Money makers

Tami Wankoff admits when she sells her company's niche services to potential clients, it often has an air of way too good to be true.

Wankoff, through her company, CTA Deposit Recovery Services, gets clients money — sometimes thousands of dollars — from phone bill mistakes and overcharges and/or unreturned deposits from past purchases. The details of how CTA does this are complex, and create a high barrier to entry for competitors, which is why Wankoff rests her pitch on CTA's solid track record: The company, she says, has obtained $6 million for clients since 2010.

“We recover assets all the time,” Wankoff says. “That's why I get so psyched about this business.”

With contingency fees of 30% to 35% per collection, Wankoff has reason to get excited. The list of satisfied, and usually surprised, corporate clients, includes Chuck E. Cheese and Fort Worth, Texas-based Justin Boots, in addition to several Fortune 1000 companies. Wankoff declines to provide specific annual sales figures, only to say the company, based in an east Manatee County corporate park, has doubled revenues every year since 2011.

It grew so much Wankoff decided to sell a majority portion of CTA in February to Naples-based Commercial Properties Southwest, part of a group of real estate companies with holdings in Texas and Florida. Terms of the deal weren't disclosed. Commercial Properties executive Joel Bobrow, in a statement, says he looks forward to helping CTA become the “premier unclaimed property recovery company for the Fortune 1000.”

Wankoff kept 15% ownership of the business in the sale. She sold the other portion, she says, not only to cash out but also so she could do less ownership work and more one-on-one with clients and perspective clients. “I was running a company, and that's not what I wanted to do,” she says. “I wanted to do the people piece.”

That takes Wankoff back to her core challenge — the sales pitch. The firm stands for Contingency Telecom Auditing, and that's pretty much what it does. Through six employees and a rotation of at least four college interns, CTA performs an intense audit of a company's entire telecommunication systems. That includes local and long distance, routers, switches, cell phones and even fax lines.

The company compares the findings to industry standards of companies similar in size and scope. Next comes the good part: If something is off, Wankoff and her team go to the phone company with the audit, which can be dozens of pages, and get the client some money back. “Each year, millions of dollars are lost due to unnoticed telecom billing errors,” says Wankoff. “There are mistakes out there all the time, and big companies don't even know.”

One CTA audit traced phone record mistakes back to 1984. Another audit netted a client $398,000, minus the contingency fee.

Wankoff founded CTA in 2010, after working for telecommunications firms in New York and New Jersey. A few years after she launched the business, Wankoff added a second unit that went after unclaimed deposits on equipment, office rent and other costs for corporate clients. Like the phone bills, that side also works on a contingency fee basis.

Through the first six years, CTA has found most clients by referrals. Specific sectors the company targets include hospitals, law firms and large retail operations, anything with lots of people and lots of phones.

Wankoff, after the sale of the business, seeks to grow beyond referrals. She recently hired a marketing firm, Grapevine Communications, and plans to start attending trade shows to look for clients later this year. She also seeks to hire her first full-time salesperson. The next best part to getting clients, she says, is getting to go do the recovery work. “Once a potential client signs an engagement letter,” says Wankoff, “the fun begins.”

(This story was updated to reflect the correct spelling of CTA Deposit Recovery Services.)

Follow Mark Gordon on Twitter @markigordon