Katalina (00:11)
Hello and welcome back to another episode of Career Path. I am your host, Katalina. Today we are going to cover the topic of the leadership effect. And here to discuss this topic with me is the incredible Andy Black, who is the VP of Operations at Yrefy. Andy, I am super stoked to have you on today to talk about this topic. Thank you so much for joining me.
Andy Black (00:23)
Yeah. Absolutely. I've watched some of your other episodes, and I'm glad to be here and share my story with you and the program.
Katalina (00:39)
Fantastic. Well, the first story I wanna hear is the first question I usually ask on this podcast, which is: tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got to where you are today.
Andy Black (00:49)
It's been a road. We pretty much right out of school, I started in the receivables market. I worked as a frontline bill collector for the United States Department of Education on federal student loan collections. I worked there at Allied International Credit. This was 2004. Spent some years there, honing and practicing on the phones in an agent setting.
Worked there for about three years doing student loan collections. Left that firm and went to another student loan company that had gotten the contract: Collect Corp. They later rebranded to Gate Stone. I spent 13 years at Gate Stone, so most of my life working there. And started directly when I was hired on a federal student loan collections product working as a primary that kind of ran its course.
Ed started changing its ways and ended up running three different subcontracting products, all on federal student loans, while at GateStone. Again, Ed continued to change its practices and the way it worked, ended up getting into some BPO work, and is still in the collections field.
Most of my life, even today, not being in collections, somebody asked me, you know what you do for a living? I still think of myself as a bill collector.
So I relate well when we go to the conferences and meet up with other bill collectors. But for the last just over seven years, I've been at Yrefy, so I'll use the pun. I went from the outhouse to the in-house, right? We were the third party having to listen and do what the clients wanted.
And now we're the client. We found a way to help the people I'd been working with my whole well for probably 15 or more years in student loan collections, helping them on a different side before different parts of their student loan journey, different parts of their obligations and debt.
And Yrefy helps borrowers manage and get out of their private student loan debts. Ben at Yrefy, I think when I started, I was employee number like 11 at Yrefy, and today we're over 250. About 130 of those are reported up through me on the operations side. And this has been a big journey, a big growth opportunity, and I'm excited for what we've been doing here and the borrowers who've been able to help.
Katalina (03:08)
Yeah, that's huge growth. Cause when you said there was- what did you say? A team of eleven is where you started.
Andy Black (03:13)
Yeah. When I started at Yrefy, I was number eleven, but I only had two directs. So I went from having a hundred and fifty agents in two different states and a big product, left that business to come here and have two employees. And that was a big testing moment to decide how I was gonna build for the future instead of just joining in a status quo. And we've been able to grow the business, and now we're back to that good size, right?
For probably the first, you know, I only had two people maybe for six months, and then it grew to five. But we were a small team for a long time, helping a lot of people. And a lot of our growth's been within the last, say, three years. And that's where we've taken over a lot of space, really grown the teams, instilled new leadership, and yeah, brought up a lot of groups. So now I have nine managers reporting to me, with all their staff. So it's been a big adjustment from eleven total to nine direct managers talking to me every day.
Katalina (04:08)
Really, that's a huge difference. And I'm so excited because this is going to play really well into our topic today. From all these different positions that you've had, both at at Yrefy and not at Yrefy, you've had all these different opportunities to both interact with a variety of different leaders and be a leader yourself. So I know you have a lot to speak to in terms of the leadership effect.
And what we mean by the leadership effect for anyone listening is basically how a leader can really determine the lasting effects on their team, whether that's positive or whether that's negative. A good leader can do great things for their team, and a bad leader can really drag a team down no matter how good the team starts out to be. So Andy, I know I'm kind of just kicking off a little bit of what that means, but I'd love to hear from you breaking down that leadership effect.
Andy Black (04:56)
Yeah, you know, I talk about this with my leaders and with my boss and what we've been through. And just recently we were talking about how you learn a lot from good bosses, but you learn a lot from bad bosses too. And even if that is I don't want to do that when I grow up. Fortunately, in my career I've worked for more good than bad. I remember one of my first bosses, Bill Ross. I never grew into leadership with him, but I absolutely grew as an agent and maturity-wise.
