Leadership Transition Secrets | Succession Planning for Debt Collection Firms | Ep. 214

Adam Parks (00:08)

Hello everybody, Adam Parks here with another episode of Receivables Podcast. Today I'm here with my good friend, Mr. Randy Slovin, to talk to you all about life transitions from a business professional standpoint. As Randy moves on into retirement and I've moved into fatherhood, we've both been spending a lot of time planning for what our futures hold and how that's going to affect our businesses.

But Randy, before we jump into all of that for anyone who has not been as lucky as me to get to know you through the years, can you tell everyone a little bit about yourself and how you got to the seat that you're in today?

Randy Slovin (00:43)

Sure, sure. I'm happy to do that. God, I guess 40 years ago, law school, my favorite course was debtor creditor law. That and real estate transactions. So I decided I need to do either one or the other area of law. And I was fortunate enough to find a small debtor creditor firm doing collections, bankruptcy, evictions, that type of thing. And so I started, I was with them for, you know.

20 years before I started my own firm. And now we've had Slovin & Associates now called Slovin & Council for 20 years. We just celebrated our anniversary back in September.

Adam Parks (01:25)

Absolutely fantastic and you guys have really built an incredible firm there and now I understand why you've been such a powerhouse in the landlord tenant space in the states in which you work. But for anybody who's not familiar, can you tell everyone a little bit about the firm and the states in which you work?

Randy Slovin (01:41)

Sure. We are licensed in Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana. I personally am only licensed in Ohio and Kentucky. My partner Brad is in all three states and the other associates are in some combination of those three, hopefully soon to be all three for the associates. We've got five attorneys and about 30 plus staff, about 35 staff.

Again, we're based out of Cincinnati, Ohio, but we do service Ohio, all the counties in Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana. And anything dealing with commercial litigation, consumer credit, lending, but pretty much on the litigation side. And we've kind of backed away from the defense side where we used to do some fair debt defense years ago.

Adam Parks (02:26)

Understood. And so you've been going through this transition. I know you and Brad have been working together for a long time. You know, what is it like as someone who has been such a staple to the debt collection industry for such a long time to start on that journey toward retirement? What are some of the things that you've come to mind as you started kind of mentally preparing for that journey?

Randy Slovin (02:48)

Well, it's not easy because you're giving up, you know, you're giving up authority over something that you created 20 years ago. But Brad and I, I mean, got along from the beginning, just turned out to be a super hire for me, obviously. And I would say within, after about...

five to eight years of hiring him, we started talking about his future with the firm and the possibility of a transition like this. But thinking about it, it it involved a lot of planning. It involved a lot of lawyers, accountants.

Adam Parks (03:22)

It's a process.

Randy Slovin (03:23)

personally

in the process. I mean, we had a consultant, we brought in an outside consultant, not a lawyer, not a CPA or anything, just to help us talk through the issues because some of these things, certainly the financial issues are very difficult to talk about. But we had a great consultant based in Florida, like you are, and he does a lot of work with law firms around the country.

and does a lot of transition planning also. And he was great. And so it just kind of made it easier for Brad and I to talk about some of the topics that are maybe a little bit harder to address.

Adam Parks (03:57)

Well, there's always some faux pas

and you feel like you're kind of opening up a piece of yourself and talking about your child. It's something that you created. You've been raising it for 20 years and not only that, but I know that you and me as well have a personal connection to the people that are in our organizations. And there's a lot of decisions that we've made to the benefit of our people over time. And so when you start talking about some of these transitional things, I feel like it's a little bit more difficult because it's

it does feel like you're talking about your baby. You're talking about something that you built from the ground up and there's so many different things that need to be addressed in those discussions, Like money is just a small part of it, but then you've got all of this trust accounting, procedural items, like it's almost never ending.

Randy Slovin (04:42)

employees, you you want the employees to buy into this. So, and we were probably late to the game in terms of introducing them to the whole topic. Other than senior management, they knew about it, you know, all our senior staff, knew about it. But in terms of everybody else, we were a little bit slow to the game, everybody is bought in. Everybody's on board. Everyone, this is now.

Randy Slovin (05:02)

You know, as of December 31st, this was effective. And so now we're a couple of months into it and, you know, we've not lost one employee over that, but you're right. There's so much more to it than money, obviously. That's just a small part of it. yeah, the employees are probably, and many of them are long time employees with us, as I know you have too. And so those are the key to keeping things successful in the future.

