Reflections on Four Years in Business
February 23rd, 2007 | 12:56 pm
Recent article from our newsletter by Chris Hurn . . .
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This month we will officially be four (4) years old as a company. With that in mind, I think it"s probably time to share some reflections about our beginning, and more importantly, about our “continuing.” See, from Day One, I wanted to reinvent and revolutionize the business we"re in — it was the reason for our genesis. I had been rethinking the logic of commercial lending from my perch as a management consultant about five years ago. It needed its mold broken, in my opinion. The banking business as usual was/is dead . . . ask Geof sometime — I used to mutter this to myself regularly, and it"s only gotten worse in that most have only fallen farther behind since that time.
Looking back, it may seem a bit lofty to restate it here publicly, but we really didn"t think we were starting a bank back then. We believed we were launching a movement. A movement based on building wealth for small business owners and fulfilling their dreams with our smarter financing. By “smarter,” we meant (and still most certainly do): leading with the Best loan product; requiring less equity to buy commercial real estate; providing the least expensive financing available even if it meant smaller loan amounts for us (part of the genetic make-up of our lead product); offering longer amortizations and fixed interest rate terms; focusing on the highest cash-on-cash return available; creating fewer headaches and hassles; and overall, lowering the risk for our Clients. All of these “smart” things simply weren"t done until we came on the scene and packaged them all together. We were the first and are still the ONLY nationwide lender to always LEAD with the BEST. We"re still the Experts at this loan product, and we"re known as the Specialists, as NO generalists will do. To us, putting our Clients first wasn"t merely a slogan for a television or radio commercial . . . we actually meant it and proved it, time and again. On our website is the proof — plenty of Client and Referral Source testimonials. If your bank doesn"t have any, maybe it"s time to think “why not?” And if your bank doesn"t mention 504 loans or if you can"t find it listed until the tenth click or so on their website, well then . . . I"ve proved my point again.
We have always thought of ourselves as a Marketing and Sales organization with very select financial products to offer the marketplace. We were not a bank first, then the “other stuff.” With us, it was/is the other way around. We were once laughed at and dismissed as an upstart, “too unconventional,” an underdog (but we acted like, and still do, an Insurgent). “How can you form a commercial lending firm around only one product?!? And one with a government guarantee at that!” Because we did our homework first. Because we were determined. Because the government rarely delivers its phenomenal programs in a simplistic fashion. Because we were right and still are. And because we were willing to ignore the criticism and become exceptional instead of listening to the naysayers and settling for mediocrity like crabs in a bucket pulling others back down.
Looking around now, those same people aren"t laughing anymore. It"s gotten harder and harder to ignore us these days. Sure we"re unconventional. Sure we act like mavericks still to this day . . . but we"ve proven that being different makes ALL the difference. We"ve never been merely another ordinary lender. A tee-shirt I saw on the plane a couple days ago captured my thinking on this, “First, we become the BEST, then we Become FIRST.”
To quote the Wall Street Journal Business Bestseller and New York Times Bestseller authors of our next Teleseminar we"ll be sharing with all of our Subscribers soon, “Mavericks do the work that matters most — the work of originality, creativity, and experimentation. They demonstrate that you can build companies around high ideals and fierce competitive ambitions, that the most powerful way to create economic value is to embrace a set of values that go beyond just amassing power, and that business, at its best, is too exciting, too important, and too much fun to be left to the dead hand of business as usual.” It"s the experience that matters most, in other words, and we"ve created a company that forward-thinking business owners and entrepreneurs go out of their way to do business with. We defy many of the familiar, dysfunctional conventions of the banking world and turn many of those on their heads. We think of ourselves as an antidote to the toxic ordinary banking culture. Our insatiable curiosity, desire to learn from all sources and our all-for-one teamwork has allowed us to unleash a disruptive presence in the marketplace, and we"re only accelerating from here.
To quote Sergey and Larry in their Letter from the Founders on the eve of their wildly successful IPO, “Google is not a conventional company . . . and we do not intend to become one.” I couldn"t say it much better myself about us. Stay tuned, it's going to be another exciting year . . .