I was young when I started there. And, you know, one of the things that he taught me and I I still think about today is he says finding what people are doing wrong is really probably the easiest part of being a leader.
Catching somebody doing something right is the challenge. And he used to make a point to say, every day I try to catch every one of my employees doing something right and rewarding the good behavior versus just critiquing the bad. So I think about those words with him, and he's not with us anymore, but he made a good impression with me.
Katalina (05:55)
That's a huge impression.
Andy Black (05:57)
after working with Bill, and he was my boss and mentor for a while, we got to know each other outside of work, bought a boat together, all kinds of stuff. I worked with him for a long time. I transitioned away, started at Gatestone, and when I was working at Gatestone, I remember I had a guy who had just transferred down from the corporate office, and his name was Sidney, Sidney Archibald, and a firecracker.
I mean, a big, boisterous, you know, commanding guy. What I remember the most is he was a company guy. You know, when he talked, he talked from the company, but he believed in it genuinely, and he gave me a reason to want to believe. My first time I applied for a leadership role, I wasn't a great agent or probably the role model that you should be in trying to progress.
And I didn't get it the first time. And that took, you know, it hit me pretty hard. And I thought I deserved it as a great agent. I had good numbers but lacked the maturity to understand what it meant to be a leader. And. It took maybe six more months, and another opportunity came around, and I was much more prepared and took it very seriously and had that opportunity to join.
And I was in like a unit leader position, maybe twelve people. I still had a desk, but I was the primary point for them. About three months after being in that role, we were sitting in a meeting, and he looked at the team and said, “Okay, we're having an office that's struggling in California. And who wants to go?” And I jokingly said, "Yeah, sign me up." I'll go.”
About five days later, my truck was packed, and I was on the road. And that was a life-changing commitment that I made. And looking back, I don't know that I really had the skills or believed it or really wanted to go, but he believed in me, and I was the only one dumb enough to raise my hand.
So I was on the road and opened up a new office in Northern California and ran that for about a year and hired the people, came in as like the culture of the business because it was all new people and nobody had worked for the organization at that point. And spent a lot of time developing people, being the person they wanted to work for. And it was a life-changing thing I did when I made that commitment to move.
Katalina (08:04)
Yeah. And what you're saying speaks so much to the fact that a leader can create ripples. It's a whole ripple effect, whether it's positive or negative. And when it is a good leader, like the ones that you're speaking about, someone who believed in you and gave you this confidence and this ability to grow, it's a huge effect that then you're able to kind of realize, okay, I need to be a leader that embodies that as well.
And that makes those other ripples go further and further and further when you're able to lead by example as a good leader and teach future leaders to be just like that.
Andy Black (08:50)
Yeah, he gave me the confidence I didn't have at that point. And I trusted him completely. And if he trusted me, that meant I could do it. And spent a lot of time out there. I ended up moving back. Some of the agents that worked for me there moved to Arizona just to continue to work with me and work for the business. So it was a neat experience to have that impact. And these people wanted to stay with me. We built the relationship that they trusted me and came to work with me back in Arizona.
Katalina (09:10)
That's awesome. So on the flip side, let's talk about what it looks like when it's a negative leader because we often hear that term, people don't leave jobs; they leave or they quit leaders. It's really bad when you have a bad leader; instead of removing obstacles, they become the obstacle.
Andy Black (09:34)
Yeah, and I consider myself thankful that I haven't had too many bad leaders, but I've worked with some people who I probably would choose not to in the future. And thankfully, I never had to make the decision to leave or not because of them, but you know, there are times when I've committed myself to the job and decided to do it because I believed in the person. I guess one of the th one of the executives at Gatestone when I was leaving,
One of the things that always struck me as a poor skill was that the leader would talk about my peers to me, or maybe people who were above me, and like critique these people. And it really wasn't the right thing; I'm not the audience for that. I know I wasn't at the time, right? And what that taught me is that if he's willing to talk bad about them in front of me, he's willing to talk bad about me in front of them.