Adam Parks (05:31)

There's a lot of challenges to kind of the transition and as you start planning, but then there's the personal side of it all as well, because you've been so wholly dedicated to an organization for such a long period of time that it becomes a, at in my mind, like when I have free time, it's difficult to start thinking about where and how am I going to spend my time. And for someone with passion and dedication,

It's even harder because what am I going to be passionate about next? So how have you gone through kind of that mental transition of like, what's the future hold for Randy?

Randy Slovin (06:05)

It's true. mean, that part is, it's a continuum. It takes some time. And it's not something that happened in December. I'm still going through that. No question about it. Last week, I went to a movie on a Tuesday night and I tried to get some friends to go with me and nobody was available. And so I just decided, screw it. I'm gonna go and...

I thought to myself, when is the last time that I just went to a movie on a weeknight as opposed to what I normally do? Bring home work every night, you know, have dinner and then go back to working for two, three hours until I'm like nodding off. Okay, like, you know, it's probably time to think about bed or start reading or something different. But it was just such an unusual experience to something as mundane as going to a movie during the middle of the week.

You

Adam Parks (06:57)

It's not easy to break that cycle. I'm very, I work from home. And so it's been a very similar kind of transition as I've started preparing for fatherhood, because I'm like, okay, well, normally I work during the day, you know, have dinner, spend time with my wife, and then I plug back in for a little while, because that's my uninterrupted time to actually get some things done. But now I live in this like three hour cycle. And so since our daughter was born, it's been

I can get a little bit of work done in between feedings, which makes it very difficult to hold meetings or to do anything else. So I've been trying to take this leave. And as I step away from the desk and my daughter falls asleep, I look around and I go, okay, now what? So I've got a list of home projects that I've been taking on but it did take some planning on that side as well. Not only planning for, my daughter to join our home and join our family, but

for me to figure out how am I going to keep myself engaged and busy and put the right people in the right places at the right time so that the organization goes forward and my clients don't feel a thing. That's very important for me. And starting to build that transition. And for me, it took time. And as Katalina Dawson joined our team, I guess it was a little over a year ago,

One of the first things I did was try and work with her on developing her own podcast. And if you haven't seen Career Path yet, I highly suggest it to any of anybody that's watching this. I think it's a very relevant podcast for the industry. And so it's been about trying to make it less about the Adam Parks show and make it more about a team of people around me. And that's been my focus for over a year, knowing that this was something, a transition that I really wanted to have happen in my life.

And we've been preparing for it for over a year, both personally and professionally. I personally, there's like the remodeling, get the car seats and all the things and, you know, get everything set up. And then from a professional standpoint, it's like, how am I going to be able to step away for someone who's generally working 10, 12 hours a day or more? How do you mentally take a step back and focus on something that's a little bit different?

Any tips for me, Randy, on how I might be able to address some of this change? Because I'm here on paternity leave right now recording podcasts because it is what I love to do and I really do enjoy my job. But how do you start to find that balance?

Randy Slovin (09:15)

Yeah, it's definitely not an easy find, I will say that. But at the same time, first of all, congratulations on the birth of your daughter. I will say that when my sons arrived, I have three sons, they're roughly spread apart by a couple of years each. And it made me realize that...

Adam Parks (09:22)

Thank you.

Randy Slovin (09:35)

time at home was so important, but that I was also going to have to be more compact with my work. work still got done. Work was important because obviously you need to provide for the family, but there's nothing like, you know, the family and just making sure that that kid has everything that they need to thrive. And I know you're going to be that kind of dad also. And

that you just somehow you just find a way. I think you get by with a lot less sleep is maybe the bottom line. Maybe that's the area of your life that gets sacrificed. I think you're already experiencing that in the first week or two of her life. Is that right?

Adam Parks (10:07)

true statement.

I absolutely

1. I'm wearing glasses just to hide the big dark circles under my eyes. And for whatever reason, it's probably a little too personal, but I listen to a lot of Grateful Dead, Dead & Company, that's just kind of the music that I enjoy as I'm cleaning up, driving, right, working around the house or whatever. And so the moment my daughter was born, immediately, like, it's just what came to mind. I started singing a song, she immediately stopped crying and stared at me like, hey, I know you.

