foot in the door, I realized that it wasn't really an hourly position at all,.. it was "We'll pay you $8 or $12 an hour PER TALK TIME x 1.80" which makes zero sense. Don't EVER take a job like that where they only want to pay you based on the callflow that they provide you, or your talk time. Countless mornings of just sitting there dispositioning Answering Machines.. Oh look I just made 30 seconds of talk time in 5 minutes. Think about it, does that seem fair to anyone? I understand that paying agents for their "Ready Call" mode can be frustrating due to lazy people that don't really want to work at all they just want to sit there and collect an hourly wage for doing nothing, but that's why you monitor your agents and make sure everyone's disposition time is where it should be. This was only ONE thing about working here that was frustrating.. If you dispositioned the calls appropriately, answering machines, and disconnecting when there is no contact to be reached, at times you would only be paid your "Hourly" wage around 6 or 6.5 hours out of a full 8 hour work day. tsk tsk. Regarding the part about the contract mentioned earlier, then it got even more interesting. The 2nd red flag of mine is that the owner or CEO of the company never showed his face or was involved in any of the agents. I always find this unsettling. All of a sudden one day I receive an e-mail stating that we have a quota of at least 1 point a week to "qualify for your hourly pay" .... qualify for my hourly pay? On what planet does anyone have to qualify for their hourly pay.. At this point this wasn't even a real job at all, it was just a scam, and I'll explain why. Your job as a "Funding Specialist" for 48 Factoring involves making Business to business cold calls to attempt to try and reach out to business owners and pitch the service. The service is financial - quick, unsecured funding. 48 Factoring provides cash advances to business owners with short terms, and daily paybacks. So the first thing you have to do is reach the business owner, which happened probably about 10% of the time, and if they happened to have a need for funding for their business, you would start the qualifying process. If the business owner reached the few requirements they needed to move onto the next step, your job then would be to transfer them to what's called a "Funding Specialist", so they can ask them a handful of MORE qualifying questions, and if they met them, and agreed to proceed with the process of applying for the loan, you just generated a valid lead which they would pay out a commission for, and provide you with points. The problem here is that the Lead Generators have zero control of whether or not the business owner is going to qualify in any sense, it's all based on luck and fate. If the business owner wasn't interested in paying back on a daily basis, or providing access to their business bank account, had tax leins, ( and a few other things ) they would just mark it as Not Interested and you wouldn't get any commission, nor a point ( which was required to get paid at all. ) So, basically what this company is asking is "You make hundreds of calls a day, and we'll pay you if you happen to stumble across a qualified prospect that needs our service"' It's a bum deal, you are nothing but a cog in someone else's marketing scheme, just a number, and not a real person. So, of course with a company like this things are just bound to get worse, and they did. The owner then decided to eliminate the positions of everyone that was making their 12 dollars per hour of talk time x 1.80, and demote them back to 8$... after months of hard work. You could either do that, or work commission only. They even had the gall to increase the requirement to get paid to 3 points instead of 1, just to make it harder and harder for anyone there to make any money. Working commission would be out of the question for this company. They are just using a list of business owners that you are COLD CALLING. They are asking you to make hundreds apon hundreds of calls, close a deal for them using their loan services, and they are offering you a small percentage of the commissions. Again, not in control of who's qualified and what happens. Sure, you can build the rappore and spend the time closing your deals, but who's to say 48 factoring isn't just going to take your commissions? This company is just using independent contractors like you and me, instead of brokers, so they can avoid having to actually pay out real commissions. Instead they get to pay you whatever they want. If you want to work on commission, just go work for yourself. Get your own leads, become a licensed agent or broker, and close the deals yourself and make the money. If you are like me and wanted to work a job that was hourly pay plus a small commission each completed sale, don't work for 48 Factoring, because it's just a scam.