And I felt like that wasn't transparent, because there's no reason he should have had to have those conversations with me about my peers. And those ones hang with you. And those are things I try to think about today when I'm having conversations or when I'm talking to my team, making sure that, you know, we don't talk about people behind their back. Anybody I'm gonna, you're gonna know where you stand. That's one of the takeaways I found for sure.
Katalina (10:53)
Yeah. And it's this idea too of lead by example that we've been kind of talking around a little bit: not do as I say, not as I do. It's a good leader leads from the front and shows you what it should be.
Andy Black (11:05)
Sure. I believe in that. Like, I look back, I still work today. I've worked for Dan Parks for fifteen or seventeen years now. We've worked together. And I remember when he very first started, he came in; he's executive vice president of ops for US. I mean, important guy who was hired away from a very important job before that, and he started; we had recently remodeled our office.
We had all these stacks and stacks of boxes everywhere from setting up new computers, right? So we set up like a hundred stations. The IT guy set all these up over the weekends and just worked hours. If you've ever unboxed a computer, you know how much there is to take apart. There's a box for a screen, a box for a mouse, a box for the wires, a box for the keyboards, all these boxes. So he hadn't had time to throw them all away. And so the back hallway was just stacked.
And he was telling Dan about this, and Dan said, Okay, well, come in on Saturday, and we'll take care of this. Like, okay. Well, we show up on Saturday morning, and I'm expecting it to be me and the IT guy doing all of it. And Dan shows up with his wife and two kids. He had probably only been at the company for, I don't know, less than two months. And for the EVP to come in on a Saturday with his whole family to come take out the garbage, I knew that was a guy that I would work with and work for.
Never pretentious: do as I say, not as I do, right? If I'm gonna ask you to do something, it's because I'm willing to do it. And that still sticks with me today. And I tell that story regularly, whether he knows it or not, because it was impactful, and I believe that was a great leadership technique and tactic that I value.
Katalina (12:38)
And what a great shout-out to Dan. He's awesome. It's another great show of accountability because bad leaders, I feel like they skirt around accountability. They blame others; they pawn things off on others. Like you were saying, if you're the leader, you should be willing to do what you're asking your team to do as well.
Andy Black (12:40)
Yeah, you know, I look at even just hours, things like that, right? None of my leaders work different hours. I don't work different hours. When I, if the business is open and it's a shift, we're here for that shift, and I'm not gonna ask them to do something I'm not willing to do.
One of the techniques I always believe in is individual accountability: if we ever part ways with somebody at the business, which happens, right? We've run a business; I've had seasonal, and sometimes people don't always stick.
The first thing I do is debrief, and we as leaders try to decide where we failed this agent. Where did we fail this employee? And look internally before assigning blame to their activity. And I'm not going to say that every one of them is 100% our fault, but we try to find where we can improve, whether that's finding the right motivation for them.
Were they the right hire? Should we have asked different interview questions to assess this? Did we find the right job in the company? Or did they not show up? Right. And even if it was they didn't show up, did we give them the environment they wanted to show up to? So we always look internally before we blame somebody, whether they're here or when we go into coaching, and we're going to sit down with somebody. The first thing is, you know, how can I help you? What do you need to be able to fill this role?
Andy Black (14:13)
So I think we take turnover real seriously, and we recognize that no matter what happens, the leadership, the buck stops there. They're the ones who are ultimately accountable for the success of the person underneath them and of the business.
Katalina (14:26)
And the idea you were saying is making sure the environment is a place they really want to come to and contribute to. And as a part of that, as a leader, removing obstacles, like allowing people to be set up the best for success that they can be. If there are a bunch of obstacles in their way and it's just a terrible time to work, nobody's gonna want to work there. So as a leader, take the time to remove those obstacles, even if it's just boxes in a hallway from unpacking everything.
