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How the infamous former billionaire is bouncing back from the business abyss after a decade of hard times.
Tulsa’s former richest man Bill Bartmann has been homeless, a gang member, a high school dropout, an attorney, president of a multibillion-dollar company, the country’s 25th-richest man (at least on paper), bankrupt, on the speaker circuit and an author of two books.
“I’ve had an interesting life, and I’ve lived in interesting times,” says Bartmann, who was once estimated to be worth $3.5 billion.
He is probably most well known as the co-founder, president and CEO of the now-defunct Commercial Financial Services (CFS), a kinder, gentler and massive collection service that grew by light speed and rapidly flamed out just as spectacularly a decade ago — July 23, 1999 — after charges of conspiracy and fraud surfaced against Bartmann and his former CFS partner, Jay Jones.
Bartmann was found not guilty in a 2003 jury trial of 58 counts of conspiracy and fraud concerning the collapse of CFS, after 38 days of testimony, several dozen witnesses and more than 1,000 exhibits. Jones, however, pled guilty and served three and a half years in federal prison facilities, with a $1 billion judgment against him.
It was the end of a ride that included some “outrageously interesting things,” as Bartmann likes to call them. Things like renting 27 747’s to take about 6,000 employees and their families to Walt Disney World or offering 250 percent 401K match programs or free on-site day care. Bartmann once famously took 5,000 employees and their spouses to Las Vegas to watch him spar with legendary wrestler Hulk Hogan — a reward promised to employees for hitting their monthly goal. Additional perks of the trip included $500 spending money apiece and Bartmann’s appearance in a sedan chair in a Roman centurion outfit — an incident he notes has been incorrectly characterized as Julius Caesar.
No one doubted that Bartmann loved his employees intensely, although working for him reportedly wasn’t easy either. A 1999 profile of Bartmann in Fortune magazine quotes a former employee, who called Bartmann a name-calling “tyrant” and cited a meeting of 600 or so employees during which he accused them of cheating and entered into a profanity-laden rant.
Since that time, the 60-year-old Bartmann has parlayed his problems into a successful speaking career, doing about 100 motivational speeches annually, often on the same ticket as Zig Ziglar, Tony Robbins and former Disney head Michael Eisner. And for $20,000 a head, according to prices listed at www.billbartmann.com, you can listen — as 185 people did in late April — to five days of his tale of rags, riches, rags and riches in a sunny, posh locale such as Palm Springs, Calif.
Michael Frick of the Speakers Platform Agency in San Francisco, which represents about 1,200 speakers ranging from Lance Armstrong to Neil Armstrong, says Bartmann’s appeal is his unique take on the current business climate.
“He’s really dynamic,” Frick says, noting that many successful businesspeople can’t command a crowd like Bartmann. “I get a lot of requests for him.”
Bartmann charges between $50,000 and $75,000 per speech, according to the Speakers Platform Web site.
“If he was less expensive, he would be hired all the time,” Frick says. “He could be working 365 days a year if he wanted to.”
The reinvention of Bill Bartmann continues with his recently released book “Bailout Riches: How Everyday Investors Can Make a Fortune Buying Bad Loans for Pennies on the Dollar,” which is geared to the average person in America and instructs readers how to participate in the bailout opportunity. It followed his 2005 release, “Billionaire Secrets to Success.”
“(It describes) how the average person can literally participate in this Main Street bailout or the Wall Street bailout, with a purchasing formula very much like CFS did — we just did it on a very grand scale; we did it on a mega scale,” Bartmann says. “I have thousands of students now who literally are investing $5,000 or $10,000 to euphemistically buy a box of loans. … They can be purchased for as low as a nickel or a dime on the dollar. Then the student can either collect them (the loans) for themselves, which I don’t recommend they do, or the alternative would be for that student to pass that box of loans on to a collection agency.”
And he’s started a private equity fund with institutional participants and a goal of $1 billion to buy “toxic assets” that the government took over from struggling banking and mortgage entities. Bartmann plans to take advantage of the Obama administration’s plan for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to auction off toxic residential mortgages.
He says it’s “Groundhog Day” for him, referring to the Bill Murray movie in which a cynical TV weatherman must live the same day over and over until he gets it right.
“I don’t need validation,” Bartmann says, sitting in his modest south Tulsa office dressed in pressed blue jeans, a collared casual shirt and Nikes, fit and trim with his charismatic persona exuding from a face deeply lined from hard times. He notes his 12 years of collection experience, when CFS did $15 billion worth of transactions.
“We touched the lives of 4.5 million customers,” he continues. “The metrics are there. We were validated and approved of by all four ratings agencies. We did transactions on five continents. We did billions of dollars worth of deals. So it goes without saying that I understand the arena. … I get to do it all again and I get to do it differently this time. The difference will be that I am teaching others to go do it.”
In all, Bartmann has started seven different businesses in seven different industries.
“It’s like riding a roller coaster for me. I can’t wait to get back on,” Bartmann says. “It scares the dickens out of you when you’re going over the top, but when you get off, what’s the first thing you do? You run back and get back in line. Welcome to life.”
The news of Bartmann’s new ventures hasn’t been welcome to everyone. He continues to be a love-hate figure with a strong contingent of both proponents and opponents. A recent story in the Tulsa World about purchasing toxic assets drew a slew of both kinds of reactions, some approaching venomous.
That doesn’t bother him.
“People have a right to have their own opinion and I honor their right to have their own opinion,” Bartmann says. “Even if it’s not supported by the facts. They have a right to have an incorrect conclusion.”
Lightbulb moments, anyone?
