The financing fact was listed in Part 10a: Getting financing from a bank involves lots of paperwork, so be prepared.
I provided some history about going to a bank when I had another company back in the late 1980s and having to deal with mixed expectations between myself and the banks. This time I explain "pink poodle parlors".
NextStage's problem was that what we do isn't intuitively obvious to the casual observer (Evolution Technology is a paradigm shift for most people. As one of my professors said to me when I showed him my thesis, "This is so obvious only you could have figured it out.").
It turns out that it's relatively easy to get bank and government funding for what's obvious. "Pink poodle parlors" was the term some folks at SBDC and PTAC offices used to designate beauty salons, dog groomers, stitcheries, manufacturing, ... anything which could be explained by saying "We do what those folks in that building do, we just do it in pink." These are obvious things to get funded because everybody knows what they are and what to expect from them. I still remember several members of these offices telling me that they were really excited about working with NextStage precisely because we weren't a pink poodle parlor. "Do you know how many pink poodle parlors we have to go through in a month? And you bring us something like this and wonder why we all want to help you?"
(more to follow...)
Previous postings in this thread have covered
- Financing Questions
- Personal and Psychological costs
- Education and Training
- Product or Service business basis
- Employees, Contractors and Consultants
- Intuition as a business management tool
- Responses to WorthABillion's comments
- Success being internal
- Pausing to catch our breath over the holidays
- Separating Fact from Impressions in the continuing thread
- Getting Financing from Banks, part 1
- Getting Financing from Banks, part 2
- Creating Reasonable Expectations between Loaner and Loanee
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