Courtney McCain, 25, is at once an unlikely and highly likely
entrepreneur. She's got half a college degree. She married an
Air Force man and moved to a remote base in the Midwest. After
being re-stationed on the East Coast, she separated from her
husband and moved nearer to family and friends, where she went
through a string of administrative assistant jobs. She excelled at
each job but was ultimately bored and burned out. Now an assistant
account executive with a public relations firm, McCain is on a
decidedly professional track.
Public relations might be her calling...but, then again, it
might not be. "I know that I've got the brains and the
talent to be a success," she says, "but it has to be on
my terms. My big challenge is to find out what it is that I'm
good at doing. Successful people aren't successful just because
they're smart. I think they're successful because
they've pursued things in which they have natural
talent."
For McCain, what seems to come naturally is consumer sales. And
to test the waters, she's taken on a distributorship for Mary
Kay Cosmetics in addition to her 9-to-5 routine. There are few
downsides. Besides, if this is her true calling, or at least
a calling, there's a lot of upside potential.
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But when opportunity comes knocking, it usually has a price. As
a distributor, McCain buys her makeup products directly from the
company and marks them up, generally 100 percent. To make, say,
$2,000 in sales, she must fork over $1,000 upfront. To make
$10,000, it costs $5,000 upfront. In short, during her nascent
career as an entrepreneur, McCain has come up against one of the
fundamental challenges of business: It takes money to make money.
Unfortunately for McCain, due largely to her age and a near-Bedouin
existence over the past three years, she doesn't have
any money.
The issue cuts deeper than simply not having risk capital on
hand for a new venture. For hundreds of thousands of would-be
entrepreneurs like McCain, there's no access to funds, either.
There's nary a bank in the country that would lend her a dime.
She can get a debit card, but not a credit card. And in
McCain's case, a fierce streak of independence keeps her from
asking friends and family for a loan.
David R. Evanson's newest book about raising capital is
called Where to Go When the Bank Says No: Alternatives for
Financing Your Business (Bloomberg Press). Call (800) 233-4830
for ordering information. Art Beroff, a principal of Beroff
Associates in Howard Beach, New York, helps companies raise capital
and go public and is a member of the National Advisory Committee
for the SBA.
Originally published in the June 2000 issue of Entrepreneur Magazine
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