Buying a call center, billing or office services company in Florida

These companies do office work for other businesses: answering services and call centers, appointment scheduling, medical billing, document preparation and scanning, mail and shipping centers, virtual assistants and back-office processing. Clients pay a monthly fee, a rate per call or per minute, a price per transaction, or a percentage of what's collected.

The best of these businesses run on monthly contracts that renew. An answering service with hundreds of small clients (doctors, plumbers, property managers who need calls answered after hours) has steady income and depends on no one client. A call center with two or three large contracts can be profitable but fragile. Medical billing firms usually earn a share of what they collect for doctors' practices, so their income rises and falls with how many patients those practices see and what insurers pay.

The work is people plus software: agents or processors, team leads, a scheduler, and the systems that route calls and track the work. Labor is the biggest cost, and people come and go constantly.

• Many clients on monthly contracts, with few cancellations each year.
• Prices based on actual use (calls, minutes, claims processed), so busier clients pay more and no client costs more to serve than it pays.
• Steady staffing, trained team leads and written procedures for each client, so a new agent can handle any account.
• Modern phone and software systems on contracts the business can keep after a sale.
• Service that's measured and reported to clients: answer times, accuracy and error rates.
• A specialty (medical, legal, home services) that brings referrals from one client to the next.
• An owner who manages the business rather than covering shifts or answering phones.

Florida doesn't license general office work or answering services; expect a local business tax receipt. Some kinds of work are regulated:

• Calls that sell goods or services to consumers need a commercial telephone seller license from the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (section 501.605 of the Florida Statutes), unless an exemption in section 501.604 applies. The Florida Telephone Solicitation Act also requires prior express written consent for automated sales calls and texts, and consumers can sue (section 501.059).
• Collecting debts takes registration with the Office of Financial Regulation: as a consumer collection agency (section 559.553), or, if you mainly collect business debts, as a commercial collection agency with a bond (section 559.544).
• Medical billing requires a business associate agreement with each practice under HIPAA, the federal health privacy law.
• Personal data falls under Florida's data breach law: a vendor must tell its client within 10 days of determining there was a breach (section 501.171).

Collection registrations can't be transferred (sections 559.544 and 559.555), and the telemarketing license names the company's owners and officers. So a new company buying the assets needs its own before starting work. If you buy the company itself, report the change: within 30 days for a consumer collection agency, 10 days for a telemarketing license (section 501.609).

• Revenue by client and by type of contract, and each contract's length, notice period and whether it can pass to a new owner.
• Labor costs, staff turnover and local wages. Remote workers in other states mean dealing with those states' payroll and tax rules.
• The phone system, software and data: who holds the licenses, whether they transfer, and what it would cost to switch.
• Records showing the rules are followed: call recordings, consent records, collection practices and HIPAA risk assessments.
• Client complaints, refunds, or penalties for missing promised service levels.
• Telephone and internet costs, and what happens if the main provider goes down.
• For medical billing, how much of each practice's billings the firm actually collects. That's what clients judge you on.

• How many clients do you have, and how much of your revenue comes from the top five?
• How many clients canceled last year, and why?
• Do you make sales calls or collect debts for anyone?
• What happens when an agent quits mid-shift or a system goes down?
• Which software and phone contracts are in your personal name?
• How do you set your prices, and when did you last raise them?
• If you were staying, what would you build next, or who would you hire?