How To Maintain Good Credit And Avoid Being In The Red with Bill Hillestad

Everyone pays people to manage their assets (brokers, financial planners) but nobody manages their liabilities — yet access to capital on the best terms is where you make or break a business, and credit is the gateway to it.

Successful, financially strong owners often have the worst credit because growth means constant credit pulls, inquiries, and the occasional missed payment — Tommy went from a mid-600s to a mid-700s score in about 30 days by removing hard inquiries and small derogatory marks.

Legitimate credit repair is fast and results-based: real experts using the actual laws can make big impacts in 30-90 days on a get-it-off-or-you-don't-pay basis — unlike traditional firms that charge monthly and drag it out with form letters because the delay is how they profit.

Credit repair can't fabricate credit: it removes items that legally shouldn't be there. It helps the financially strong whose score doesn't reflect reality — someone in true financial distress needs debt relief or credit counseling, not repair.

Capital is fuel, not a free pass — don't access it unless you know what to do with it. A quick numbers check (payroll, owner pay, marketing spend) often reveals the money should go into marketing and growth, not a boat or a deeper hole.

Facebook is the single most powerful marketing tool — the key (per David Ogilvy) is reach, frequency, and impact: shrink your audience small enough to afford being in front of them constantly, and make ~80% of content valuable/entertaining rather than selling.

Split-test relentlessly with a tool like AdEspresso: run many headline/image/text combinations (5x5x3 = 75 ads), kill the losers, and keep the winners — one 6-second scroll-stopper clip dropped a sale cost from $193 to $3.81; one image swap took a lead from $80 to $13.

Build look-alike audiences from video viewers: boost an authentic (not overly professional) video, then have Facebook build a custom audience of people who watched 50%+ — the resulting look-alike is 22-25x more likely to convert and cut lead cost 60% in one step.

The Facebook profile-to-page migration tool instantly converts a personal profile's friends into business-page followers (one page went from ~130 to 2,200 followers in under a minute) — and 360 video gets preferential reach because the auto-scroll motion drives massive engagement.