Katalina (00:00.866)
Hello and welcome to Career Path. I am your host, Catalina. This podcast was created to explore the industry through the eyes of somebody who is very new to the arena, myself, by seeking the mentorship and expertise of industry veterans, my guests. In Career Path, we will explore a variety of different topics, some very industry specific and other more broad explorations on how to grow, level up and build your own career. Before we get into our topic today, I do wanna introduce my first guest,

Becca Lubke from Crown Asset Management. Becca, thank you so much for joining me today. Would you like to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what you do in the industry?

Bekah (00:37.907)
Absolutely. Well first thank you for having me on. I'm very excited to be a guest on your podcast and very happy to meet you. I am head of operations for Crown Asset Management. We are a debt buyer and we've been in business. We will actually celebrate our 20-year anniversary in January. So very exciting. Very excited to have that celebration coming up. But I've been with the team here for about...

Katalina (00:41.678)
Pleasure.

Katalina (00:46.601)
Oh, thank you.

Katalina (00:56.178)
Oh, wow. Congratulations.

Bekah (01:06.859)
six and a half years now and have just sort of moved through different roles within operations until becoming Senior Vice President of Operations in January of this year. And I'm very active with RMAI and participate in several committees and recently was given the opportunity to chair the industry research working group.

and very excited to get started with that and continue to work in the industry and see what comes next.

Katalina (01:39.982)
Fantastic. I am so excited to have you on today. Thank you so much again. So today the topic we are exploring is called entering Oz. Exploring how entering the receivables industry can feel super overwhelming, like a whole new world. And this resonates a ton with me because as you know, Becca, and as some of our listeners and watchers may also know, I have a bit of an odd background. I used to be a professional magician. I also used to be a

professional princess, which is like one of those princesses for hire. So if somebody wants like a Cinderella or an Elsa for a birthday party, I used to do that. And through a series of twists and turns, I ended up in the receivables industry and it is like entering Oz. It is like entering a whole new world. And I did come through the path of marketing. So I did a lot of

performance, obviously the magic, and I also did copywriting and event management with marketing and through that I started slowly building a career and one day kind of woke up and found myself in the receivables industry. And I know you have a pretty similar odd trajectory. If I'm not mistaken, specifically, you were a trumpet teacher before, a music teacher and you specialized in trumpets, correct?

Bekah (02:59.787)
That is correct. You know, it was funny when we started talking about having this conversation, I thought back to when I interviewed for the position here at Crown, and I can remember sitting in the conference room when I met Brian for the first time and cracking the joke that I had always wanted to be a debt collector growing up, which obviously was not true, and we know that's not true of almost anyone in this industry.

Katalina (03:01.595)
So cool.

Katalina (03:20.834)
Really?

Katalina (03:25.237)
Okay.

Yeah.

Bekah (03:29.571)
I, you know, my first career dream was to be a cowgirl. I grew up in rural Mississippi and we had horses and cattle and we showed horses and broke horses to ride and did all of that. But yeah, it was great.

Katalina (03:39.042)
Mm-hmm. Oh, that's beautiful. I'm a writer myself, so I love that. That's so great.

Bekah (03:47.367)
Yeah, and you know what? I think you learn a lot about leadership through learning to interact with horses. Definitely learn how to navigate tough situations and how to keep your cool.

Katalina (03:52.494)
Absolutely.

Katalina (03:58.038)
Yes, that's a huge one, because if you're not keeping your cool, your horse is definitely not keeping their cool. Ha, ha, ha.

Bekah (04:05.531)
100% that is so true and that's absolutely true of your team as well. So I, I think about that and, um, you know, Definitely a great lesson to learn, but I, you know, ended up falling in love with being a trumpet player early on. I just sort of go in with the flow and my sister had taught me to play the trumpet a little bit at home. And when it came time to join, um, the band at school, that's what I did. And.

Katalina (04:16.622)
Absolutely.

