#132. Power Your Business through Proper Financing with Eric Youngstrom | Podcast

Vira: 0:40

Hello, hello everyone, and welcome to Email Einstein podcast by Flowium. I’m your host, Vira Sadlak. I’m a marketeer an agency called Flowium. And here at Flowium, we are very, very passionate about email marketing. And because we love what we do, we want to share our insights with you. Delivering the right message to the right person at the right moment— that’s what we are here all about. And today we will be talking about a very interesting topic to many of you. Um, and I know that many of you guys, especially those who have just started your business, or maybe you are growing your business— in fact, like, every company faces some cash flow fluctuations at some point of their um, sort of like development. And cash flow shortfalls, they can be devastating, especially if you are still like a smaller business. And I found this, um, statistic on, um, on the website that we’ll be talking about today that actually 32% of e-commerce businesses fail because of a lack of capital. 32%, that’s like a lot if you ask me. And finding financing, um, options might not always be easy, especially for businesses that have been operating for less than 2 or 3 years. And today we will be talking about all things funding with Eric Youngstrom, founder of and CEO of Onramp Funds. Say hi, Eric.

Eric: 2:03

Hi there.

Vira: 2:04

We are so excited to have you here. And I do have like a gazillion juicy questions about all things finances, basically. But before we go there, Eric, I just wanna play a little Q&A game with you, like this or that kind of game to get to know you better before we go to all of the serious juicy questions. Okay?

Eric: 2:22

Sure. Sounds great.

Vira: 2:22

Let’s do this. Okay, Eric, texting or calling?

Eric: 2:26

Texting.

Vira: 2:26

Shopping online or shopping offline?

Eric: 2:29

Online.

Vira: 2:30

Sorting by price or sorting by rating?

Eric: 2:33

Oof.

Vira: 2:34

That’s a hard one, I know.

Eric: 2:36

Yeah, rating.

Vira: 2:38

Yay. Yeah, well, I’m the price girl myself most of the time, but rating is a good one too. Cake or pie?

Eric: 2:46

Cake.

Vira: 2:47

Okay, good, good. Sandals and socks, yay or nay?

Eric: 2:52

Nay.

Vira: 2:53

Maybe it’s my European heritage, you know, but sandals and socks all the way. It’s like a— it’s probably something, something, something German in me, you know. I don’t know. Might be. Might be my roots. Okay. If there was like one song that played every time you entered the room, what would it be?

Eric: 3:12

Ah, we’ve, we’ve had this conversation in the office. I think it’d be Thunderstruck by AC/DC.

Vira: 3:18

You are not the first person telling me that, having that answer, and I love that. That’s a good one. I mean, it’s a good one. It’s a good one. Cool. Okay, so after such fun little intro, let’s discuss some finance stuff. So first of all, tell us briefly about your company, what you guys do, and why should our listeners care?

Eric: 3:44

Sure, sure. Well, first, thank you for having me on. It’s an honor to be invited and I’m looking forward to the conversation. OnRamp Funds is a provider of working capital financing solutions to the e-commerce SMB market segment. So we work with really kind of brand new businesses up through businesses that are running about $10 million a year in recurring revenue.

Vira: 4:07

Mm-hmm.

Eric: 4:08

And what we’re here to do is really help them solve their cash conversion cycle problem, which is, you know, for merchants less than $2 or $3 million in revenue, almost all of their profit is paper profit. It actually doesn’t translate into cash coming out of the business. And that cash conversion cycle is what captures the profit. And so what we do is, is provide essentially kind of 30-day to 150-day capital lines that allow you to purchase inventory, pay for advertising to drive the sale of your inventory, and then pay for the shipping and fulfillment expenses to make sure that, you know, any order that you capture is actually fulfilled and delivered to the retail buyer so that it’s a great customer experience and it doesn’t turn into a chargeback or a return. And what we’re really trying to help the merchants do is essentially release the profit that’s captured in the business so that they can pay themselves and actually take a longer-term view of their business and really help them get that business to a sustainable point that they can run it forever.

Vira: 5:08

Hmm, that’s interesting. And you guys specifically work with like e-commerce businesses, right?

Eric: 5:14

That’s right.

Vira: 5:14

With e-commerce small to medium-sized businesses.