Randy Slovin (10:20)

you

Adam Parks (10:42)

And now apparently I'm the only one in the house that can stop the crying because I've got the songs. And if I start singing the right song, she immediately stops crying. No matter what we're in the middle of doing, diaper change, feeding, you know, she's hungry, whatever. If I start singing the song, she's nice and calm. So I've kind of found this like calming space for her. And I roll her right into the office if I'm sitting here when she falls asleep, but if her eyes are open, I'm unplugged.

And so for especially for the time period that I'm taking off of paternity leave, I don't mind walking into the office and plugging in for a few minutes. She's absolutely asleep in the other room right now. But my wife's family is also come in from Brazil to help us for the first month and really help us get our routines down and just take care of everything that needs to happen simultaneously. So we've been very lucky to have that kind of support. My mom lives down the street and we've got a really great support network, which has made it easier for us.

But I had to plan for like, what's this transition actually look like for me? And I had to put two people in place, and pretty much everybody who's watching this podcast has met Katalina and Leah at different times. And so Leah is running everything that's operations based. Katalina is running everything that is creative based. And I'm still here to answer questions and help drive strategy and do those things that are most important. But I had to take a deep look at myself and say,

what's the biggest value that I provide to the organization? What's the biggest value that I provide to the clients? And what I've kind of learned about myself through this process is it's the strategic vision. It's the strategic approach to how we're going to execute and solve problems. And I think our team has really done a phenomenal job, our entire team of...

Seeing how those things have been done because I've been openly talking about them for the last two or three years as I'm solving problems, I like to provide the why. And I always ask my team about the why. If you're gonna make a decision, why are you making that decision? And when I make a decision and it's appropriate, I explain the why to them as well. Here's why I'm making this decision. And you can agree or disagree with the decision that I'm making, but I think by providing the why, it helps people to understand not just

where their job fits into the organization, like what their job is, but how their job fits into the greater organization. Because if you're designing something in a bubble, right, it's really hard to understand the context in which it's going to be used. So I always ask my team, if you have a project in front of you, ask yourself why you have this project. What's the purpose of this being assigned to me? And when you understand that, why, it really does open up that

perspective pretty significantly and provide them with the opportunity to contribute more of their own, not just their work product, but their brain power. And that's really what I've been trying to unlock across our organization for the last, at least the last year as I've been planning this life transition over time. Because like you said, family is extremely important. It's the most important thing and it requires me to take a little bit of a step back.

In order to take a step back though, Like somebody, something where somebody has to come in to kind of fill those gaps as I take that step back so that I can maintain the quality of services that we've been providing to all of our clients for such a long period of time. And that's really important to me too, because if you, my wife always jokes when we got married down in Brazil, my guest list looked like a conference attendee list.

Randy Slovin (13:52)

Yes.

Adam Parks (14:09)

because those are the people that I spend the most time with. How many cities have we had the opportunity to sit down and talk in or spend time together in? And how many different cities have I explored with various people from around the industry, whether it be an RMAI, ACA, NCBA, CRS, DCS, and so many different times, but those are the people that we spend the most time with. And my wife and I have been together about three years and she's been traveling to all those conferences. So those are all the people that she knows as well.

Because if we're traveling every other week, we know a handful of people here in Port St. Lucie, but we know a lot of people when we go to Las Vegas in February. We know a lot of people when we go to San Antonio in October for the NCBA show. And that's, it's a major part of our lives. And I think accepting that and just trying to put that in context of our lives has been an important step in our kind of mental journey in preparation for this type of life change.

Randy Slovin (15:01)

in providing that next level of leadership with the answers, with the whys to why you're making a decision on something. I mean, it's going to make the transition so much easier for you. For me, I don't know that lawyers are always good about explaining the whys of their decision making. We should. And as business leaders, I think it's very helpful to the next level. And I feel like I tried to focus on that.

Adam Parks (15:18)

Fair.

Randy Slovin (15:27)

over the last couple of years. I think that's really important what you just said. So Brad, Amy, Becky, the associates here, Jon, are all better equipped to kind of step into that vacuum that you were talking about.

