writing a business plan

[Sailor_Jerry]

Turns out you were right Brastic. We did put the time in and carefully planned and detailed what we were looking for. We were convincing enough that a local credit union gave us a loan and 1 year later here we are, struggling and still working our day jobs on top of a new business but we are loving it and are so glad we went ahead with it.

If you are thinking about doing a business and have come across this post, my advice is take the time and commit to paper your ideas and plans. It will help you think through the steps better and if you have to go to a bank they will want to see it.

[dmpyron]

If you live in the States (sorry von Poppel) you can try using SCORE (Service Corps Of Retired Executives). These folks really, really want you to succeed and I had a lot of help with mine. You can get a lot of help from volunteers, but I paid the guy that helped me build mine. I bought some software that turned out to be worthless.

I used it to get a small loan. I'm also using a small plan, for an individual project (a group cruise) to get another loan to cover immediate expenses. 4% from them is better than 19% from the credit card.