Eric: 5:17

Yeah, so we work with, you know, Shopify sellers, Amazon sellers, we work with, you know, BigCommerce, uh, we’re turning on Walmart here soon, Squarespace, WooCommerce, and a couple others where, you know, wherever you host your online store, uh, we can help you then, you know, with a working capital financing that just helps you run your turnover, right? Your inventory and sales turnover so that you can continue to run the business, you can invest in growth, um, and that you have really a partner that’s going to help you run more sustainably.

Vira: 5:46

I see. And would you say that raising capital, say, for ecommerce, small to medium-sized businesses is different from, say, brick-and-mortar businesses?

Eric: 5:56

Yeah, I mean, raising capital is a pretty loaded phrase, right? There’s— that can mean a lot of things. Are you trying to go, you know, are you trying to sell a portion of your company to a venture capitalist who wants to take an equity position and help you grow a business? You know, that’s, that’s a real investment versus, you know, I’d like to think of OnRamp as more of a lender, right? We’re not taking an equity position. We’re not trying to be an owner alongside of you or have a board to tell you what to do. We’re simply giving you short-term capital that infuses the business with the capital necessary to really drive this month’s, next month’s, and the months after sales. And then that is perpetually available so you can continually use that capital to power your business and grow your business. The reason we started OnRamp was when we look around at the e-commerce world, e-commerce as a real business has been around, I guess, since the let’s call it mid-’90s when Amazon launched.

Vira: 6:49

Yeah.

Eric: 6:49

But it wasn’t until really kind of the late 2000s when the tools started to exist for SMBs to, to really go to market, right? Before then, there was no Shopify, and so you had to go build your own website, your own shopping cart, your own payment gateway. Everything had to be built from scratch, and that’s not the case anymore. And so the tool sets that are being built for the SMB world are really only a decade old at most. And when we looked at the market, we saw that there was a real gap in financing tools, that the financing tools that are available for brick and mortar have been built over the last 150, 200 years, and they’re very well adopted to a traditional retail ecosystem with the lack of visibility that comes from that world where you don’t know, you can’t see the physical inventory. You don’t know daily sales because you’re a lender. It’s something that only the merchant knows and there’s no way to report it. Whereas in the e-commerce world, those tools aren’t optimized for e-commerce. And so they’re actually too expensive for e-commerce. And what we saw was the opportunity to come build a purpose-built working capital product from the ground up, specifically customized to the e-commerce ecosystem, leveraging all the different data feeds that are available from a merchant that allow us to then, you know, that allows a merchant to connect to Onramp in just a few minutes and allows us to do all of that analysis work around their financials and sales performance and product catalog and seasonal indexing and things like that without the merchant having to do anything other than just sign up and connect a store. So, you know, what we’ve done is taken all that heavy workload that traditional retail requires, but that e-commerce allows us to avoid And then, you know, we take those real-time data feeds so that we can make smarter decisions much, much faster and really take the work off of the small business owners so they can focus on, on running their business, growing their business, making it successful, having, you know, a financial tool to help them that’s fully optimized for their business right out of the gate.

Vira: 8:58

Hmm. I see. I see. And what would you say are like the main reasons the small to medium-sized businesses are coming to Onramp, like to get the money for, like, how can like ecommerce merchants actually use those merchant cash advances?

Eric: 9:13

Yeah, so, you know, the main reason they’re coming to us is there’s just not a lot of capital sources out there for them, right? There are traditional merchant cash advances that are factoring products that are very, very expensive. And, you know, a great— you know, I’d say the vast majority of those are in fact non-digitally enabled, which means they’re asking the merchant to give them tax returns and to give them financial statements and things like that that are just cumbersome. And so we, we take that workload off the merchant. In terms of, you know, what the merchants are using the money for, right, it’s very much the short-term needs of the business. So I need to go purchase inventory, you know, that might be a 120-day cycle. You know, other merchants really need money just for advertising, right? They have inventory in stock, but, you know, if they could juice their advertising spend, right, they could accelerate their sales. And so here’s a capital infusion for that.

Vira: 9:59

Mm-hmm.

Eric: 9:59

You know, also merchants look at it for shipping and fulfillment, right? Those costs are, are you know, very real. They’re a real part of the cost of goods sold of running a business.

Vira: 10:08

Mm-hmm.

