Step 4: Enforcement of judgment

This is where were feel very comfortable helping you get your payment. As you can see, you may have followed quite an in-depth process to get to this point. But if the intransigent debtor or debtor business still hasn’t paid, you need to compel payment by using one of the enforcement procedures. The thing about enforcement is that actually, if you apply a little matrix, it’s very easy to use.

Instead of worrying about what the legal procedure is, think about and visualize the assets that your debtor actually has, and you probably know more about your debtor by now than you realize. The things you are looking for are:

• Goods… be it a car, business machinery, office furniture, posh lawnmower, caravan, speedboats, antiques, stock in a shop.

• Salary

• Property

• Bank accounts

• Shares

• Pension or life insurance lump sum

• The prospect of an inheritance Cash flow in the debtor’s business

All of these things can be subject to a court procedure to get you paid. So that’s why, when you start your customer relationship, you need to understand whether the customer has any of these things, because now those assets are going to be very valuable to you when it comes to choosing the right method of enforcement.

Now if you are not sure which method of enforcement to go for, there is a procedure called ‘an order to obtain information’ procedure, which puts the debtor under oath about their assets. Personally, we are not very keen on that procedure because it’s long winded, and we think that a knock on the door from one of our agents is a better way to establish exactly what is going on with the debtor.

Once we know what assets the debtor has or you think they have, we then encourage you to use our agents to knock on the door and verify that information, if you haven’t already done so.

And a lot can be gleaned from social media such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, and Instagram, about what the situation of the debtor really is. So, in the last 10 years the way to track a debtor’s assets have improved for creditors – it just takes a little planning and ingenuity!