Bekah (04:33.019)
I loved everything about being a trumpet player, the practicing, the performing, the opportunity to have leadership opportunities in general. Our teachers were just really great at making sure that they were molding great humans as well as future leaders and followed that path to college. It was the best scholarship opportunity and I lived near...

Bekah (04:59.303)
Ole Miss was just a short trip down the road. So down the road to Ole Miss, I went for college and studied music and got my master's. I was a band director for a year, taught fifth through 12th grade. Definitely a life experience there, teaching fifth through 12th graders. But, yeah.

Katalina (05:19.05)
Yes. Oh my goodness. That probably aged you a little bit too, dealing with all those kids, that's crazy.

Bekah (05:27.735)
Yeah, it definitely does. You get a few gray hairs through that. But somewhere in the middle of all of that, you know, I had to have part-time jobs here and there while I was in school. And while I was working on my undergraduate degree, I was working with a friend of mine out at the Humane Society, and my sister convinced me that I needed to apply for a job at the company where she worked. And that company was Security Check. It's a... At the time was a...

Bekah (05:56.659)
You know, one of the biggest employers in Oxford, Mississippi, they were a check collection and payment processing company. And I started out doing data entry. Um, eventually worked my way through different positions, but it was great. And there were people I went to high school with some of my closest friends worked there at different times. Yeah. It was, um, it was, it was a very. Yeah.

Katalina (06:15.714)
That's great.

Katalina (06:19.97)
somewhat familiar territory in a way. Yeah.

Bekah (06:23.435)
And, you know, after I'd been there for a couple of years, they brought in a new director of operations, I think was her initial role. And it was somebody that I really grew close to and we, she started to mentor me and helped me to move into more of management and leadership positions. And, but like I said, you know, I was in and out, I was very much straddling being in this industry. And

still thinking that I was going to be a music teacher. You know, I would teach private trumpet lessons, the band directing, I would go out and teach with different area high school groups and help with their visual or their music lessons and things like that.

Katalina (07:08.93)
So when did you start to feel more comfortable in the industry and like it's where you wanted to be and where you wanted to grow your career?

Bekah (07:18.891)
I would say probably after I spent that year of teaching 5th through 12th graders, I really started to think a little bit. You know, it's very difficult being a teacher and I don't think much has changed about that. The pay is not great, the hours are long, and I had to spend a lot of time supplementing my teaching salary.

Katalina (07:26.45)
Oh, okay. Teaching made you run away.

Bekah (07:46.907)
I'd leave my day job of teaching my kids at my school and go and teach private lessons at a different school every day. But I ended up moving back. I had moved away to take that teaching job. I ended up moving back to Oxford and contacting Security Check and specifically asking if that person was there, if Joan Raspberry is still there, can I speak with her?

Bekah (08:14.879)
because I had made the decision before I called, if she's not there, I don't wanna work there. But if she is, I really felt like I had a connection with her and specifically wanted to work with her again. So it wasn't necessarily about getting back into the industry at that point. And

Katalina (08:24.76)
Yeah.

Katalina (08:32.29)
It was about seeking that mentorship and that person that helped you grow and feel belonging in there.

Bekah (08:38.663)
Yeah, it was. And, you know, things have evolved a lot since then. That was obviously very different from working in the receivables management industry as we know it today. Eventually those companies evolved and I got the opportunity to work with a debt buying company that they started a couple of years after that. And my sister worked there as well. And that's

Bekah (09:06.163)
actually why you guys call me Becca today instead of Rebecca. As I progressed through my career, I desperately held on to feeling like I needed to be called Rebecca to be considered professional. And anybody who worked with her and then anyone who worked with Joan, because she and my sister also worked together, they called me Becca. So everybody else around us called me Becca as well. Yeah, and.

Katalina (09:30.83)
That's fine. And it just stuck.