Adam Parks (15:43)

I can imagine as a lawyer, it's even a little bit more difficult because you have to create the separation of yourself between here's what I'm doing as an attorney and here's what I'm doing as a business leader. Because it's not always the same thing. And I'm sure that you have some, you know, internal conflict in your own mind between, okay, I'm acting as an attorney or I'm acting as a business leader of this law firm. Is that, is that really the case?

Randy Slovin (16:07)

It is, yes, it is the case. And I would say that when you're managing a firm, it's probably, I think 80 % of your job is acting more as a business leader and perhaps 20, maybe 30 % as a lawyer, as a litigator, as an advisor. But at least I noticed a shift about...

probably 10 years ago for me personally from instead of just hands-on in all the litigation, being able to kind of step back, manage other people, let them go to court more, settle cases more, negotiate that type of thing. And I was able to step back and then I think.

We, along with some other things that we did, including getting Jon Siegel, as I mentioned before, adding Brad to the firm, Superguys, I think that it really helped, I will say, once I stepped back and was able to act more as a manager, as a leader, I would say. Yeah.

Adam Parks (17:01)

Love, Jon.

It's never easy to take that first step back. Did you have any, and I'll give you a little bit of a personal story here, but for me, the catalyst for me letting go was my mother getting very sick and I needed to become her 24 hour caregiver. And so I had to step back from the organization at one point and I had to put things in the hands of other people because I was at...

my absolute limit for physical capacity. Like there was no more time in the day, I had no more gas left in the tank, I was putting everything that I had into caring for my mother. And that required me to allow people to step in and this is, I guess over five years ago now. I had to make that change and I don't know that I ever would have given up control had it not been for that traumatic experience.

Was there any kind of a catalyst for you or did it just kind of become clearer for you? I'm curious how other people go through that type of a transition.

Randy Slovin (18:07)

It was similar, but it happened a long time ago. My dad owned a local contracting company, actually a demolition company. They tore down buildings and would salvage things like, you know, the leaded glass windows or stained glass doors, know, church pews, all that stuff. But bottom line, they were just tearing down buildings, you know, and he never got to enjoy retirement.

Okay.

Randy Slovin (18:34)

he was supposed to, but then cancer stepped in. And so he was not able to do it. And that was, I think, the catalyst for me. It took a few years to like look at what happened and everything, but to say like, I don't want that to happen to me. know, dad should have experienced a good, long, happy retirement. You know, he worked hard for it and crazy hard, I would imagine, I would say. anyway, I think that that looking at

his life and how things kind of played out for him. It was a huge influence on me to say, at some point you have to stop and let other people, good people take over and then do the things you like doing, whether it's traveling or volunteering or whatever it is.

Adam Parks (19:17)

So for those organizations

out there that don't have their succession plan in place and don't have a brat in their organization that's ready to step in and really take the reins, any advice for those types of organizations or for those leaders that are starting to consider a retirement life change or another life change, but don't really have the succession plan in place yet?

Randy Slovin (19:40)

I would say don't try to do it yourself. Lawyers think that they can do everything. We're not just talking about lawyers, obviously. We could be talking about agency owners, know, whatever, vendors. But don't try to do it yourself. There's lawyers out there that specialize in this. There's accountants that specialize in this. And like I was able to fortunately find a consultant that helped with this so much.

And again, that person was able to bring Brad and I together to talk about these topics. I had been working with the consultant for a number of years before, but then once I started saying like, okay, you know, I think by such and such a year, I would like to step back. He was so instrumental in us getting this done. And so I think my biggest piece of advice would be to involve experts.

Adam Parks (20:32)

I like that, you know, putting

somebody else in there to help lubricate some of those discussions, because like we talked about at the beginning, some of these discussions can be really uncomfortable, even if you've had a personal relationship with somebody for an extended period of time, you start to look and go, okay, so now what? But having somebody in there, that's kind of a neutral third party who can bring the parties together, make sure that the discussions are organized and nothing is forgotten. Because that's always I think, one of the fears as you go through a transition is that there's something that we didn't consider.

And if you've got a consultant or someone who's gone through this type of transition, and that's their business is helping organizations to go through the transition. I think you can fill a lot of those gaps and kind of stop the unknown. The only thing that we can fear really is the unknown. Like that's the biggest fear of any human is the unknown. And so when you can kind of put something in place there to keep it balanced, there's a lot of additional value there.

I think that's some really good advice, Randy.

