Darran Hathaway

With businesses it was mostly non-payment of business rates I would be chasing. They pay a sizeable fee for the pleasure of me to come along, threaten to take their goods away, pay me off, bring everything up to date as per the last liability order and then the same thing would happen again. This was mainly throughout the southeast, here on the coast but sometimes up to London and occasionally down to the west country, working for the local councils because they are required to go through the process of using bailiffs. I did some work for HMRC collecting tax arrears but the predominance of it would have been for business rates and council tax arrears.

A chance conversation led me to talk with someone who was offering Debt Solutions, as a business, and they were keen on my experience and understanding of the industry and how bailiffs worked etc. I had the opportunity to join them and in return, I was trained on debt solutions and learned how you break that cycle of debt, how to put in place solutions to resolve those difficulties and give people a platform to start moving forward again. That was back in 2006 so it’s been a while since I’ve been working on this side of the industry now!

R2B Business Solutions (R2B means Red to Black) started about five years ago, I was working for somebody else and that business ultimately morphed into R2B Business Solutions and brought me to where I am today.

My passion has always been debt solutions for businesses. The domestic market is well catered for in terms of how the laws and regulations work on loans etc. For consumers with debt problems such as credit cards and personal loans, there is plenty of great help out there. The lenders are highly regulated and must work with debtors to find a workable solution. But when it comes to businesses it’s not regulated – the gloves are off! Creditors can bankrupt you or wind up your business, there’s no protection in that sense and those are the people that we really want to help. Get it wrong and you can lose everything.

There are a lot of things that can be done to achieve a positive outcome, it doesn’t have to all be negative, far from it, you can do some really good things, you just need to know when to do them and that’s how we can help.

I enjoy bringing calm to somebody’s life, people who have never been through debt, whether it be personally or through a business and have had no real understanding of how unbelievably stressful the situation can be. If you are an employer, you have others dependent on you so that they can put food on their table and pay their mortgages and if it all starts to crumble it can be incredibly stressful. The first thing that almost everybody does is pretend it’s not happening. But it is! If you don’t deal with debt problems appropriately, they get out of control very quickly. I would see as a bailiff, that people were just jumping from one issue to the next. Those fees that were being used for me to knock on the door and threaten them could have been used to resolve the problem and get back in front.

When we first sit down with people to discuss the options, we ask a lot of questions, about what’s been going on, how it’s evolved etc. It’s not just about who they owe money to, we ask for all the background information so we can talk about all the options that are available. They then start to see which options could be applicable to them so they can start to see a way forward – it’s very satisfying to see the amount of calm and peace that brings to some people, just talking about it gives them a sense of calm.”