Metliss Barfield was established in 1994 by Geoffrey Metliss FICM to provide an efficient and inexpensive all round outsourcing service for SMEs.
And A Co-operative Enterprise...
Metliss Barfield is a co-operative enterprise, so whilst some people work directly for the firm, others work with it to provide specific outsourcing services - specialised types of training, for example, or particular aspects of insolvency practice.
Providing an Efficient And Inexpensive Service...
The fact that Metliss Barfield is a co-operative goes a long way toward keeping the services we offer inexpensive - clients don't pay for anything or anybody not directly concerned with the provision of services they order.
To Clients Who Want Value For Money
Everyone who works for or with Metliss Barfield in any capacity is an experienced front-line credit professional who has worked long-term in a tough, competitive, commercial environment. Being part of a co-operative allows those people to work more closely with clients, come up with original and innovative ideas to suit their specific needs, and find creative and speedy solutions to their problems.
Every collection, every training session, every system we advise on or document we produce, every Credit Circle we administer, and every insolvency case we deal with is treated as a 'one-off' - a particular task that demands that we THINK and determine upon an approach that will produce the best results for our clients.
Our Ethic: Prevention Not Collection, Negotiation Rather than Confrontation
No amount of care can do away with the necessity of collection altogether, but our emphasis has always been on prevention rather than collection, and negotiation rather than confrontation - and we believe that it is now more important than ever to invest in preventative measures and avoid wasteful 'production line' collection methods and unnecessarily aggressive collection tactics.
Preventative measures are the best way to ensure that collection becomes necessary as infrequently as possible, and that if and when collection becomes the only available option, the odds are stacked on the side of the creditor company and not the defaulting customer. Making that happen means ensuring that a company's internal credit system is capable of guarding against and/or mitigating loss as far as is humanly possible - and making that happen demands strong credit systems, solid up-to-date credit documentation, and knowledgeable well-trained credit personnel who have learned how to interact successfully with other people, and how to access, evaluate and correlate information accurately so as to be able to forecast whether a potential or existing customer is credit-worthy, and to what degree.
Production line methods belong in factories. We are not running a factory, so we don't use such methods. Moreover,aggression destroys the will to negotiate or compromise where accounts are disputed, and causes the development of avoidance strategies where there is a cash flow problem. Most people are prepared to be reasonable if they are approached in a reasonable manner. It is far more effective to take the time to listen to grievances and be prepared to negotiate settlements than to resort to aggressive tactics before they become appropriate. We specialise in being reasonable until being reasonable becomes inappropriate.
What We Can Do to Help
We can provide systems, documentation, access to useful information, and the sort of training that will encourage a company's personnel to develop initiative, ambition, and an interest in approaching their work in a knowledgeable, confident, imaginative, and creative way. We can take on the burden of dealing with insolvent or deceased customers, and handle difficult or disputed accounts by working toward sensible arrangements for settlement that don't involve anyone in the expense of litigation or result in the sort of acrimonious feelings that might affect future trading.