Eric: 10:08

And, um, you know, if you don’t have cash available to pay for that next shipment, you know, it’s, it’s worse taking the order than it is, than it is not taking it because now you have to refund it, right? And that causes problems with your payment gateway. It changes reserve balances they might hold. It’s a really bad customer experience. And so what we’re trying to do is make sure that, you know, the capital necessary to keep the order flow going is there for the merchant.

Vira: 10:32

Yeah. And especially with those seasonal businesses, because I know we do have a lot of clients who have seasonal businesses and having that access to additional funds during the high season can actually help you a lot to help you carry through that seasonal fluctuations. Because a lot of people had high season December, but what happens then? How about January and February? And cash advances, they can really help those can help stabilize the cash flow and basically making money available as needed. You know, it’s a big one for seasonal businesses too, for my clients anyways. Yeah.

Eric: 11:11

Yeah. And that’s, you know, the way we work, right, is that we understand the seasonal changes to the sales velocity of a business. And so we know that, you know, for most e-commerce businesses, like Christmas is a big seasonal spike. That’s easy for us to then forecast and then say, hey, look, you’re going to need extra capital during this period of time. Christmas is winding down right now, right? The e-commerce season for Christmas is effectively over yesterday, maybe today for overnight delivery, which now means they’re looking— if you’re looking forward to the next 90 days, like it’s a slower period, which means you don’t need as much money. And in fact, if you take as much money as you took in Q4, you’re probably paying for capital that you’re misallocating or not even really using. And why would you want to pay for something you’re not using? And so what we’re doing is—

Vira: 11:55

Sure.

Eric: 11:55

—is then saying, hey, look, the optimal amount for the next 3 months, it’s lower than the last 3. And here you go. Now, some merchants are going to come through that and say, hold on, but we’ve actually got to, you know, we’re actually hitting above target, right? We’re going to be growing. And the beauty of our model is because we’re looking at that data every day, it’s very, very easy for us then to say, hey, great, your credit availability, right? Your capital availability is growing because of that growth. And there’s more available to you right now to support the right now experience that you’re having so that you’re never short of capital. But what we’re trying to do is just optimize for that so that they’re not taking more than they need, but they’re not constrained from getting as much as they need.

Vira: 12:34

I see, I see. So that’s basically like the main difference, I guess, between the revenue-based financing and debt financing, right? So that’s like a two— almost like two different models, would you say?

Eric: 12:46

Yeah, I mean, they’re, they’re very similar, right? But, you know, I think the bigger differentiation is, can your lender see what’s really happening in real time? If they can’t—

Vira: 12:56

It’s more like dynamic, right?

Eric: 12:58

Yes, right? Because if they can’t see that, they’re making, you know, they’re, they’re making less informed It’s, it’s, I’m not trying to knock them, right? They’re just, they’re, they’re working with the data they have. And the beauty of the OnRamp model is we’re making decisions and we’re looking at your data daily, right? We, we know that sales have changed yesterday versus today, right? And then we’re looking at that trend line, um, and, and we’re using that real-time data to then help make sure that what we’re doing is giving an optimal amount of cash based on what’s really happening today, not what happened last month or a quarter ago or a year ago, but what’s happening today.

Vira: 13:33

Right.

Eric: 13:34

So that we’re aligned with you. And then, you know, the other thing that we’re doing is, is tying that, that, uh, that payment schedule back with that as well. So that if for some reason, right, things were going really, really well, but then you hit a hiccup along the way and sales come down, well, your payment rate comes down because you don’t have the sales to make the same payments anymore.

Vira: 13:53

Interesting.

Eric: 13:53

And so instead of being a, a traditional, you know, hey, here’s your— you have to make this monthly payment, you know, our payment is tied to those sales so that we’re fully aligned with the merchants, you know, as they go through Uptimes, they pay more, but as they go through slow times, they pay less so that we’re not putting them in a pinch that all of a sudden we become the actual pain point for the business.

Vira: 14:13

Right, right. No, I can see how it’s like more dynamic when you sort of like using this model. Revenue-based financing is like almost— it has different payments, right? Like that minimum payment, it reflects based on your most recent level of sales, right? Compared to say traditional debt financing when you pay back the principal and interest monthly until it’s all pretty much paid off. That’s interesting. And what about the risk assessment process? Because I know that in older types of structure, that risk assessment process, it usually takes a long time and lenders, they have to check things like all of your, like, personal credit card scores and, like, maybe business credit score and, like, length of times you’ve been in business, like, different balance sheets and stuff like that. How do you guys do the risk assessment process, and do you do it at all?

