Whitebox news: first dealers coming online!
August 14, 2008
Anyone involved in a startup quickly realizes that most everything takes longer and costs more than you originally assumed (well, at least in EVERY startup I have been involved with this has been the rule). Whitebox has taken longer and cost more than we assumed to bring online, but now we are finally seeing the fruits of our effort. Brad Merritt and his team started the process of bringing dealers online this afternoon. There were a few suprises and a few glitches, but in general we are well on our way. One positive surprise was our assumption that the average dealer would write 4 contracts per month. Turns out some dealers will write as many as 50 contracts in a month. While this is great news, it means our debt assumptions/requirements may be much bigger than we had first assumed. According to our 4 contract model, our initial launch of 800 dealers would require approximately $800,000 in debt each month until we reached about $7,000,000 (at about 13% interest) in debt. After 12 months, assuming we didn’t add additional dealers, we would be able to retire the debt in short order. If our average increases to closer to 30 the funding requirements will be daunting - anyone have some money to lend us at 13% or less? Anyway, pictures from our launch meeting:
