Hello Everyone,
I posted a thread about my vintage auto restoration business last week and had some really good replies. These made me rethink the direction I need to take this business.
My question is about investors and partners.
I have pretty much reached my limits as far as capital and am pretty much bootstrapping things from here using cash flow.
I have come to the conclusion that to take this business to the level that will truly be life changing I will have to have either an investor or a partner. To make it a 10 million dollar business will require a lot more capital than I currently have available to me now or in the next few years.
The market for our service is massive and horribly underserved so the ability to fill this void is very doable with the right setup. The issue is to get there will require quite a bit of capital, now and also at various benchmarks.
I have always been of the opinion that I started this thing from nothing and I wanted to remain the sole owner. I realize now that this is very short sighted thinking and will seriously limit the growth of the business as well as taking a LOT of time.
I remember reading years ago that said something like: would you rather own 100% of a 500k pie or 50% of a 10million pie?
This make a lot of sense and I guess my ego just has gotten in the way of not wanting a partner in the past businesses I have owned. These businesses did OK but were underfunded as well and this limited their growth severely. When I exited and sold the one business I got “all” the money but it was a fraction of what it would have been had I grown it to its potential with a partner or investor.
Does anyone have any ideas about structuring a partnership or investor as far as percentage of ownership, whether they would be a working or silent partner, what skills would they bring, what amount of money for what percentage of ownership, etc?
Thanks in advance for any advice
I posted a thread about my vintage auto restoration business last week and had some really good replies. These made me rethink the direction I need to take this business.
My question is about investors and partners.
I have pretty much reached my limits as far as capital and am pretty much bootstrapping things from here using cash flow.
I have come to the conclusion that to take this business to the level that will truly be life changing I will have to have either an investor or a partner. To make it a 10 million dollar business will require a lot more capital than I currently have available to me now or in the next few years.
The market for our service is massive and horribly underserved so the ability to fill this void is very doable with the right setup. The issue is to get there will require quite a bit of capital, now and also at various benchmarks.
I have always been of the opinion that I started this thing from nothing and I wanted to remain the sole owner. I realize now that this is very short sighted thinking and will seriously limit the growth of the business as well as taking a LOT of time.
I remember reading years ago that said something like: would you rather own 100% of a 500k pie or 50% of a 10million pie?
This make a lot of sense and I guess my ego just has gotten in the way of not wanting a partner in the past businesses I have owned. These businesses did OK but were underfunded as well and this limited their growth severely. When I exited and sold the one business I got “all” the money but it was a fraction of what it would have been had I grown it to its potential with a partner or investor.
Does anyone have any ideas about structuring a partnership or investor as far as percentage of ownership, whether they would be a working or silent partner, what skills would they bring, what amount of money for what percentage of ownership, etc?
Thanks in advance for any advice
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