Eric: 15:38

Oh, we definitely do it. Yeah, there’s— it’s an unfortunate reality that there are fraudsters out there that you have to be able to, you know, know your customer, you know, make sure that you’re dealing with a legitimate business entity and whatnot. And then, you know, once we’ve cleared those hurdles, right, You know, the rest of the risk assessment is, you know, what’s the right, what’s the appropriate line, what’s the appropriate payback speed, you know, how does that fit in with the rest of your, you know, you might have other debt, right, that, that also has to be paid. So, you know, you don’t want to— we don’t extend capital without understanding the rest of the capital utilization of that business because we’re a part of it, right? We’re not— it’s, it’s, we can’t just look at ours alone. The beauty of our model though is that we’re data-driven, right? So the merchant connects their store and we’re pulling their sales orders in, right? We see each discrete order and we see the price that was charged for each product in that order. And we see how that’s changing over time and how that then generates the revenue that the merchant’s going to, you know, receive from their payment gateway or from the marketplace. Um, and then we, we build our own essential, you know, essentially a P&L for that business based on that order data. And so, and because this is all technology driven, you know, once we have the data, right, which can happen in minutes or hours, the rest of that work’s done in real time, right? So we effectively have, have created that view in, you know, you know, some of our customers sign up and are funded in less than 2 hours. So it’s a very, very fast process because what we’re not doing is asking the merchant to go pull, you know, old financial records and email them to us. We’re just going to go build our own version based on the raw data that we get. And that gives us a great insight into their business and it allows us to be incredibly fast and responsive to their needs.

Vira: 17:19

Right. Right. And how do you, how do you collect the data? Do you get, what kind of access do you get to the store? Is that like view only? Because I know that a lot of our listeners, that’s probably the question they have. They might be concerned about all of the data that they have on their website, some like sensitive data. Pretty much they’re giving you the access to, to their business. Like, how do you guys get that information?

Eric: 17:41

Yeah. So, you know, if they’re selling on Shopify and Amazon, right, they’re gonna connect their stores. We’re gonna then start pulling order data, inventory data, other types of historic data in. We are a read-only interface.

Vira: 17:52

Okay.

Eric: 17:53

So that’s, that’s one really important piece, right? We’re not writing to their store, so we aren’t changing the data. We’re pulling the data and we’re pulling it from a source of truth, right? Because it’s from Shopify, and so, you know, it’s, it’s very trusted data, or it’s from Amazon, same thing. The other thing that we do in terms of just trying to be sensitive to, you know, the data is we actually don’t bring in the PII about the order, right? The personally identifiable information. We actually, you know, we hash each discrete order, you know, the retail buyer, right? Name, email address. Those things are hashed so that we can identify unique and repeat buyer behavior. But we don’t have to know it was Eric Youngstrom, right? We don’t even know it was you. We just know that that same person has come back.

Vira: 18:39

That person, yeah.

Eric: 18:40

But that way, if we ever had a data breach, we actually wouldn’t be exposing PII. Right? We wouldn’t have it. And so we built from the very beginning with that in mind. You know, a long time ago in my career, I actually helped launch an identity protection company and, you know, spent a lot of time on identity fraud and helping stop those types of problems and, you know, responding to data breaches that companies would have. And so we just wanted to start OnRamp from the very beginning to just limit the amount of PII that we would have so that we wouldn’t have a, you know, if we did have a data breach, right? Because it’s You know, security is really, really important to what we do, but you always have to have an eye to the fact that, you know, something bad could happen, that we would just be prepared for that by not having data that, that would expose anybody’s PII.

Vira: 19:27

I see, I see. No, makes, makes total sense. And I do like how you mentioned that, like, the process when you’re doing it automatically, it almost like takes less time. And with like a lot of I think in traditional structures, this process can take like a longer time, but a day within the e-commerce space, it can like delay like a lot of crucial stuff for business for weeks, right? And that’s a huge one. That’s a huge one. How do you guys determine the offer, by the way? Like how do you determine how much money you will give and like what the offer will be?

