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Registered
Join Date: Jan 2002
Location: Long Beach CA, the sewer by the sea.
Posts: 38,252
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Quote:
SBA looks highly upon SCORE. Forget about your assets. Have a pro do it for you. Your business already has good will; it's salable. The vehicles are just the sales fleet. Better than leased. The product has position and momentum. Loans can be made on orders taken, you prove you delivered last year. Get all of this in a financial report. Take that and your new orders to every bank you can find. You can tell them your almost hooked up with SBA, but you thought they might like a first glimpse. All anyone needs to be shown is how you plan on using the money in order to pay it back. Think about that, that's big effort. The best plan wins; whether the best plan works is another matter.  Let them decide on that. 
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06-03-2008, 08:04 PM
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Registered
Join Date: Dec 2004
Location: Irvine, CA
Posts: 1,167
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Shaun our company is Bonne Vie Fitness. It's a personal training and fitness center offering multiple types of training (yoga, pilates, kickboxing, Gravity Training, private, and we offer a Crossfit program). People have said that we are crazy to be a non-membership facility. The general idea in the fitness industry is to open up and sell a lot of auto-pay memberships. Calculate that most of the people won't come in yet they will forget about the extra $50 coming out of their checking account each month. Our business is based on people actually getting fit. We were originally market focused as a high end studio but have adjusted to take advantage of the flexibility of our programs. If an individual wants to take 2 classes a week and spend $80 they can do that. If they find the next month that $40 fits their budget the client can ask their instructor for a program to do at home on the off days with no obligation to a membership. We prefer to retain our clients with quality rather than contracts.
I am going to ask some seemingly dumb questions but they might help when it comes to approaching the banks. As Milt pointed out you have a good product that is attracting sales. Are your sales strictly to stores or are you also doing sales online? If you aren't online have you thought about something like Threadless? What is your market share for children's clothing? Have you figured out your five year goals for LT? Will your current market support the five year goals of LT? Say you were selling parts. Your business goal is to sell H4 Headlights for 911s and you wanted to have $20,000 a year in sales. If the market is only $30,000 a year for the United States it's not realistic to expect you'll have 66% of the market share. Now if you expand into other parts or do something to increase your market exposure you can certainly meet the goal of $20,000 a year in sales for your company. So using this example is there any way to expand your market share or your market exposure? With some web presence I think you could do really well. Every one I have shown your Fall '08 catalog liked the designs a lot. I'm not sure how it works if you have contracts set up with stores, can you sell your clothing on your own through the web? The bank people are going to want to see essentially a presentation on your business and it's future. As milt pointed out your goal is to "sell" your business to the SBA and your local banks. There is a ton of potential in your market, check out the latest issue of Inc magazine for an article on Threadless.. If you'd rather discuss over PM I'm glad to do that, sometimes people prefer to be more private about their businesses. PS That's not my wife and I on the website. I don't have any idea who those people are, I think they're stock photos.
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-Jess Last edited by BlueSideUp; 06-03-2008 at 10:11 PM.. |
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06-03-2008, 08:28 PM
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