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An SBA loan must be personally guaranteed by the borrower, so I don't really see a difference between an SBA loan and running up credit cards, except for the in
by BobbyH 17y ago
An SBA loan must be personally guaranteed by the borrower, so I don't really see a difference between an SBA loan and running up credit cards, except for the interest rate.
Personally, I would try to suffer through the Valley of Death. Here are some ideas I would try:
* Can lloydarmbrust sell for an extra hour by taking a two hour lunch and spending an extra hour at work?
* Can lloydarmbrust sell via email during the workday (assuming he can stay on top of his regular job)?
* Can jnovek can do some of lloydarmbrust's work so that lloyd can get more time to sell and/or survive at his current job?
* Can jnovek learn to sell, at least to the point of identifying prospects? For instance, a lot of lloyd's time may be spent trying to find out the decision maker at, say, the NYTimes. jnovek might be able to offload some of that "find the client" work, even if he weren't comfortable enough to "sell" the prospect he finds.
Finally, $2.5k in monthly recurring sales sounds extremely low for a b2b sale that can add 5-8% to the bottom line. Have you considered raising prices by 10x? If your customer has $1 MM in revs, saving them 8% is $80k a year! You should be capturing a big chunk of that.
Forgive my forwardness, but it's my sense that you don't have a financing problem, but rather, a pricing problem.
- jnovek 17y ago"Can jnovek can do some of lloydarmbrust's work so that lloyd can get more time to sell and/or survive at his current job?" This is a discussion that we haven't had and should. There may be things that I can do to optimize Lloyd's lunch-hour selling. As far as me doing sales, I am an awful salesman and Lloyd is a very skilled and accomplished salesman. The difference between us is like night and day. "Forgive my forwardness, but it's my sense that you don't have a financing problem, but rather, a pricing problem." Keep in mind that we haven't yet developed a novel product -- we are still entering spaces that are occupied by other providers. We have big plans for some novel stuff, but right now we need to cover a few salaries. While we ARE competing on product quality, most of what makes us competitive is price. Low-price alternatives are very attractive to newspapers right now as their ad revenue continues to decrease steadily. We try to negotiate the maximum price that we think a publication will bear.