Eric: 20:02

Yeah, well, actually I’m going to take a step back and talk about our timing and then I’ll get into the offer. So, and I’m going to give a comparison, you know, Takes between 8 and 12 weeks to get approval on. Um, and there’s about 400 pieces of paper that get generated to make that offer. And it touches, I think I want to say like 25 different people to make an offer.

Vira: 20:25

Wow. Insane.

Eric: 20:26

And so if you’re an e-commerce business owner, right, one, do you even have time to walk into a bank and, and go start that conversation? The very first thing they’re going to do is say, prove who you are, right? We want to see your EIN documents, your Secretary of State’s filing, your driver’s license, all this other stuff. Give us your financials, give us your tax returns, right? Like, there’s this huge list of things, and then fill out all these forms, right? And ours is the exact opposite. You connect your store, it takes, you know, look, connecting an Amazon store is an OAuth connection, right? It’s your username and password and your multi-factor authentication. Boom, it’s connected.

Vira: 21:00

Right.

Eric: 21:00

We then do all that work. We’ll come back to you and make you an offer before we actually have validated and verified your identity. Because we haven’t given cash yet. And so what we’re doing then is saying, hey, look, you’re qualified to borrow this much, but we won’t give you the money then until you actually prove your identity. And so you don’t have to give us your EIN document, your Secretary of State’s, you know, business LLC docs, your driver’s license, your other proof of identity until you know that we can actually offer you money. And, and so it’s worth taking the time to take those steps because you know that money’s available. And by the way, once you’ve done that the first time, you don’t have to do it again because we’ve— you’ve cleared that hurdle. But what we try to do, right, is, is put all the friction at that one point where you know that you provide us that documentation and the money’s going to come an hour later when we’ve, when we’ve been able to run through all the systems and just validate the identity. So, you know, what, what, what we’ve really built, right, is this purpose-built engine that leverages all these different data touchpoints that are very easy to connect in a painless way for the merchant. And then, you know, it’s unfortunate, but you always have to verify and validate business identity and owner identity. But let’s just wait to do that until we know that we can actually offer value to the merchant. And if we can’t, then let’s not make them jump through those hoops.

Vira: 22:20

True, true. And I know, I know that some MCA lenders, they actually include some sort of like restrictions and merchant agreements, stuff like that. Do you guys have anything like that? For example, like some may require like use specific processor or like having certain like operating hours or stuff like that.

Eric: 22:39

I mean, look, we require you to adhere to the terms of services of all of the marketplaces and shopping cart environments you use, right? Because if you’re not, they can turn you off and that would mean you wouldn’t be able to generate revenue. You know, we expect that you’re going to follow the laws of the United States of America. You know, we’re asking you to validate for us that, you know, if you don’t have any other lenders to validate that, if you do, that you’re forthright with us so that we’re making informed decisions. We don’t require a lockbox. Um, you know, we’ve explored that, and that may be a product we offer in the future, but today, you know, that’s just not how we operate. Um, you know, I think we’re, we’re pretty flexible in working with the merchants and, and, and the small business owners and doing so in a way that reflects the nature of the business they’ve already established. And that is designed to minimize the, the kind of level of effort to work with us. And so, um, Yeah, like, I think we’re, you know, we have reasonable restrictions in place, but we really operate on a model that says we, we want to be a good partner to the merchant and we want to be easy to work with. And, and, you know, while protecting ourselves, also doing so in a way that just, that, that really is aligned with the e-commerce ecosystem, right? Like this e-commerce moves fast. We need to move fast with it.

Vira: 23:55

I see. I see. Well, Eric, let’s go back to that offer questions. How do you guys determine the offer?

Eric: 24:02

Sure. Yeah. So that’s, you know, hypothetical example. You’ve been selling for 2 years, right? So we can see 2 years of sales history. We can see 2 years of seasonal patterns. We can see what your growth, um, you know, your, your kind of monthly growth rate is even mapped through the seasonal patterns. Um, and so what we’re going to really do is, is, you know, our, our kind of opening offer is a 90-day term.

Vira: 24:28

Okay.

