Keep Bailing

Just when you think you’ve heard it all, another nut comes out of the woodwork… Whatever your profession, if you’re visiting a blog, you probably have various feeds and alerts that you check out daily on your industry. You have to keep up with what’s going on and, of course, you hope you’re not the last to hear the latest about your competition.

Now, all industries have their share of distressing news, and some certainly are more serious than others. But, when you’re a bail bondsman, the morning news alerts can be particularly interesting. Take this morning, Read more »

If it’s not the first question people ask, it’s the second; “You’re a bail bondsman - like Dog the Bounty Hunter?” No, actually, my job is nothing like what Beth and Duane Chapman (aka “The Dog”) do on television. A day in the life for me entails talking with mostly nice people who know someone who has made a mistake or who the authorities think has broken the law.

Quite honestly, I had never seen the Dog the Bounty Hunter show start to finish. I’d probably caught 5 or 10 minutes here or there while surfing. Still, when I cruised by A&E the other night, the show was just starting; I thought I’d give it a shot and watch the whole episode.

Dog was in Colorado (possibly why I decided to watch; I have a long-standing love affair with the Rocky Mountain State, dating back to John Denver, but I digress…). As I watched, I was a lot more interested in the “how” of The Dog’s operation than the two fugitives they were chasing down. Read more »

From Pencils to Pagers to Blogs

If you have kids, you’ve heard them giggle, “You didn’t even have cell phones when you were a kid! Did you have electricity?” As I prepared to launch the Keep Bailing blog, I realized how lucky Greg and I are to have modern tools that Greg’s dad, Cal Rynerson, never even dreamed of when he started his bail bond business almost 40 years ago.

Cal Rynerson, became a licensed California bail agent in 1969 and started Rynerson Bail Bonds in 1971 (the same year Roy Tomlinson sent the first email). That was before personal computers, before fax machines, before cell phones, before websites. Cal did business the old fashioned way, with pens, paper, and face-to-face personal interaction. (Imagine that?)

With an office located directly across the street from the Santa Ana jail, he regularly had walk-in customers. He wrote 95% of his bonds for the local jail, often handling 10 or more bonds each day. Ten bonds may not sound like a lot, but each one requires a bail bond interview, paperwork, and a trip to the jail. At the time, the average Southern California bail bond was around $500.

Now, the average bail in So Cal is around $20,000. We’d be lucky to write ten bonds in a week! With the proliferation of internet and the glut of competition, Greg and I need to write bonds all over California. There’s no way we could do business the way Cal did 30 years ago. Read more »