Since becoming CEO of Vcheck Global in 2017, Adam Rudman has led the company’s sales growth and expanded its offerings as a provider of deep-dive due diligence background checks for commercial real estate companies, law firms and investment groups.
Vcheck Global services over 1,000 clients across the globe that include many large commercial real estate lenders, law firms, private equity, hedge funds, accounting firms and corporations that use the company’s sophisticated set of services to vet investments and borrowers. The company’s services include identity verification, asset searches, judgments and liens, bankruptcies, criminal records, credit reports, social media presence and more by real estate professionals who vet prospective hires, clients, strategic partners and suppliers.
During Rudman’s tenure, the company has increased revenue by over 250% and he has successfully secured some of the largest Fortune 500 companies as clients, placing the company on Inc magazine’s 5000 Fastest Growing Companies list for the last two years.
How long have you been in the industry?
Since 2013. We started with four people, and we grew the company team to over 70 employees.
How did you get into the business?
My partners Shai Stern and Seth Farbman and I saw an opportunity to buy into an existing California-based background check firm. Both had a long history of taking over companies in the financial services space and growing them 10 times. They are widely known for running Vintage Filings, a financial printing company.
Who inspires you?
My partners have shown me what it means to work hard and also remember that your family is most important. They wake up at the crack of dawn because there is so much to accomplish and so little time to do it in.
I love this quote from the great Kobe Bryant, who also inspired me: “I wasn’t willing to sacrifice my game, but I also wasn’t willing to sacrifice my family time. So I decided to sacrifice sleep, and that was that.”
What is the biggest challenge for the industry in this cyber age?
Speed. Everyone wants due diligence reports back yesterday. You must be careful not to sacrifice quality. To help speed up the process, we have built our tech platform to enable most of our research to be performed utilizing AI and machine learning.
What is Vcheck’s greatest challenge?
Also speed. We deal with such crucial information that we would rather get the information right than get it faster. Our tech platform enables us to accomplish quality with speed.
Any outrageous story you can share? You don’t have to name names (unless you want to).
We did a background investigation on a board member of a publicly-traded company that revealed the individual was a convicted felon. The obvious question was: how in the world did this person become a board member at such a high profile company? He operated under an alias that we uncovered. People will do whatever they can to hide their skeletons.
On another deal, we saved our lender client from getting tied up in a $90 million deal after our background investigation discovered that even though their borrower was clean as a whistle in the United States, he had a presence in Bangladesh, where we discovered he was part of the Bangladesh mafia for five years.
