[Sean Cash]

Good question. When you blanket the masses, sometimes people hear what they want to hear and that can cause you to get all kinds of weird inquiries. I actually just talked to jason at total merchant resources this morning about his appearance on shark tank and he said their phones are blowing up, but that a ton of it is people who don't have a business yet.

You can advertise business loans and you will get calls for personal loans and startup loans.

You can specifically state you don't do startup loans, but in my experience, that's never a sufficient deterrent. Some people think that by forming an LLC, they are no longer a startup even if they have no business plan, no customers, no sales, and no money.

I have had "merchants" call me that literally had nothing more than an idea they thought up 5 minutes ago ask for a business loan. There was one guy driving down the highway and he got a great idea for a restaurant name that he knew could not fail. He didn't have a location picked out, a business plan, money, any experience in running a restaurant or working in one, but he had a name. Before he could even pull over to the side of the road, he was calling and asking for 250k in startup capital.

me: sir, we don't do startups unfortunately.
merchant: well i'm not a startup, I already got a name picked out.
me: what's the name?
merchant: Restaurants in New York
me: the name of your business will be 'Restaurants In New York'????
merchant: yup. imagine how often i'll pop up on google.

The man was on to something. We wired the 250k the very next day...