Anyhow, remember that just typing in the name of the company or the name of the guarantor may not be sufficient. Your search terms may be lost in all the information that may be available. You can’t really find out easily the information you are seeking. Try your own name as an example, just to see what comes up when you search yourself.

Sometimes, I find it helpful to insert quotes or add an ‘and’ or ‘minus’ to filter my results. After all, who wants to look through 20 pages of results? I don’t know if anyone even makes it beyond page two.

You may be asking, “What are you talking about?” If you are, then keep reading. If you are not and are now saying to yourself, “Who doesn’t know that,” then stop. No need to read any further; you probably already do these searches all the time if for no other reason than you cannot help it.

Lately, though, I have been amazed that more people don’t do any search or don’t know how to narrow their search criteria;  they don’t know about filtering or narrowing searches or modifying search phrases. So, for those who are not doing this already, here is a process you can try. I’d love to use a real example; however, I think I would be revealing information that should be kept to a private posting and not available for the world to see (at least not through this posting).

Therefore, searching your prospects is all up to you.

If you type [company name] by itself, you will receive a list of various Internet resources that have this name together or that have these names anywhere within the search results you find (meaning, the words searched are not all together as one phrase). By inserting quotes [“company name” or “guarantor name”], the search results become more narrowed. You are now only searching by the specific phrase listed in the quotes.

From here, you can narrow the results even further by adding an ‘and’ such as [“company name” and “Florida”] or other criteria you choose. Take this concept if you have results you don’t want and then insert a [minus ‘thing you don’t want’] and look again. This even works for factoring. Tired of seeing results that retrieve information on factoring polynomials? Just enter [factoring minus math] to narrow the results.

Eventually, depending on the transaction you are reviewing, you may find more information that you thought possible. Some of this data will just help you bring together all the information you already knew… or didn’t know but ultimately helped create a fuller picture. You will realize over time when you have searched too much (or over researched) as all the results will be the same.

However, in some cases, it may ‘pay off’ and you may have saved yourself from doing a deal that would have resulted in a loss. You may find out about prior frauds, tax liens, customer disputes or billing concerns, other charges, related entities, common ownership among customers, and more. You may no longer feel ’lost’ when you enter into a new transaction. And just think, it would all be through a free search… just your time and prudent due diligence.   

NEW: since this post, I did find an example that may help illustrate the importance of searching the Internet:

[Bob Pearson] was the contact for a prospective client on an insurance type of prospect, where receivables would be paid by the insurance or other commercial entity to the factor. Go ahead, search just the name without quotes.

Although a ‘one off’ deal, during the due diligence process, the factoring company also searched ["Bob Pearson" and "Dallas"]… do your own search with quotes to see what information was found…

Wishing you success. The Factor Guru