Episode 53: Everything You Need To Know About Vetting With Justin Recla

On this episode Bella speaks with Justin Recla, Operations Officer for The Clear Business Directory Due Diligence and Vetting Solutions. Justin Recla They discuss: The importance of vetting your potential business partners, employees, and service providers How best to go about vetting How Justin and Tonya's background in Counterintelligence translated over to the business world. Does having a due diligence process tells others that you do not trust them? How business owners can use their vetting process when marketing themselves.   Justin and Tonya Dawn Recla are Army veterans and former government agents who bring over 20 years of combined counterintelligence experience to the business world. They established The Clear Business DirectoryTM and have forever changed the way business gets done. For the first time, consumers and business owners alike can make sure potential partners, investors, and service providers are who they say they are and can do what they say they can do. You can find out more at ClearBusinessDirectory.com. Subscribe To The Show: Transcript: This is episode 53 of Bella in Your Business. Welcome to Bella in Your Business, where Bella will discuss anything and everything about your pet sitting business to help you land on target. So get ready. Bella’s got your chute. Let’s jump. Welcome to another episode of Bella in Your Business. Today, I am definitely going to bring an incredible topic that is never talked about. I guarantee you, if you go try to find this topic in the industry, you won’t find it. So this is almost an exclusive on the show. Today, I have Justin Recla with me. He’s an Army veteran and former government agent who brought over 20 years of combined counterintelligence experience to the business world. He established the Clear Business Directory and has forever changed the way business gets done. For the first time, consumers and business owners alike can make sure potential partners, investors, and service providers are who they say they are and can do what they say they can do. How often have you hired someone for your business and just gotten burnt? If you’ve had that experience or you fear that experience, this episode’s for you. Justin, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me on, Bella. For sure. So why don’t you fill in the gaps there and break down for me what counterintelligence and a former government agent mean? That sounds so like 007. Super secret and sexy stuff was actually what Tonya did. My wife is also a former counterintelligence agent. Together we have over 20 years of combined experience in the field. Essentially, it is that cloak-and-dagger thing. Tonya was doing investigations, surveillance, and interviews of people who were actually committing espionage against the United States. She traveled all throughout the country following people, surveilling them, and investigating them. A lot of my experience was over in Afghanistan and Iraq, more on the offensive side, gathering intelligence from people. We’ve translated that over into the business arena to help protect business owners from frauds and scams and, more importantly, how to leverage transparency for their own business to establish trust quicker with potential clients. I love that. And before we dive deep, I also want to let our audience know that not only are you two badass business owners, but you also have a daughter who is a bestselling author and all this stuff. Everyone, I met this incredible family at the Fast Inc. networking conference I was at last week, which was just the most anointed place ever. It had the feeling of the Holy Spirit or the universe or whatever you associate with. It was all over that conference. I met this family, was so impressed with them, and instantly drawn to them that I said, you have to be on this podcast. But more so, I want you to tell us about Neva, what she’s doing, and what just happened to her. She’s seven years old, and she went to Fast Inc. because they were having a media pitch since she’s in the process of writing a bestselling book at the age of seven. This is her fifth business venture, and after she did her pitch, one of the media people from Inc. magazine came up and said, hey, I want to write an article about you. The following Monday, she and her mom met with him in person, did the interview, and the article just came out. So at the age of seven, because of her pitch, she landed her own Inc. article all about her. I’m just trying to stay out of her way. She’s grown up at business conferences, and I’ve seen the impact she has on people’s lives. She started off being a philanthropist and giving back to wounded warriors and vets, something she still does to this day. We’re a 24/7 family—we breathe and sleep business, we breathe and sleep each other, and that’s just what we do. That’s so amazing. We’ll definitely put her in our show notes because I want that to be an inspiration to anyone listening who says, I can’t pitch the media, I can’t get on stage, I can’t do a 30-second commercial at a networking meeting. Come on, you guys, take a page from Neva’s story. Getting into this, I know a lot of people are thinking right now, on one side, I’ve been burnt by a website designer or a logo designer or anyone for that matter. A lot of times we get burnt, and that breeds fear, and people stop moving forward in their business. This might even apply to doing our recon on a potential hire for a dog walker or office manager or something. So why don’t you start from the beginning and tell us how business owners can protect themselves from falling victim to fraud or a scam? Awesome. It’s super simple once you break it down. The problem is most business owners are so close to their business that they don’t see the hidden risk. In business, it’s, “I’ve got a need, you say you can meet that need, I like you, we do business together.” And they get excited about it—as they should. A lot of people ask us all the time, how do you trust? You guys don’t trust anybody? No, we do, but we verify. Instead of saying trust but verify, we love people—people are what make business happen. But as business owners, too many people were abdicating their power in decision-making. They’d find someone who was an expert—especially with tech stuff—and since they didn’t know enough about what they needed, they just weren’t asking the simple questions. The three-step process is super simple. First step: critical thinking. What do you know? How do you know it? And what do you need to know about the person before you bring them into your business? That applies across the board, whether it’s an employee, business partner, service provider, or B2B transaction. Apply that first step: critical thinking. Second step: ask the hard questions. This is where most people fail because they don’t know what to ask. They stop at “I need a website designer, I found one, I like the guy, I hire him.” They don’t ask questions like how many websites have you built, what types, have you built ones with shopping carts or affiliate programs? You have to take that pause and do that critical thinking. The third step: verify that information. Just because they give you an answer, don’t take it at face value. A lot of people say they verified it, but when we ask how, they say, “I checked their website—it said the same thing they told me.” That’s not verification—they built their website! An easier way is to check the Clear Business Directory. We’ve vetted a lot of businesses already that operate in transparency. We’ve got service providers, lawyers, and more in the directory. If you’re a business owner, it’s a great way to leverage trust because trust takes two years to establish brand trust with potential clients and five years to hit the revenue tipping point. The quickest way to build that trust faster is to operate in transparency, which is what the Clear Business Directory helps with. It’s not a peer review site or a Better Business Bureau. We don’t give grades—it’s literally, “Here’s who I am, what I do, and how I show up.” If you’re looking for anyone to get involved with, we do free consults all the time. You can call us—we’ll go down the rabbit holes with you and help you figure out what to ask before getting involved. Now you said something interesting—you can even help with employees. How does that work, and how is it different from a standard background check? The industry of employment screening is convoluted, especially for business owners, because laws exist to protect employees, not business owners. The business owner takes all the risk. We didn’t enter that space for a long time because we didn’t find a system that worked, but now we have one. It’s similar to what the government uses for background checks. We used to do background investigations for people getting top security clearances, and our process uses almost the same standard. It’s different from B2B vetting because employment screening requires certified providers, while for businesses there’s no social security number involved. We can do background checks on service providers and business owners without going into the employment screening arena. You definitely have to be doing some social media searching, seeing how they show up, and what their reputation is. A lot of that is what we do on the back end. But when it comes to employment screening, most small businesses fail because they’re just doing Google checks or using $49 online database checks, which aren’t complete. Local agencies don’t have to report up to the national database, so those checks miss things. We have access to systems they don’t. So if you’re actually hiring someone, you have to go through a certified provider. This is so interesting. I love this. When we come back, I want to talk about how to have a due diligence process without looking like you don’t trust anyone. Commercial break. ...