Bill Bartmann

William R. (Bill) Bartmann is the founder and CEO of CFS II, Inc, a debt-collection company based in Tulsa, OK. Previously he was the founder and CEO of Commercial Financial Services Inc, a debt collection company based in Tulsa, OK that operated from 1986 to 1999.

Personal life

He was born in Dubuque, Iowa in 1949. At age 14, he dropped out of high school and joined a traveling carnival. He later joined a gang called the Manor Boys. He attempted to join the Marines but was rejected for hearing problems. Bartmann became an alcoholic by age 17, and one night fell down a flight of stairs while drunk. He became paralyzed and was told that he would never walk again. Against his doctor's wishes, Bartmann embarked on a nightly regimen of physical activity until he eventually regained the use of his legs.

For several years Bartmann worked at the Dubuque Packing Company, a large local slaughterhouse. While there, Bartmann organized a wildcat strike to force the company to give benefits to part-time workers. The strike was successful. Around this time, Bartmann ran into a high school principal who earlier had expelled him from school. The principal challenged Bartmann to get his GED certificate, which he did. Bartmann later earned a BS from Loras College and a JD from Drake University.

After passing the Iowa Bar Exam, Bartmann immediately went into private practice, specializing in personal bankruptcy cases. He also invested in real estate along with his brother, Ted. Bartmann moved to Muskogee, OK to devote full time to real estate investing. While there, he became involved in oil drilling and promptly lost almost all of his assets. Bartmann was later asked to take over a struggling oil equipment company in Oklahoma. He turned around the company and grew it substantially. It folded in 1985 due to falling oil prices, with Bartmann one million dollars in debt due to personally guaranteeing some of the corporate obligations.

Commercial Financial Services

Hounded by debt collectors, Bartmann looked for other opportunities. He saw an ad in the newspaper about buying defaulted loans from the federal government. He bought a portfolio of loans, financed by the bank he was already in debt to. Bartmann succeeded in collecting enough money from that first portfolio to recoup the cost of the portfolio, plus make a partial repayment on his bank debt. That led to more purchases of loan portfolios. Bartmann created a company that would buy out debts and then attempt to collect from debtors. The strategy was successful, producing net margins as high as 48%.

By 1997, Bartmann was listed in Forbes magazine as one of the 400 richest people in America. Inc. magazine estimated Bartmann's net worth to be in the range of $2.4 to $3.5 billion. Goldman Sachs offered to buy a 20% stake in the company and Norwest Bank offered to acquire, but Bartmann refused both offers.

As the company grew, Bartmann gained a reputation for doing the unexpected. He challenged his staff that if they beat their performance goals, he would take them all to Las Vegas. They exceeded the target and Bartmann flew the entire company to Las Vegas. Bartmann arrived and wrestled Hulk Hogan at the Thomas & Mack Center in Vegas." On another occasion, Bartmann leased 27 Boeing 747 Jumbo Jets to fly thousands of employees to Disney World for the weekend. CFS offered free on-site daycare that grew to 500 children, as well as free full health care and a 250% company match in its 401(k) program. BusinessWeek magazine called CFS "One of the top 10 family-oriented businesses in America" and Working Mother Magazine named it "One of the top 100 best companies for working mothers."

In 1998 the Harvard Business School published a case study on the methods Commercial Financial Services used to securitize non-performing debt.

Also in 1998, an investigation began after an anonymous letter raised questions about the propriety of certain transactions at the company. Throughout the ensuing investigation, Bartmann maintained his innocence. Jay Jones, a shareholder of the company, later confessed to the questionable transactions and admitted that Bartmann did not know about them. Nevertheless, even a Tulsa grand jury indicted Bartmann finding probable cause in the U.S. Department of Justice 57 felony counts against him.

In the trial that followed, Bartmann was found to be not guilty of all charges. Even so, the controversy meant his company could not obtain financing and Commercial Financial Services declared bankruptcy. A bankruptcy trustee liquidated the company, laying off its 3900+ employees.

In 2005, the bankruptcy trustee for Commercial Financial Services publicly declared that the company had not been a fraud.

Bartmann Business Enterprises

In 2003 Bartmann founded Bill Bartmann Enterprises in order to offer business training and information to entrepreneurs. In 2008 he noticed that the banking bailout and TARP subsidies presented an opportunity to buy defaulted debt from troubled banks, mirroring the situation he built Commercial Financial Services on in the 1980s and 1990s. Bartmann developed a series of training programs to enable individuals to buy portfolios of defaulted credit-card debt and have them managed by approved collection companies.

In 2009 Bartmann published a book, "Bailout Riches", which describes the opportunity he says the bank-bailout and recession of 2008-2010 has created. The book became a #1 world-wide bestseller on Amazon, and also made it to the Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek bestseller lists.

In 2010 Bill Bartmann Enterprises was named to the "Inc. 500" for 2009. It's the fifth time Bartmann has made the list.

CFS II

Bartmann established a new debt collection company, CFS II, in July 2010. In November this new company took a lease on two floors at the CityPlex Towers complex in south Tulsa, returning Bartmann to the location where CFS had previously operated.

Industry Reform Efforts

In the 1990s Bartmann gained a reputation for collecting debts by avoiding strong-arm tactics. He is evidently following the same consumer-advocate approach in his new company, CFS II. He says: "We’re going to go at it the same way we did before, treating people with respect and helping them out of bad situations." A Bartmann-run website, StopTheseCriminals.com, urges consumers to sign a petition that calls for drastic legislative and regulatory reforms of the debt-collection industry. Among those recommended reforms are the barring of all collection efforts on debt that is older than the statute of limitations; allowing consumers to record telephone calls from collection agencies; and requiring the licensing of both agencies and individual collectors.

Bartmann has worked with members of the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate to reform the current federal debt-collection rules. In addition he helped to enact a recent change to the Oklahoma debt-collection rules, which the Governor of Oklahoma signed into law in June, 2011.

External links

• Official site
• Consumer Advocacy site
• Inc. Magazine article
• Robert Evatt, "Bartmann sets up asset fund", Tulsa World, April 2, 2009.
• "For CFS, Bad Debts Are Sweet Profits. Never heard of CFS? It's reaping eye-popping gains from delinquent credit-card loans", Business Week, August 11, 1997.
• "Commercial Financial Services, Inc. Completes 'First-Of-Its-Kind' $80 Million Securitization." PR Newswire, May 31, 1995.
• "How I lost it all. And how I'm getting it back." Inc. Magazine, Press Release September 2010, pp. 94-96.