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Meet the Founders | James Kallman & Andrew Andersen, CRA Syndicate
The People Behind CRA Syndicate

Meet the Founders of CRA Syndicate

CRA Syndicate was built by operators, not vendors. Our founders spent their careers running staffing, recruiting, and human capital businesses before deciding that the way background screening infrastructure gets sold to entrepreneurs needed to change.

Quick Answer

CRA Syndicate was co-founded by James Kallman and Andrew Andersen, both of whom built careers in staffing and human capital markets before launching the company. Their thesis was straightforward: most people who want to own a background screening company do not lack the sales ability to win clients — they lack the vendor network, compliance infrastructure, and software that a Consumer Reporting Agency requires. CRA Syndicate exists to hand that infrastructure to the business owner and let them focus on selling.

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James Kallman

Co-Founder

Finance professional with experience in background screening and human capital markets.

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Where finance and deal-making meet screening

James Kallman's background is in finance, applied across the background screening and human capital markets. That combination matters more than it might appear, because the screening industry runs on recurring employer contracts and multi-year vendor relationships — both of which are fundamentally financial instruments dressed up as operational ones.

His specific experience is in assembling deals. That includes carve-outs, where a screening or human capital business is separated from a larger parent entity and has to be valued, documented, and transferred as a standalone operating company. It includes M&A work on both sides of a transaction — evaluating what a screening business is actually worth, what liabilities travel with it, and how vendor and client contracts survive a change of control. And it includes buy/sell agreements: the structures that determine how ownership is transferred, how value is set, and what happens when a partner exits.

That deal background is why CRA Syndicate publishes its pricing and builds a defined SBA financing pathway rather than leaving economics to a sales conversation. A transaction that cannot be evaluated on paper cannot be financed, and a business that cannot be financed is inaccessible to most of the people capable of running it. Kallman's view is that demand was never the barrier to entering background screening — employers always need screening. The barrier is the cost and complexity of standing up a compliant Consumer Reporting Agency.

At CRA Syndicate, he focuses on how the licensing model is structured, priced, and supported for new owners, and on making the opportunity legible to lenders, buyers, and enterprise organizations alike.

Areas of focus

Corporate Finance M&A & Carve-Outs Buy/Sell Agreements Human Capital Markets Screening Industry
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Andrew Andersen

Co-Founder

Background screening and technology operator focused on turning complex compliance infrastructure into something a new owner can actually run.

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Building the infrastructure behind the brand

Andrew Andersen's work centers on the operating layer of CRA Syndicate — the software, vendor relationships, and support systems that a licensee inherits on day one. His focus is on the part of background screening that is invisible to the client but determines whether the business actually functions: order flow, data sources, turnaround times, dispute handling, and the technical maintenance that keeps a screening platform current.

That is a meaningfully different discipline from marketing a business opportunity. A Consumer Reporting Agency operates in a regulated environment involving candidate data, employer clients, court record retrieval, verification providers, adverse-action processes, and reinvestigation obligations. Andersen's role is to ensure that infrastructure is genuinely operational for every licensee, not merely diagrammed in a sales deck.

This is also where the shared-services model earns its keep. A single new screening company has almost no purchasing leverage with court researchers, drug-testing networks, or verification providers. Pooling order volume across the network is what makes wholesale pricing and workable margins possible for a new entrant. Andersen's work sits at that intersection — vendor management, platform reliability, and the operational support that lets an owner sell with confidence about what happens after the order is placed.

Areas of focus

Screening Technology Vendor Networks Compliance Operations Platform & Support

Why they built CRA Syndicate

The background screening industry has a structural problem. Demand is steady and recurring — employers hire continuously and almost every hire requires some form of screening. Yet the cost of entering the industry as an operator has historically been enormous: software licenses, vendor contracts, compliance processes, support staff, and technical administration all have to exist before the first client signs.

That gap created two bad outcomes. Some people with excellent client-development ability never entered the market at all. Others entered by paying heavily for infrastructure they did not understand and could not negotiate optimally.

Kallman and Andersen built CRA Syndicate around a different division of labor: the licensee owns the client relationship, the brand, and the revenue; the syndicate owns the platform, the vendor network, the disputes, and the technical maintenance. That is why published pricing and a defined SBA financing pathway matter so much to the model — a prospective owner should be able to evaluate the economics before they ever get on a sales call.

Talk directly with the people who built the model

Every conversation starts with our published numbers, not a discovery call designed to qualify you. Review the pricing, run the calculations, then schedule a walkthrough with our team.

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