A Word About ITEC

For those of you who don't know, and I'm sure many of you don't because it's entirely unimportant: ITEC (The Institute of Technology Entrepreneurship and Commercialization) is a program in conjunction with my and Chin's alma mater, Boston University, that helps budding entrepreneurs start up their businesses. Every year ITEC hosts a business plan competition, whereby three teams are chosen to present to a panel of venture capitalists their start-up proposals. The grand prize is $50,000. I have entered this competition twice now -- once last year for a web-venture and this year, for saus. We submitted our business plan and hoped for (and expected) the best.

Here is the email I received today from ITEC:

Thank you for participating in the ITEC $50K Business Plan Competition. This year we received many very impressive business plans. Picking the top finalists was more challenging than ever before. While the judges were impressed with your plan, they did not feel confident that it is ready yet to go to the next round in the Competition.

We thank you for sharing your plan with us and wish you the best of luck with your business. You will be receiving specific feedback from the judges next week. In the meantime, we encourage you to continue participating in ITEC events and look forward to seeing you at the Business Plan Competition on Wednesday, April 8 at the School of Management.

Of course, we continue to be available to help you with growing your business. Please do not hesitate to contact us for support.

No, ITEC, no you will not see me, nor any of my teammates, at the competition on April 8th. I will be too busy watching Lost after a long hard day of renovating our space and smoking tobacco with our investor dollars (oh calm down, just Washington). Am I bitter? Heck yes. We didn't make it because we are not the right kind of company. It's time we dispel the negative stigma surrounding restaurants. There are outrageous statistics out there that claim something like 90% of restaurants fail in their first year - this is completely untrue. I bet I can take a handful of quick-serve restaurant concepts and a handful of software concepts and find that the two are equally profitable, if not one more successful than the other (restaurants).

SBA Bashing

So here is the deal with the SBA (Small Business Administration): a little over a year ago, this was the government source for start-up and small business funding. A year ago, Saus probably could have swindled the SBA for a loan. It's not that there is something particularly special about the agency -- it's basically a glorified bank -- in fact, it teams with banks to provide loans to entrepreneurs at a Federal interest rate....a little over a year ago, that is.

If you are an entrepreneur trying to obtain seed money at this time, your efforts to do so through the SBA might be futile. Recently, I met with the resident food service expert at the SBA and dragged our adviser along in case there was a glimmer of hope for a financing option. We soon discovered there was not. The banks have more financial jurisdiction than even our own government in that due to their loan terms for small businesses (that is, in order to secure a loan, must have been in business 2+ years), the SBA consequently was disabled from its lending. Simply, the banks control everything. The 7(a), which is the SBA's general business loan, was down 40% from last year. The good news, however, is that in 2008 the SBA was able to lend to some of the largest companies in the United States (Lockheed Martin, Dell, etc.) -- do these sound like small businesses to you? In fact, 1/6 of the money doled out by SBA went to the top 10 largest firms in the US.

Let's just hope for all the job creators of the future that the banks, followed by the SBA, begin lending to small businesses again.

So to add humor to this dark and dismal landscape, I have included an online conversation I had with our adviser about the SBA:

Adviser: We should rename the SBA from Small Business Administration to something more appropriate
Like No Start-Up Loans (NSL) or No Jobs Here (NJH)...
Sent at 8:34 PM on Tuesday
Me: Shouldn't Be Agency
Adviser: Ha Ha, yes I could not think of anything good for SBA
You are a quick wit you.
Me: not really, my quick wit would originally have said, Shit Bagger Association
Adviser: Har Har.
Small Business Anti-Christ
Another pot of gold for the shameful business advocates (aka lobbyists)
Sent at 8:38 PM on Tuesday
Me: haha
Small Business Annihilator
Adviser: ha ha okay you win
Me: i think ill cut and copy this conversation onto the blog