Hi Brooke, this is my first month in Scholars and am super excited to have joined. I don’t think I could have picked a better time to join this program.
This year has been our first year in our wholesale business. We purchased an existing business last year and we were and still are excited about the opportunity that we pursued. However, we did take out two business loans in order to buy it and get started. The bank that loaned us the money set the payments up as one large annual payment on each loan. The due date on both loans is September 5th of each year. Well, September 5th rolled around and we only had enough money to pay one of the loans. So I talked to our loan officer and he was incredible in wanting to work with us and was willing to change our due date to October 5th on both loans for the life of the loan. We did pay one of the loans last month, and are going to pay the other loan this month.
We had a huge lull in sales in August, which was to be expected according to the previous owner of this business. In our industry it is normal for sales to go down in August but to pick back up in the fall. And it has! We currently have lots of orders to fill and that’s great. But the August lull left us with little money coming in (our payment terms with our customers is 30 days). So what little money we did have coming in has been going to payroll and COGS. Long story short, we only have half the money that’s due this Friday, and we don’t have enough money coming in from our customers in time to cover our loan payment. In hindsight, we should have prepared for this early on in the season, but I guess we just threw ourselves right in early on and tried to make sure we were making payroll and covering all our COGS. It seemed hard to predict, this being our first year, how this all would play out.
What should I do? Should I call our loan officer again and tell him our situation? We will definitely have enough money to pay the whole payment by the end of this month with all the sales that are coming in now. It is definitely embarrassing to call him again and ask for another extension.
I do believe our second year will go much smoother (our season is April through October) because we will have tons of inventory available for early sales in the season next year, whereas our first year we had no inventory to start out. So that meant we didn’t get our product out until 3 weeks out from the date of the order because we had to wait for the winter and early spring weather (we get snow into May on and off usually) to subside before we could have our employees package our products for shipment (our product is rocks, lots of rocks!) Next year we will be able to ship our product within the first week, so our sales will turn over quicker.
Thank you for reading my long story, I appreciate all the advice you will offer on this. I’m excited to go through your money and entrepreneurship programs!