ABOUT

Back in the old days of TIC when our office was in the basement of our parents’ home, I can still remember fighting with mom that she needed to do the laundry at a different time -- rather than when Mike and I were trying to make Verification/Collection calls! Even though mom was never too keen on the idea, we still managed to make calls despite the dog barking and the noise of the washing machine and dryer!

Those where the days when dad got us contacts from the West Bend company who at that time was selling high quality stainless steel cookware and which we financed for 12 and 24 months. I used to make all of the payment books from hand and send them to our customers. Then after some time, “open end” financing became popular or better known as “revolving credit”. This was much easier because all we had to do was send a statement each month. In those early days we worked off of ledger cards. How this worked was that each month when the payment came in we would deduct it from the balance and each month when the payment date would come we would pull all of the cards, calculate the interest and then recalculate the balance. Then at the end of each month we would write every ones name down and what the balance was, which was called aging our receivables.

We had no computers! We didn’t even know what computers were at that time! Everything was done by hand and calculated manually except the statements which we individually typed using an old type writer! We thought we were on the leading edge of technology once we got that type writer! Little did we know what technology we would come to have one day in the not too distant future! Looking back it’s almost mind boggling!

Those where defiantly some good and very different times. Looking back a lot has changed, but some things have not changed at all. Some of the important things that have not changed is our philosophies and commitments about our dealer relationships, our TIC family and our ability to use common sense buying practices. These things have really never changed. Yes, today we have modern day tools to help us make sound financial decisions, but we still use the same matrix. Yes, we still have great relationships with our dealers /distributors who we do business with. In fact most of our long timers, including our first dealer, are still active today -- that’s over 30 years of financing with us! They truly are raving fans for us. Yes, we really do promote and project a family atmosphere here at TIC. We have many happy raving fan employees who have tenure anniversary’s dating over 17 years. This is one of my favorite and most enjoyable aspects of my career -- getting to see these employees 5+ days per a week! I enjoy hearing about what our employees are doing in their everyday life experiences because they are part of the TIC family.

And lastly, yes, we really do still use good old fashioned common sense lending when we are trying to purchase contracts. This philosophy of Common Sense Lending is a 30 plus year old practice still used at Time Investment Company!