Selling Finance Door-to-Door During Covid

This week, lockdown returned to Ontario, Canada, due to the third wave of Covid cases. On April 3rd, the Premier issued a stay-at-home order, putting 14 million Canadians back behind closed doors. Based in Ontario, Canadian Financial is a one-stop alternative and traditional funding shop that still champions door-to-door sales and the lockdown has sidelined them for the third time.

“We just went back into lockdown. The whole province, everything just shut down,” CEO Patrick Labreche said. “We were getting 20 to 30 new cases a day, and then it jumped to like 200 a day.”

Meanwhile, 110 miles down south at deBanked, de Blasio announced NYC public beaches would be opening up by Memorial Day. Because of the wide range of government shutdowns this past year, Labreche said it is hard to admit to some that his business is booming.

“I was having a conversation with a guy who does payment processing, he makes residuals on his customers, and so his book of business was not making any money right now; he’s hurting,” Labreche said. “So it’s kind of hard to tell a guy like that that we’re flourishing, and maybe you should come work with us.”

Labreche said that the processor was actually going to work with Canadian Financial. Success this past year came from leveraging the interpersonal skills that make an excellent door-to-door salesperson thrive, Labreche said.

“I started in the door-to-door and b2b at 19 years old, completely broke. I dropped out of school, and I started knocking on doors, and you know, that business model has changed my entire life,” Labreche said. “When you get into door-to-door sales, you understand how to sell yourself first. You get a sense of how to communicate with people, how to understand their needs, their pain points: How to leverage the service or product that you have.”

With a team of salespeople connected through weekly department meetings and messaging groups to keep the energy up, the deals kept rolling in throughout covid. Labreche said his firm is set apart from a good portion of Canadian alt finance: they offer a smorgasbord of financial products directly to the borrower instead of using lead generators.

While most fintechs think all business owners want a one-button final product, Labreche attests to the opposite- his firm sends out salespeople to make sure businesses know they have a rep to rely on.

“I have nothing bad to say about aggregators; that’s their business model, not ours,” Labreche said. “Our business model is going into a business that didn’t even know that the solution was available. When you’re looking online, you’re looking for a solution that you already know is available.”

Labreche favors traditional finance. His firm offers MCAs and other alternative forms of funding but said those are mostly band-aid solutions and he regularly sees MCA deals taking advantage of merchants. For example, Labreche said he walked into an ESCO gas station last month, and through talking to the owner, discovered an opportunity. The owner had taken an MCA from a big Canadian firm but was confused about the cost of capital- he thought he was paying 17%, but Labreche read a recent statement and discovered the rate was really 50%.

“Right there and then he was like, ‘oh my God, that’s crazy I didn’t know,’ he was misled, and it’s like that across the board. So I ended up getting him a quarter-million dollars at four and a half percent on a term loan,” Labreche said. “Nobody’s ever walked into his business or called him, offering him traditional money. We feel like there’s a huge underserved, undereducated market.”

This week, walk-ins have become less of a possibility, with a lockdown banning all non-essential travel. Still, business development manager Julian Hulan looked forward to when things would open back up. He had masked up and gone out on sales calls throughout the year when the government wasn’t in shutdown mode. Recently he traveled to 20 car dealerships to offer financing in a two-day period and said he found merchants excited to see him in person instead of over email.

“They were like ‘oh, I can actually sit down and talk to this guy?’ and that’s when they eat it up,” Hulan said. “They know because they’ve already made that connection face to face, they can call me directly. We don’t do this whole 1-800 Number. You’re going to call me directly and if I don’t answer, you leave me a voicemail, I call you back, it’s that personal relationship between me and that client.”

Kevin Travers was a Reporter at deBanked.