Bekah (09:34.791)
It did. Well, it did and it didn't. So I took a little bit of a leave of absence from the industry. I got recruited to work for a company in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. And when I went up there, I went by Rebecca, my email address started with an R. I was like, here I can be Rebecca and I can I can

Katalina (09:54.966)
You were back at it. You're like, I'm sticking to this Rebecca thing as much as I can. Holding on to it.

Bekah (10:00.287)
And then I came back to the industry and the person who introduced me to Crown had worked with my sister at Security Credit Services. And so here I was, Becca again. And in 2018, I changed my business cards and I changed my email address and I'm just going with it now. Yeah. So, I mean, I think...

You know, if I think about when I really felt like I belonged here, you know, I think there was it's that's a very personal journey. I feel like that's really different for everyone. On the one hand, part of it was embracing. Working in an office setting versus the music path and.

Katalina (10:47.082)
Yes, super different. Same with me, very different there. I'm... Sorry, I didn't mean to talk over you.

Bekah (10:49.843)
Yeah, very much. And...

Bekah (10:56.322)
No, no, that's fine. I'm just, we can kind of.

Katalina (11:00.034)
I was gonna share one of the things that for me that I felt or I still feel, because I still consider myself very new to this industry. One of the things that makes me feel, I struggle to say uncomfortable because there is a certain sort of comfortability here because people are so friendly and there's a sense of people being so real, so genuine. And I love that. So there's a sense of comfortability.

Katalina (11:27.79)
comfortability from that. But where I do feel uncomfortable and where I feel like the industry is so overwhelming is how vast it is and how intricate it is. There's so many different types of companies and the way they interact with each other is complicated. And each one has all these different intricacies and different verifications and like different things. There's just so much to it that coming in, I was like, oh.

Oh my God, what are these people talking about? Things were just flying over my head. And still, I still feel like that today. I'm by no means an expert, but I'm slowly getting that information and learning what those relationships are and the different players in the industry. I'm working on my RMAI certification right now. So there's things that I'm doing to try to learn. So were there ways that...

Katalina (12:22.502)
you were able to or resources that you used to educate yourself when you first began.

Bekah (12:29.407)
You know, a lot of it is you have to learn on the job, be able to, particularly if you're in an operations or a compliance role, you know, there's a certain element that you have to learn coming in through required training. And it's probably a little bit different in your role and the structure of your organization, but when you are at a debt buyer, you're at a collection agency or a collection law firm.

Bekah (12:56.319)
you're having to start a little bit more with learning those regulations. Um, but you know, it helps to have those resources, the people that you can go and ask questions as you're encountering different scenarios. Um, but you, you touched on something earlier with just the genuineness of the people. And you know, what I have found is there's just such a diverse

Katalina (13:00.494)
Absolutely.

Katalina (13:16.822)
Yes!

Bekah (13:25.883)
set of backgrounds and I think that, yeah, it's this melting pot of experience.

Katalina (13:28.13)
Absolutely.

Katalina (13:31.818)
I mean, just between you and me, we have a music teacher and a magician. I know everybody else. People come from crazy. Yes, Anne Princess. Yes. So it is a melting pot. It really is. The more you talk with people, the more you find out that, like you said earlier, nobody really is a little kid going, when I grow up, I wanna be in debt collection. It just doesn't tend to be that way.

Bekah (13:35.827)
Right. And a princess.

Bekah (13:52.94)
Yeah.

Bekah (13:56.627)
You know, and I think it's the nature of the people that really helped me to feel comfortable. You know, it's one thing to feel like you belong in your organization. And I absolutely, when I was at the company in Mississippi and working with them, I for sure felt like I was a part of that organization. I wasn't doing as much.

Katalina (14:03.342)
absolutely.

Katalina (14:20.302)
great.

