Warren: In starting my business I knew that I needed to get the capital. You know, I needed access to fund to like I could build a store and buy ingredients and get started and things like that. I didn’t have resources myself, so I needed to go to the bank. I went there and I said, what do you need to know in order to help me start this business? Their reply was, well we need to know what you need to know. You know, I mean like we’re not experts at baking. We’re not experts at running a retail bakery. So, you got to educate us about what’s going to happen.
And a business plan is something that is very organic. Just like a business, things change all the time. Adaptations need to be made. Thing stricken from the record in terms of like what your goals are, if they’re off. It’s the overall general playbook of what’s going on in the business.
You got to be able to demonstrate to people, listen, I want money from you so I can spend it on these things and this is how we’re going to make the money and I can pay you back with all the money that we made and we brought in.
Lon: It’s so critical to know where every dollar is going and how important it is to know the cash flow of the company and what too many people focus on is the profit of the company. You could be making a lot of profit, but you could be out of business in a week. Because you don’t have the cash to pay your employees, to pay your suppliers and your customers aren’t paying you in time.
So there’s a lot of management of those cash flows that is really critical to a success of a business. And going through that process of working to the bank, it was getting our financial statements in line. Getting them clean and presenting to them with a proper amount of accounts receivable to support the line of credit that we’re looking for. And as a rule of thumb with the banks, it’s usually 80 percent. So if your accounts receivable are a hundred thousand dollars, they will on average loan you 80 thousand dollars in a line of credit. So it was a lot of process of getting to that number and getting the bank to actually admit that to us so that we can figure out. See how we can adjust our company to support the numbers needed to get those bank loans.
When I was first getting going I had the job, but I didn’t have any money in the bank account. I don’t have a rich family. I really have no resources to go out to get funding. I didn’t know anybody here. My first idea, which I think a lot of people’s first idea how to get funding, was to go to the bank. I mean, they have the buildings. They have a lot of money. They’d be a great place to ask for some money to start a company. And I toured a couple of them and talk to their business bankers and I told them my idea. I showed them my business plan. And I walk through it all, and every one of the bankers said, this is a great idea. And then the next question was do you own a house? I said no. And they said, well we don’t really have anything to give you money off. Well I said, what about the business plan? Well, the business plan is great, but what happens if the business fails? They are not entrepreneurs. They are not risk takers and I figure that out very quickly that they don’t want to take risk. They want to be back by cash. The only thing that I can come up with and the way of raising money or getting capital was through credit cards. So I sent in about 20 different credit card applications, and about 2 weeks later I got 15 credit cards. Started rolling in. And I have about $45,000.00 available credit to me along all these different banks. So basically I spread out my risk over a bunch of banks and I have this available credit to me, which was actually more than I was making at the time, which was pretty amazing. And that was the way I funded the company. It was off credit cards and personal debt. It was the only I was able to pay my suppliers and keep things going. It’s extremely high interest rates, so it’s an expensive way of doing it. But it was the only way I could have done it.
Even to this day, I still have to personally guarantee all of the loans that we’re getting in the bank. We really won't get away from that.
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