Excerpt from the Merchant Maverick article What’s the Best Way To Get a Loan For My New Business? featuring quotes from The Golding Group CEO Kyle Golding among others….
Perhaps it’s an understatement to say that starting a business is hard work. With countless judgment calls, details to attend to, plans to make, and business-related things to learn, quite frankly, it’s a wonder that anybody starts a successful business.
One of the biggest decisions an entrepreneur with a fledgling business has to make is how to fund their business. Funding is notoriously difficult for business startups to attain; but on the other hand, additional funding could really jump-start your business.
Should you seek outside funding? If so, when? Making those judgment calls can be hard. We’ve asked some successful entrepreneurs how they’ve funded their business, and here’s what we learned…
Most Start with Bootstrapping
Most entrepreneurs started with bootstrapping. In fact, according to a survey performed by The Alternative Board (TAB), two-thirds of small business owners surveyed self-funded their business.
The co-founder of VORTTX Training and Testing, Kyle Golding, has a similar story. Golding and his partner wanted to make sure they had a feasible idea before investing money in their business:
Our approach was putting some personal money (neither of us mortgaged a house or anything with risk) into the basics like website, trade show display and digital marketing (less than $5,000 total) to very strategically approach the most likely audience only. This laser focus might seem too risky to some but we knew each limited dollar spent was going directly at a very likely target.
Golding advises that,
The most important thing to do is determine if you have a profitable business concept, not how fast can [you] get funding for the first version of a product or next great idea. . . . If you play the long game with hustle and patience, you can build something not only profitable but sustainable.