Randy Slovin (21:28)

And even with your transition that you've gone through on a personal level, having a new baby, are experts that you're using. You have doctors, you have grandparents that have been through this before, or parents of yours and your wife's that have been through this before. And so you're making use of the same outside sources that I was doing just without maybe thinking.

Randy, I had a

whole team. I had doulas and midwives and doctors and nurses and grandparents. I, you know, Rick, they say it takes a village and I'm an over-preparer. So I had all of the things, I'm probably the first guy that showed up to the hospital with laminated birth plans that weren't worth the paper they were written on. But you know, hey, at least we had mentally thought our way through it. Like we had met with the doulas and other consultants to help us prepare for what are we going to need to have at the house and how are we going to need to have

Randy Slovin (21:51)

Exactly.

You

my-

Adam Parks (22:17)

I'm not the type to just buy every fancy new gadget. I really try to limit that as much as possible and focus on value adds. Like what do we actually need? You what you actually need is a diaper genie. That's what I actually needed. I did not need any kind of wireless monitoring system for heartbeats. So like I feel like there's different strokes for different folks, but when you can take the...

opportunity to learn from those that have been there that have done that and you can listen to that advice and try and apply it to your own world even if your own world is not the same as theirs and that's one of those things that I always try to balance as well is like I live a pretty unique lifestyle and I can take a lot of advice but I have to try and put it into the context of my reality what does it mean to me in my world and my wife has been absolutely fantastic at helping me to

kind of prepare for some of these things and to set reasonable expectations of myself so that, like you said, you can't put the whole world on your shoulder. I'm not Atlas. I can't put the whole world on my back and carry it down the road. I need to find these realistic expectations of myself so that I can be as much as I can to my business, to my clients, to my family, to my friends. And there's a lot that goes into that. being able to kind of...

fragment yourself in some way, shape or form to still be able to be who you expect of yourself, but to all of these different people as well. I've tried to concentrate on my own expectations of myself and less on the expectations of others, but we all fall into that trap at some

Randy Slovin (23:48)

It's true. Yeah, it's true.

Adam Parks (23:50)

So Randy, one final question for you here. What do you think retirement is going to hold for you? Is there more time with the grandchildren in the future? Are you gonna, I know that you've been instrumental in artwork and community engagement and involvement. Like you do so many things outside of the office. Any thoughts on where your passions will lead you next?

Randy Slovin (24:11)

So definitely some of the things you mentioned, more babysitting. I did that last night for my four-year-old granddaughter and we had a blast playing with building, what are they called? Magnetiles, I think they're called, which are really cool. You're gonna wanna get those for your daughter. And working on her letters and things like that. I'm definitely exploring some new volunteer opportunities now. I'm going to meet.

with another organization in about an hour actually, more traveling, more reading, and possibly something in the art world. You know, I've often thought about maybe opening up my own art gallery. I would love to do that someday. As you know, we've kind of created one here at the firm, and hopefully someday you'll get to come visit it and see what we've done. But one of these days, I would love to maybe take that a step further.

That's down the road.

Adam Parks (25:02)

Well, maybe we'll have a chance now that

ACA is going to be in Louisville this year to make our way up to Cincinnati. We're going to we're putting it on the agenda. We're going to try and get there. My daughter is going to be about four or five months at that point, so I'm trying to organize what travel realistically trying to set a realistic expectation of myself for 2025, but I will definitely follow up with you on that.

Randy Slovin (25:08)

That would be nice. That would be nice.

Adam Parks (25:25)

For those of you that are watching, you have additional questions you'd like to ask Randy or myself, you can leave those in the comments here on LinkedIn and YouTube and we'll be responding to those. Or if you have additional topics you'd like to see us discuss, you can leave those in the comments below as well. And since Randy's a friend, I'm hoping I can get him back at least one more time to help me continue to create great content for a great industry. But Randy cannot thank you enough for all of your insights.

Randy Slovin (25:45)

without it.

Thank you, Adam. It's been a pleasure and I wish you all, you and your wife, all the luck in the world with this new baby. That's so exciting.

Adam Parks (25:55)

We really do appreciate it and thank you everybody for watching. We appreciate your time and attention. We'll see you all again soon. Bye everyone.

Randy Slovin (26:01)

Okay,

thanks Adam.