Let's Talk About It

Yesterday I posted on social media that we opened PJP without an exterior sign in 2014 because we couldn’t afford one. Our bank required our husbands to sign along with us on a business loan, even though they weren’t legal owners of PJP. While this is a common practice (at least in our experience), our social media accounts blew up as the post was liked over 1,000 times and shared over 20 times. So we should probably talk about it here, right?

Jeanne and I own PJP as 50/50 partners in a limited liability company. It was important to us way back in the fall of 2013 to start our business together. Jeanne raised me as a single mom and we are accustomed to all sorts of crazy adventures for the two of us. Also, there are all sorts of pros and cons to the members included in an LLC filing and given that, it was the best fit for our company. (Don’t take this as legal advice - be sure to consult your attorney and your accountant before filing with the state if you are starting a new business.)

At any rate, we started PJP with $10,000 we raised on Kickstarter and a generous offer from my in-laws to buy our equipment and we repay them over 60 months. But for the rest…the signage, the displays, the cash register, the whisks, the spatulas, the initial food orders…WOOF. It adds up quickly.

To loan money, banks require a business plan. We didn’t have one. (Or I guess we did, it just lived in my head.) They also require collateral. And really, you can’t blame them. 50% of small businesses will fail in the first five years, so it isn’t any wonder that our bank wasn’t willing to throw a fistful of dollars at two people looking for world pie domination. Two people without a written plan, at that.

But all of our collateral - our houses, our cars, our retirement accounts - were held jointly with our spouses. And that is where you arrive at the convention that our spouses sign their interest in their collateral away to the bank for a business that they don’t legally own. It still leaves me unsettled. I recall at one conversation, a banker said to me “[w]e would just feel better if your husband’s name was on this.” Gah. If Behind-The-Scenes Jason and his dad owned PJP, would the bank feel better if I signed too as his wife? Somehow, I doubt it.

So we opened without a sign…and without a lot of things that probably would have made those earliest years much easier. Eventually we saved up enough cash to buy a very artistic - and expensive - sign that was hard to read and didn’t light up, which just goes to show you that entrepreneurship is nothing but a series of lessons. It hangs in our store now as an homage to where we’ve been and what’s important to us as we continue forth.

When it was time to move to PJP Nifong, we had a solid five years of sales data to back up that we are serious about what we do. And we also owned a store full of equipment after making those 60 payments, both of which made us candidates for a conversation with a new bank that looked at our entire story and not just co-owned collateral. They jumped into this story with us (and never once asked us what our husbands do or if they might be available to sign on the dotted line).