Andy Black (14:51)
Those are the problems that person had, right? Today most of the staff come to me. I'm the primary point of contact for this for my leadership group. But, you know, when I talk to Dan, he'll explain that his job is to be like the lead blocker. He goes out to remove my obstacles to make sure that my team can function. And having somebody in that role, or having somebody who's willing to go out and attack those obstacles for you while you can focus on different parts of the business makes the job a lot easier.
Katalina (15:21)
Yeah, something that Adam, my boss, says all the time is you want to hire good people and then get out of their way so that they can do their thing. But part of that is also paving the way so they can do what they're good at. So you don't have to be an expert at everything, but you open up those opportunities for those experts.
Andy Black (15:39)
Yeah, empowerment, I think, is something that we've tried to do a lot of, and I try to do even at an agent level. If we're gonna make a big change, I want the team to know, I want their feedback to be heard. And even if we go through the decision process together and we end up doing something that they might not have said that's their idea, they were heard, and they were part of the decision. They get to hear the business reasons behind it.
But at the end of the day, good leadership has taught me that if I'm making 90% or 95% of the decisions for my group, something's wrong. I want to find people that are prepared to make decisions, prepared to come up with the idea that they believe in, pitch it to me, and let's go. People want to work their plan better than they probably want to work my plan.
So letting them be heard and letting that be their idea, they go out to execute that a lot more diligently. And if that doesn't work and we come back and we go my way, they know that I trusted them, that we tried it their way, that they were heard and allowed to have an opinion. And not just have an opinion, but that we value their opinion. So I don't want to make all the decisions for the group.
Katalina (16:43)
Huge. I love it. So can we dive a little bit more into talking about it because I feel like we've covered some amazing aspects of positive leaders? Let's dive a little bit more into when there is a negative leader that is becoming an obstacle. What can those obstacles look like? Like what does a leader do that makes them that obstacle?
Andy Black (17:04)
Yeah, my experience with hopefully more junior leaders and not seniors is that they can lose sight of the mission or lose belief. They haven't had as much opportunity to see what the business can do. And they'll get involved in listening to the rumor mill or being a part of the side talk and buy into somebody else's opinion that isn't their boss's and/or isn't of the people who make decisions.
I think for the most part, people fail when they stop trying to understand the other side and start making their own assumptions about what's going on. And at least in my ethos, it's we're gonna be open, and we're gonna talk about it, and you're gonna know the truth. We are an overcommunicative business.
That's the leadership style. You will know more. We're going to give you more than probably what you asked for and let you handle that and know why we make these decisions. Most of the time, I find it's with those leaders who start to disengage or start to go rogue, if you will, it's because they're not seeking to find the answer.
They're making up their own answers and like I think that when people go out and one of my like strongest principles that we talk about, we have a a leadership academy here at Yrefy where we take our like blossoming agents that we see the potential to be a team lead or a manager, supervisor and grow up through the ranks, we put them through a series of courses within the organization that are hosted by other managers to teach the values and principles of our leadership.
And one of the very first ones that we talk about is "seek to understand, then to be understood." For me, that's where it starts, and I think people respond better when they feel heard. So, trying to understand, as you said, what the obstacles are. Find out what they believe the problem is, hear them and genuinely listen to what that is, and then give them your feedback.
A lot of people in my experience put a lot of weight into the success of their job. And sometimes when you go in with that critique first, that can feel very personal. They put a lot of their personal value into how well they do. And when you go in and talk poorly, or you want to give them that feedback, or you want to give them that redirection, that can feel like an attack on them as an individual.
And I find that slowing down to ask the questions and help them understand their space and their reasoning before we offer an alternative, changes the way those conversations go. So seek to understand, then to be understood.
Katalina (19:32)
I love that. That is actually, I'm gonna share a quick personal story on that because that's one of the first key things I learned when I started coming into a leadership role. is this that exact phrase, the seek to understand first, then to be understood. And I learned it specifically in that context.
