Amir Erez wants debt collection to mind its manners

Amir Erez’s introduction to debt collection arrived at the family home, addressed to somebody else. His family had moved to the United States in 1987. His parents did not speak English, so he called about notices intended for an aunt who lived elsewhere. He remembers an aggressive collector threatening to report him to the authorities for opening her mail, then hanging up. He had tried to untangle an address. He came away frightened about his future in America.

After college, Erez opened Cedar Financial. His early prospecting involved knocking on merchants’ doors along Los Angeles’s Pico Boulevard, offering to collect bad checks. Larger clients and national assignments followed. The founding pledge was to put people first.

There is a certain justice in making a career out of improving the conversation that once upset you. In Erez’s case, the work has continued from local shop accounts into international collections, technology and staffing. The telephone has acquired considerably more company.

The customer remains a customer

Cedar dates its beginnings to 1991. Based in Calabasas, California, it handles domestic and international recovery, with an expressed aim of preserving the relationships between creditors and their customers. That puts two interests in the same room: the business waiting for payment and the person being asked to pay.

The company’s stated approach includes professional negotiation, transparency and helping consumers understand their rights. It places staff education alongside technology. Manners, in this setting, have to survive a working day, a disputed account and a difficult conversation. A pleasant slogan has a rather easier schedule.

This is the business proposition Erez has chosen to advance. Recovering a balance and protecting a relationship are both part of the assignment. For a creditor, the customer’s experience continues even after an account leaves the ordinary billing process. Someone else may be making the call, but the original relationship is still in it.

“My agency would put people first.”

Amir Erez

A bigger map, with conditions

By March 2013, Erez was also chairman of TCM Group, an international collection network. During his chairmanship, the network announced that four former agents had become shareholders in 2012. It also described tighter application screening and the removal of member offices whose compliance and performance failed its standards.

Those details give his international work a particular shape. Expansion involved deciding who could enter the network and who could remain. A larger address book was only part of the job. Standards had to travel with the assignments.

Cross-border business makes the handoff between organizations central to the service. Cedar’s stated mission pairs local representation around the world with professional treatment of clients and customers. Erez’s TCM chapter shows him working on the network through which those local relationships could operate.

It is an instructive stage in a founder’s career: moving from personally winning an account to helping determine the conditions under which other firms will handle one. The work becomes less visible to the eventual customer, while remaining consequential to the conversation they receive.

Seven systems are quite a crowd

As Cedar’s operations developed, its communications setup became another management problem. The company had been relying on seven vendors. Calling, messaging, recording and dialing carried their own arrangements. Bringing those functions together became part of the next phase of the business.

Erez has spoken about using Nextiva to organize different teams and connect multiple centers in one system. That is a fairly practical ambition for a founder: let the machinery cooperate so the people have a chance to do the same.

The technology search lasted 18 months. The eventual implementation connected Cedar’s existing records with a cloud contact center, including a bridge to its on-premises back-end system. A tidy interface still needs somewhere reliable to get its facts.

The change also expanded communication beyond voice to channels including text, chat and email. Transcription and compliance scorecards gave supervisors tools to flag calls for attention. In a business built around interactions, being able to examine those interactions is part of the operating work.

The relationship extended into public discussion. In 2024, Erez took part in a Customer Contact Week session about automating customer experience. He also appeared with Cedar colleague Justin Franklin in a podcast conversation about customer journeys for collections. The vocabulary had moved well beyond collecting a bad check.

The CEO and the quarter-hour

For a closer look at Erez as a manager, consider his attention to a small unit of time. In June 2024, he described a weekly written report that takes each team member 15 minutes to complete. It covers current work, obstacles and plans for the following week.

The report gives him visibility into the work without assembling everyone for another meeting. He also makes a case for hearing from colleagues who may contribute less in a group discussion. An idea can reach the CEO without first winning a contest for airtime.

There is an appealing lack of ceremony here. A short report asks for something concrete and gives the manager something to respond to. Erez writes about transparency and ownership in terms of this recurring exchange, including the need for his own participation. The chief executive appears in the process, rather than floating serenely above it.

His tone is informal. He calls himself a “friendly neighborhood CEO.” The phrase sits comfortably beside his interest in keeping track of the front line. The ambition is to make it easier for useful information to arrive.

Give the work an owner

Another of his 2024 articles addresses the RACI framework, which separates the people responsible for doing a task from its accountable owner, advisers and those who need updates. Erez describes using it across three companies. He is specific about one requirement: a task should have a single accountable person.

That preference gives his leadership writing a practical center. Growing organizations can produce an impressive number of participants while leaving responsibility curiously unoccupied. Naming an owner makes the question of what happens next rather harder to pass around.

He also writes about who needs consultation and who simply needs to hear the outcome. These distinctions matter when several businesses and teams are working together. An invitation list can get longer without a decision getting any closer.

His advice on scrum meetings follows the same instinct. Keep discussion focused on obstacles, the day’s work and requests for help. Set a time limit, ideally 15 minutes. Move routine information into tools that people can read outside the meeting. Whoever guides the discussion should keep it moving and make room for people to speak.

Erez also cautions against turning the gathering into an interrogation of employees. His version gives colleagues a place to ask for assistance and solve problems together. The structure is intended to help the work, rather than furnish a manager with a daily theatrical production.

Then come the goals. He advocates the SMART framework: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and bound to a deadline. His examples replace general ambitions with defined changes and ways to track them. It is familiar management advice, but it completes the picture: hear the problem, establish responsibility, decide what progress would look like.

The careers beside his own

Other people’s accounts add a more personal view of his influence. Syntheia Nagel, Cedar’s chief compliance officer, has recalled joining the industry after speaking with Erez. His vision for the company helped persuade her to join the team. A conversation about a business became an entrance into a profession.

Chris Walcher offers another example. In an October 2025 interview, he named Erez among the industry professionals he admired, describing a mentor who had taken a chance on him and continued to create opportunities for growth.

These are individual accounts of a working relationship. Their value lies in the detail: being invited in, being given an opportunity, having someone continue to push your development. A founder’s career can be followed through the responsibilities that other people grow into beside him.

Erez’s own public messages sometimes make the same point directly. Congratulating a colleague on a work anniversary, he wrote: “Your success is our success.” It is a small message, attached to an ordinary workplace milestone. Those ordinary milestones are where much of a company’s life takes place.

More ways to start a conversation

The businesses around him have also widened. CollectCo, which identifies Erez as its founder, applies software to accounts receivable and recovery. In his writing about the 2024 SubSummit event in Dallas, he highlighted its work on bad debt and failed payments for subscription businesses. The collection problem had followed customers into a different billing model.

Remote Scouts, where he is CEO, concentrates on people and operating capacity. Its 2026 Customer Contact Week presentation emphasized AI-enabled staff with human supervision. Erez was listed among its leadership participants. The staffing business places him alongside the hiring, preparation and organization of teams that carry out the work.

His public enthusiasm for professional gatherings is less restrained than his meeting timer. “Networking is one of my favorite parts of any conference!” he wrote while sharing RMAi photographs. The combination is pleasingly practical: limit the internal meeting, then go and meet someone new.

Across these activities, Erez keeps returning to the circumstances of communication: who makes contact, what they know, how they are supported and what the other person experiences. For a founder whose business began with a promise about a phone call, that remains a rather personal line of work.