If I had to point out the single most important asset one has, it would be credit. A good credit score is essential for getting a business loan, home loan, apartment, car loans – the list goes on and on. In business, many firms will check your D&B rating (Dunn and Bradstreet). A typical report will contain information about your financials, size of your company, lawsuits pending and other indicators as to whether one should do business with you.
For a brand new startup like Consorte Marketing, such information as a D&B score is not readily available to the public, because it hasn’t been established. So the next best thing is having good personal credit. There are 3 main bureaus: Equifax, TransUnion and Experian. By law you are entitled to one free credit report for each agency, per year. You are also entitled to a copy of the credit report used by a credit card company that rejects your application for credit. This information is great and should be used to find any issues that may arise. However, it will not provide your actual score at each agency, only those factors used to measure your score by. Confused?
The bottom line is that the number is the most important thing (in my opinion). From my own experience, TransUnion seems to be the most lenient and if you get rejected for a loan based on a score from a different agency, you may be able to convince the loan officer, or say, a car salesman, to use your TransUnion score instead of say, your Equifax score to get your loan approved.
Personally, I like to check my score on Equifax. It seems to be the most comprehensive and they even have a service that allows you to get all 3 credit reports
from a single location. That would be my recommendation as each will have slightly different historical data on your credit – who you owe money to, when you were reported having a late payment, etc. It will also reduce your risk for identity theft.
In business, besides a good credit score, it really helps to have referrals or testimonials as to the quality of service you provide. One easy way to do this is to set up a LinkedIn profile and ask your clients, employees and peers to post something attesting to the work you’ve done for them. Obviously you need to back this up with actual results. I never ask my clients for these things until after I’ve gotten them great results, so that they’re happy, write nice things and it’s all true.
Last, expect that people will Google you (feel free to google Dennis Consorte to see what comes up). This is the simplest way to find details about someone in terms of integrity. Disgruntled clients will post negative reviews on Yelp, Google Maps and other places. When this happens, you should consider Online Reputation Management services, a service we offer. Think of us as a “reputation defender” of sorts – we will work to suppress those negative reviews and push up content that gives a truthful picture of who you are and what you stand for. There’s one catch: unlike other firms, we will not accept a client for reputation management if we feel that they have truly wronged people in some way. This is simply us protecting our own integrity. We will do our own due diligence, conduct our own research and then decide whether to accept you as a client. We offer this research as a product, and at the end you will receive a report of our findings, and if we accept you as a client, a price quote, what we can do for you and what to expect.
Alright, enough self-promotion. In short, work on your credit in terms of building a good credit score, and work on your credibility in terms of doing good work or selling great products to your clients so that they may attest to your abilities. With a little hard work, dedication and integrity, you can build all of these things up. Before anything else, check your credit so that you know where you stand, and where you want to be. And if you need online reputation management, contact us.
