Origin Story: Avco, Dr Gavin, and the Label

Roger Wallis

My name is Roger Wallis. This is Debt: The Truth. Before I spend the next however many episodes telling you everything that's wrong with the debt and insolvency industry, I should probably make a confession. I used to work for it. Not in the way you might think. I didn't start at the top, in a nice office, putting widows into arrangements they didn't need. I started at the bottom, in Burnley, in 1983, at a company called Avco. And I was rather good at it. So if you've ever wondered how I know the way this machine works — it's because I was once a moving part inside it. Poacher turned gamekeeper. Although I've met a lot of poachers over the years, and I have to tell you, most of them never turn. That's Debt: The Truth. I'm Roger Wallis. Here's the part I have to say once, every episode. Let me say it plainly, and then get on with the story. Speak For You Limited is an independent consumer advocacy service. It is not authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority. It is not a regulated claims management company. It is not a firm of solicitors. Nothing in this podcast is financial advice, legal advice, or debt advice. If you are in financial difficulty, you should speak to a free-sector adviser of your choice, or to a regulated professional. Right. Seatbelt on. Let me tell you about Avco. Avco was an American consumer finance company, and in the early eighties I worked for their branch in Burnley. The job was to lend money to the people the banks wouldn't touch. Small sums — five hundred pounds was a big loan back then. Working people. People who needed a new cooker, or a Christmas, or a way to reach the end of the month. Now, here's how the model worked, and I'd like you to appreciate the elegance of it, because somebody was very clever, and it certainly wasn't the customer. You'd come into the office. We'd look at your wage slip. And then we'd ask you for six names. Six people you knew — friends, family, a neighbour or two. References, we called them. They were not references. They were the next six customers. Because when you fell behind — and the whole model rather depended on you falling behind — we would go and visit those six people. And we would lend to them. Same terms. Same six-names question. And on it rolled. It built itself, like a chain letter that charged interest. And when somebody genuinely couldn't pay, that's when you learned debt collection — which is a polite phrase for the part of the job I liked least. I'll be honest with you. It was a brilliant business. Ruthless, efficient, self-perpetuating. A genuinely great model — provided your only definition of great is money. But I could see who was sitting on the other side of that desk. It was never the comfortable. It was always the ones hanging on by their fingernails. And some quiet part of me, even then, filed that away. I didn't know it at the time, but that desk in Burnley is where this podcast began. It just took me about forty years to reach a microphone. There's an earlier story, though, and it's the one that actually made me who I am. So let me wind back a little further. Before any of the finance work, I was a police officer. It was the job I'd wanted since I was a boy. And I lost it — not to a scandal, not to anything I did. I lost it to a label. For the best part of a year, I was unwell. Racing heart, panic, sweating, the whole catalogue. And a system — my doctor, the police doctor, all of them — decided the problem was me. I was cracking up. I was nervous. I needed antidepressants. My wife was asked, in front of me, whether the marriage might be the cause. Everyone agreed on the diagnosis. Everyone was terribly confident. And I got a label, a prescription, and a slow, managed exit out of the career I loved. And every last bit of it was wrong. Because there was something physically wrong with me. Something a single blood test would have caught in about five minutes. A doctor named Gavin eventually took that test, asked the one question nobody else had bothered to ask — and there it was. Five minutes. That's all it took to overturn a whole year of confident professional opinion. Nobody had taken the blood test. And do you know why? Because nobody questioned the label. The moment they'd decided the problem was me, they stopped looking. Hold that thought. Because that is exactly — precisely — what the consumer-insolvency industry does to people today. It tells them the problem is them. You're bad with money. You're reckless. You got yourself into this mess. And then, ever so helpfully, it sells you the solution. The label is decided before you've even sat down. And the one question that would change everything — was the lending fair? Was this product suitable? Did somebody do something to this person that ought to be looked at before we process them? — that question never gets asked. I know what it feels like to be on the wrong side of a confident opinion that turns out to be nonsense. I have been the patient nobody tested. So when I started seeing the same shape in another industry, decades later, I recognised it on sight. I'd lived it. And these days, honestly, the whole of what I do is just Dr Gavin's five minutes. Take the time. Ask the question. Look at the actual evidence. And don't believe the label until somebody has proven it. So that's the short version of how a man ends up spending his retirement taking apart other people's paperwork for a living. I went from that Avco desk into a working life spent in and around financial services and insolvency. Some of it I'm proud of. Some of it I'm not. All of it is useful now, because I know where the bodies are buried — I helped bury a few. I've built practices. I've been through the mill with the regulator more than once. And a few years ago I decided I'd finally had enough of watching the same thing happen to the same sort of people, and I set up Speak For You. Speak For You does one thing. We read the paperwork — forensically, line by line — and we tell people the truth about what was done to them. We're not a regulator. We're not solicitors. We don't give advice. We simply look, properly, at the thing nobody else looked at. I've also written two books, because apparently I don't know when to stop. Insolvency: The Truth, and Bailiffs: The Truth. There's a free debt help guide as well — it costs nothing, which in this industry makes it something of a collector's item. There are more books on the way. And now, evidently, there's a podcast. This show is going to name the machine. Not the people — the machine. How it works, who it works for, and how to see it coming before it sees you. Some of it you will find hard to believe. I'd have found it hard to believe myself, if I hadn't spent time sitting on both sides of that desk. That's the first episode of Debt: The Truth. I'm Roger Wallis, and I'm very glad you're here. Next time, we get into the machinery itself — starting with the single piece of paper that quietly decides your entire financial future, and how it manages to come out wrong quite so remarkably often. If any of this landed close to home, the books and the free guide are the quickest way in — and if you think you were put into the wrong thing, that is precisely what Speak For You is for. Speak For You Limited is an independent consumer advocacy service. It is not authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority. It is not a regulated claims management company. It is not a firm of solicitors. Nothing in this podcast is financial advice, legal advice, or debt advice. If you are in financial difficulty, you should speak to a free-sector adviser of your choice, or to a regulated professional.