Numbers, Negotiation, and Know-How: How Sheree George Makes an Impact at InCharge

For as long as she can remember, Sheree George has had a gift for untangling complicated situations, a talent that is virtually immeasurable for an organization with as many moving — and constantly changing — parts as InCharge.

A reliably cooperative creditor is suddenly rejecting proposals (to be added to the DMP)? Sheree will sort it. A client’s account is lurching toward closure and collections? Sheree will troubleshoot it.

“She can step back from a problem and start to really dive deeper to analyze … the root cause of the situation,” says David Sanchez, Senior Vice President of Customer Experience and Business Strategy. “Then [she] can evaluate it to figure out how we can be creative with a possible solution, especially knowing in the world that we operate, there are a lot of regulations we have to conform to with at the state and federal level.

“She has the ability to look at things and then identify what they are, but then also get creative to find a solution.”

Sheree is admired for her astute nimbleness, a quality she began honing as a youngster growing up in the New York City’s Harlem, just a short stroll from the world-renowned Apollo Theater. The iconic venue gave young Sheree a taste of the larger world beyond her neighborhood, leading to her first entrepreneurial adventure: Raising money for a bus deposit to shuttle area kids to Six Flags Great America, 90 minutes down Interstate 95 in New Jersey.

Her go-to gambit: a fish fry organized by her mom. “People in the neighborhood would come by, get a fish sandwich and French fries, and I’d save the money up,” Sheree says.

Park-goers would get a roundtrip ride and a group price on their ticket, and, for organizing it all, Sheree would take a small cut. When they grew out of roller coaster rides, Sheree picked a new destination: Atlantic City. Still, Sheree always got her piece of the action.

“They had a nickname for me,” she chuckles. “ ‘FeFe,’ because I always had a fee for this or that.”

Numbers intrigued her, especially those with dollar signs. Sheree naturally fell into bookkeeping and accounting, which helps explain how she wound up rubbing elbows with Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk and Captain America as Lady Greenback to the writers at Marvel Comics, for whom she tracked royalty payments. “I knew Stan Lee before he was Stan Lee,” she says. “And every company event, we would have all the characters come. It was a lot of fun.”

But Florida and its pleasant winters beckoned, and she came south to help oversee the books for a resort timeshare company. When the operation moved to Las Vegas, Sheree stayed. She wouldn’t hear of uprooting her husband and two children.

Besides, she’d come to think of Orlando as home, and when she landed at InCharge — 22 years ago — Sheree was convinced. The town, the company and she belonged together.

“I think of this as my company,” she says. “And I want the people I work with to think that way, too.”

Now her children, Michael Jr. and Kiani, are grown, and having babies of their own: Michael III, Logan and Malachi. “It’s fun,” she says. “Whenever all three get together, it’s just comical.”

Sheree worked her way up the management chain, starting in receivables, where she put together the process of collecting from problematic payers. Next came customer support and figuring out what to do when creditors failed to cash a check. Mission accomplished, she gathered the research team, then the credit services and proposals teams.

Today, she’s the customer support manager, with a dozen direct reports, and loving every moment … which helps explain how daughter Kiani came over from Bank of America 10 years ago to join the InCharge team.

“Being very people-oriented, she puts her people first in everything that she does,” VP Sanchez says. “She wants everything to be equitable across her team. She’s very good at identifying tasks or talent, people on the team where what talent and strength they bring will best align to the work within her department.”

Sheree, in short, embraces the InCharge mission.

“I get fulfillment of seeing a client come to the program who’s in distress with a lot of debt,” she says. “We help that client get their fees reduced, [and] they can get their monthly payment reduced.

“And then the best part — because I see the payment programming side of it, too — is when the client makes that final payment, you know. That’s fulfillment to me.”

For Sheree, every final payment represents more than just a completed program – it’s another problem solved, another life changed.