When there is a problem, or you're coming to somebody for an adjustment, and you started to mention this as well. It's a great moment to have that. And I learned that when I came into something with that curiosity, instead of, like, why did you do this this way? This was wrong. This went out for a client, and it was incorrect. And why did you do it? Instead, I went, Okay, so how did you understand this project, and why did you end up doing it this way?
And when they explained it to me, I was like my gosh, we just uncovered a key part of our workflow process that is not translating information properly. So what they got was like a game of telephone, and they didn't have all the information to actually do it correctly. So instead of coming at it like “:Hey, this is disciplinary; you did this wrong,” by just coming from curiosity and being very gentle and trying to figure out the situation, I learned that actually they kind of did nothing wrong.
We, as the leadership, were actually failing them because the workflow process was incomplete. And it was such an eye-opening moment because this could have gone so differently had I just approached it a slightly different way. And it's like right after I had learned this, and I'm like, my God, so glad I learned that lesson so that I could come with that curiosity instead of with that just, we have to correct this. Why are you doing things wrong? It was such a different approach and it had such an incredible outcome that built even more trust between the rest of the team and me because they're like, you've got our back, you're looking out for us. And I was like, yes, I'm trying my best.
Andy Black (21:21)
There you go. I love it. And you know, that goes back to that idea of when we are counseling or when somebody isn't achieving what we expect of them, looking internally on how can I do this better. And when you've learned that we didn't define the expectation well enough for you. We didn't give you the resources you needed or the explanation. Like you said, the breakdown in workflow that really If anything, we might have failed you, not the other way around.
And one of the other things we talk about in our academy is, like, I firmly believe that most people want to be good employees. I find it hard to believe that many people wake up in the morning and go, I want to go to work and be crappy at my job. And I wanna make the bosses mad, and I wanna not hit my goals, and I wanna be counseled, and I wanna be a problem.
I just don't believe that. So finding a way to align that definition, that reward, that process to keep them in that spirit, give them aligned expectations to what the business wants, giving them a reason to want to do it. And I don't think if you give people a chance and help them along the way, they'll go do what they want to do, which is be good at your job.
Katalina (22:17)
Yeah. So kind of to wrap this with a nice tight bow, I would say leadership is influence, and whether it's intentional or not, you are gonna influence people for the good or for the bad. You're gonna leave a lasting effect. And the best leaders are going to make their people, their team, better long after they leave the room.
Whether that's because that person becomes a leader or they've just been transformed by having such a positive leadership experience that they're motivated by it. As you said, they don't want to be bad employees. Nobody wakes up going, I really want a write-up today. That sounds great to me. And people may forget what a great leader said to them, but they probably never forget how they made them feel and how they felt in that job.
Andy Black (23:11)
Yeah absolutely. It's a responsibility, and I think making sure that you're up to the responsibility and that you believe in the input you're gonna have because whether you think you're important or not, they do. And present yourself in a way that gives them the respect or gives you the respect for them to believe in you.
So take the responsibility seriously and try to find a way to work with them instead of against them. And it served us well. We got a bunch of yeah, two hundred or hundred and thirty people coming here every day into the office, happy to come to work. So hopefully we can keep this up for a while.
Katalina (24:00)
That is awesome. Well, Andy, thank you so much for sharing all of your insights, your experience with us today. This has been fantastic. Unfortunately, we are out of time, but it has been so great to have you on. Thank you so much.
Andy Black (24:12)
Absolutely. That went quick. I will say if anybody's interested in continuing the conversation about leadership, student loans, anything in the market, reach out to me on LinkedIn directly. conferences. I'm excited to talk about the industry, what we do, how we serve borrowers, and how we can better serve employees too.
Katalina (24:27)
Yeah, and Andy is the student loan expert. So if anybody has any questions, this is your guy. Absolutely. Well, thank you again, Andy, to anyone who's listening. If you have any questions or comments, please leave them in the comments below. We always do our best to try to get to all of them. Otherwise, we will see you in our next episode. Thanks. Bye.
Andy Black (24:44)
Thank you.