Bekah (14:22.263)
to get out and go to conferences and to meet people outside of our organization. So it just really hadn't presented itself to me at that point. But, you know, when I got to Crown, clearly I was a great fit for me. And I thoroughly enjoyed working here. But when I really started to feel like I belonged out in the broader sense of the industry, it was through getting involved through committee work. And

Bekah (14:48.727)
the people that I met that embraced when I would volunteer to do things or that I might run into in an airport lounge and regardless of whether or not they're carrying a title of president of the main association that we're members of, they're human too. And I think that was really the personal journey. Part of it for me was just getting out of my own head and stopping to just...

Katalina (14:49.13)
Yes.

Katalina (15:06.711)

Absolutely.

Bekah (15:18.443)
be humans with each other and start to build those relationships. And now I feel like I have amazing friendships, um, with people at a lot of different organizations, not just within our walls here at Crown.

Katalina (15:35.318)
That's fantastic. And I remember in our earlier conversation, you talked a little bit about being invited to the conversation. Do you want to touch on that a little bit? Because what you said on it, I thought was phenomenal.

Bekah (15:48.559)
Yeah, I think that you have to really pay attention for those invitations and listen because they can be very subtle. You know, sometimes it's just a matter of someone asking you something in passing. Maybe they don't even realize they're inviting you to the conversation, but you get an opportunity to interact with people and to really connect if you can get out of your head and be present in that moment.

and just engage. You never know what's going to come next and what sort of interest that's going to create based on what you say. And on the flip side of that, I think we really have to be mindful of extending those invitations as well.

Katalina (16:39.342)
Absolutely. Like being the mentor, coming into that leadership position and inviting others to the table.

Bekah (16:41.062)
Because they're... Right.

Bekah (16:46.719)
That's right, because you just don't ever really, you just don't know. You don't know what impact what you say in that moment is going to have for someone. You don't know how that's gonna resonate with someone else. And so it's great to just pay attention, watch for the facial expressions, watch for the opportunity to pull somebody in from the side and see if they take the bait, see if they bite and they wanna be a part of that conversation.

Katalina (17:16.526)
Absolutely. So along with looking for opportunities to learn, you also mentioned something about plotting your path. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Bekah (17:31.147)
You know, I always say that when you get in your car, you have a destination. You're not just getting in your, I mean, you could. You could go some day. But generally, you know where you're going. And based on that destination in mind, you're figuring out what is the best way to get there. And there may be different obstacles that pop up along the way. And I think that our career paths are exactly the same.

Katalina (17:41.311)
You could, you could just get in and go.

Bekah (18:01.447)
you have to see what opportunities present themselves to you and maybe they're not it's not something you were expecting or it's You know not exactly what you planned maybe it's going to zigzag its way to where you want to go So, you know, you've got to have some level of flexibility and not be so steadfast about what that end goal exactly looks like but as long as you're making

Katalina (18:27.474)
be willing to take those opportunities as they show themselves to you to build that path.

Bekah (18:33.427)
Yeah, you know, and be willing to take a little detour, you know, go a different direction when you get to that fork in the road and see what happens, see where it takes you. You never know what's going to be introduced to you that could ultimately build on what you wanted all along or introduce you into something new that you didn't know that you wanted.

Katalina (18:55.05)
I love it. And that's actually a perfect way to wrap up the first episode of Career Path by talking about how to build your own career path. That was so perfect. So I wanna thank you, Becca. Thank you so much for coming on here, sharing your experiences, your expertise, and for also just being the absolute first guest ever on Career Path podcast. It was such a pleasure to have you. Thank you. And thank you.

Bekah (19:04.372)
That's great.

Bekah (19:14.167)
Hehehe

Bekah (19:18.027)
So happy to be here.

Katalina (19:21.014)
And to all of our listeners or anybody who may be watching this on any of our video platforms, if you have any questions, comments, or even have a topic that you would like to see explored, please feel free to leave it in the comments down below. We will try to get to all of them. Thank you everyone for joining us today. I look forward to seeing you again soon in our next episode.

Right now I'm gonna stop. Oh, we were just shorted too much.

Bekah (19:44.227)
Thank you.