Jonathan Brooks spent nearly two years working as a part-time consultant at LocateSmarter in 2014 and 2015. He enjoyed it so much, he’s returned to be the new president of the company.
In answering what attracted him to the skiptracing company, Brooks said it was the “passion” of the team and it turned him into a “believer in what they are doing.”
Brooks was announced as the new president earlier this week. He will continue to work from his home in Knoxville, Tenn. LocateSmarter is based in Cedar Falls, Iowa.
Brooks has spent his career in the data industry, he said. When he was consulting with LocateSmarter, he was tasked with helping the company understand the data landscape, and leveraging the different data providers to ensure that the company had pipelines into all the data feeds it needed.
Skiptracing has come to be viewed as a commodity in the ARM industry, with collection agencies and debt buyers focused on finding the lowest-cost provider and eschewing other important factors, like the quality of the data being returned. Brooks is working on changing that perception.
The goal, Brooks said, is to help companies save money so they are not wasting it on irrelevant data and searches.
“That’s where we want to change the industry,” Brooks said. “It’s about creating value. We want to help them save money so they are not wasting it.“