Bartmann got the idea for his most recent ventures much as he has gotten any other. He and his wife, Kathy, heard about the government bailout funds while sitting around the dining table.
“And so she and I … just looked at each other and we smiled,” Bartmann says. “Because this new opportunity was happening right in front of our eyes. We just saw something. … The economy is in deep doo-doo. And there are an awful lot of people unemployed — like 8.5 percent — a little over 12 million unemployed. More than 20 million underemployed.”
He remembers that they looked at each other and said, “Hmm, we could go do it again.”
“And rather than go create CFS again, we will do it a different way this time,” he says.
But why? It takes a certain personality, according to Jim Wheeler, the Stanley White executive director and co-founder of the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at the University of Oklahoma.
Wheeler calls Bartmann’s boom-and-bust cycles “serial entrepreneurship,” a feat he says is relatively rare.
“Donald Trump is another obvious one,” he says. “But it just wouldn’t apply to that many people.”
Wheeler says people who are good at entrepreneurship are generally good at either raising capital or leading.
Another is risk tolerance.
If the person is a charismatic leader and can get people to buy in, those entrepreneurs “tend to be survivors,” he says.
But he says there are no set characteristics of an entrepreneur, and sometimes situations work because of a special partnership that wouldn’t work any other way.
“They haven’t come up with the perfect litmus test as to what’s the perfect entrepreneur,” he says.
How to recognize lightbulb moments and, more importantly, capitalize and execute them is part of what Bartmann teaches in his seminars.
He remembers something Dick Kovacevich, vice chairman of Wells Fargo, said years ago.
“(Kovacevich) said something that resonated with me because it was just one of those profundities,” Bartmann says. “He said he could leave the business plan for his bank sitting on his seat on an airline. And his competitor could pick it up and read his business plan and it would not work. Because the real secret was in execution, how you did something, not that it was just enough to have the idea.”
And another key element to his seminars is dealing with bad days or down moments.
“We all have those, but it’s how you deal with them,” he says. “Adversity introduces us to ourselves. And that’s when we find out what we’re really made of.”
His seminars are liberally laced with humble pie.
“I get to tell them about the times I failed,” he says. “I get to tell them about the times I screwed up. I get to tell them about the times I got it wrong. … And not for ‘woe is me.’ … I get to tell them that no matter how much stuff comes down the pike at them, it is how they deal with it that will determine the outcome.
“When you’re the guy who’s been treated like the piñata at a Mexican birthday party, you have some credibility to say, ‘You can survive anything.’ And right now, in this economy … people need that message more than they need anything else.”
It’s another reason he says he loves teaching.
“To know you’re giving people some tools to go do something that will change their life,” he says. “ … They will be able to pay their bills. They will put their kids through college. They will be able to be a breadwinner again. And that’s changing people’s lives.”
How they got there
CFS had a spectacular ascendance that has become legendary in the business world. Bartmann and Jones founded the company in 1986 with $13,000 borrowed from a Muskogee bank to buy bad loans and use a less intimidating way of collection to collect a higher percentage of those loans. In 1992, CFS had 45 employees. In 1998, it had 3,900. Its unraveling came when an anonymous letter was mailed to bond rating agencies Sept. 30, 1998, alleging that CFS had been propped up with sales to Dimat Corp., which was largely owned by Jones. Ratings on CFS bonds were suspended. Credit lines dried up. The resulting implosion of CFS cost those 3,900 people their jobs.
Now Bartmann makes do with eight employees.
It’s not that he doesn’t miss those 3,900 people.
“They were singularly responsible for all the accolades that CFS received,” he says.
Bartmann had lots of friends during the go-go days of CFS. But life was lonely afterward.
What’s gotten Bartmann through the dark days, through the trial and bankruptcy and being on the front page of the Tulsa World more than 200 times almost consecutively, has been his companion of 45 years — his wife, childhood sweetheart and business partner, Kathy.
“It’s easy to have friends in the good times,” he says. “It’s easy to have people who are with you in the thick of life. But they usually vanish in the thin of life. Kathy has been my friend forever and through all of the ups and the downs and the ins and the outs and the backs and the forths.”
What he’s learned
To Bartmann, being successful boils down to self-esteem and a positive attitude.
“Rather than look at any of the negatives that people might think of … at any opportunity I always happen to see that rosy side of life,” he says. “That somewhere in that pile, there’s a pony. I will keep digging through that pile until I find the pony.”
He seems almost wistful about the “old days.”
“And, oh, do I understand what it’s like to string nine zeros together?” he says. “And to be the 25th wealthiest man in America — yeah, I do. And I do know what’s on the other side of that equation — yeah, I do. And I see both sides and I am not awed by success and I’m not intimidated by failure.”
But it’s not as if he wouldn’t like to be there again, hop scotching the country in what would be his fourth jet, his last being a Gulfstream IV.
“We’ll get a bigger one this time,” he says. “We’d get a G650, which is the latest and greatest model.”
It’s not just being cocky, he says. It’s a matter of business.
“I understand expediency,” Bartmann says. “I understand logistical considerations. I understand how important it is to be able to travel quickly to do business transactions efficiently.”
Finding a little peace
This new Bartmann, while still high energy, is a somewhat mellower man.
“Most people worry so much about what other people think about where they live, what they wear, how they conduct themselves, who their employer is or what their status is or whether they have a parking spot. Or whether they wear clothes with a label on them or no label on them,” he says. “But only in life after you’ve been through it a few times do you get to look back and say, that stuff wasn’t that important at the end of the day.
“There’s no one’s opinion that I’m concerned with. I love them all, but I just don’t care.”