Eric: 24:28

We’re kind of working on an assumption you have a 90-day cash conversion cycle, and we’re going to go ahead and make you an offer that says, hey, look, over the next 90 days, we think you’re going to have this much revenue, and so we’ll offer you a certain percentage of that revenue. And then we talk to the merchant. We’ve found, and prior to Onramp, I helped launch a company called ShippingEasy that was later acquired by Stamps and the Octane family of companies, and we found that we could build a white glove concierge type service around these products that really, you know, respects the fact that these SMB business owners are CEOs, right? And they’re running real businesses. They may not be $100 million businesses, but they still get that level of treatment from us as if they were. And so we’ll talk to them, you know, talk to the business owner and really understand what their needs are. And it may be that in fact they need a shorter term, they need 30 days or 60 days and a little less capital or more.

Vira: 25:20

Right.

Eric: 25:21

But really more aligned. And then what we do is customize that offer for the merchant so it really reflects what their specific capital needs are right now. A lot of first-time borrowers like to take less than the offer because they want to test us as well, right? They really want to make sure that they’ve borrowed money from us, they’ve gone through that full payment cycle, really understand how it works and the impact on their business, and then they grow that line with us over time. because they’ve really dialed it in. Now, you know, the other thing could be that we look at it and say, look, you actually, you know, in working with that merchant, need 120, 150 days of repayment time. And so we optimize for that. And then we spend a lot of time with the merchants, too, helping them understand that, you know, traditional lending and the way that Americans are taught from birth to think about this is a mortgage, right?

Vira: 26:13

Yeah.

Eric: 26:13

You take a 30-year term, the lowest rate you can get. You might even pay points on that rate because if you’re going to own the home for more than you know, 4 or 5 years, it saves you money.

Vira: 26:22

Mm-hmm.

Eric: 26:23

The challenge with, with that, though, is if you take a 1-year term loan for 1 quarter’s worth of inventory, what happens at the end of that quarter when you need more money but you’re still paying back? Right. It’s not there for you. And so when it comes to working capital, it’s almost the inverse is true, right? The shorter the timeline, the faster you pay it back, the faster you get access to more. And so when it comes to working capital, it’s incredibly important to align the, the, the amount of the draw and the payback period with your cash conversion cycle time, right? And again, in e-commerce, that’s typically, you know, on average it’s 90 days. But we also know that, you know, different, different businesses have different supply chain timelines, might be dealing with Chinese delays, things like that.

Vira: 27:09

Right.

Eric: 27:09

And so you may need extra time, right? And so what we’re doing is, is working to align to that so that you have What you need today, but that means, you know, you could be halfway paid back and have an opportunity to grow your business faster. Well, you can come get more from us then, um, and so that we can align with that and expand that line with you as those opportunities arise, um, and so that we’re not overstretching you and putting you in a situation where your debt payments are too high.

Vira: 27:35

Mm-hmm.

Eric: 27:35

And that’s because of that rapid turnover. And so when it comes to working capital, right, you know, faster is better. And by the way, Faster allows us to reduce your fee. Um, and so we can actually reduce the price of that capital because, you know, the, the time value of money and the fact that if you’re paying it back faster, there’s less, there’s less risk exposure on it. Um, and so when they were aligned with the, with the business owners as well and helping them reduce their cost of capital when they, when they work with us.

Vira: 28:02

I see, I see. And you briefly mentioned that you guys have like a super quick, um, that pre-qualification process, but like how long does it take to get pre-qualified? Like, what do you need to get pre-qualified? And like, how long does it take to actually get the cash for the business? Because in e-commerce, the days, they can sometimes mean a lot, you know?

Eric: 28:23

Yes, no, that they can. So look, it takes 2 minutes to sign up and we start, we start getting data, you know, depending how big your business is, you know, take us 30 minutes, could take us a couple hours to get all the historic data in so that we can do our analysis. At that point, then And you’re pretty much prequalified, right? So once we have 90 days worth of data, we’ll give you the, you know, the most recent 90 days, we’ll give you a quick prequalification number on that. And then as we’re getting, you know, kind of the last 2 years worth of data, that prequal number gets further refined.

Vira: 28:53

Mm-hmm.

Eric: 28:54

And then, you know, we’ll come back and say, hey, look, you know, kind of here’s where we think the offer should land. We’re already talking to the business owner through this. And so if we know ahead of time that they really just need 30 days of capital, we’re going to start with that offer out of the gate. And then, you know, once we have all that data in, then our pre-qualification number gets really refined to really what you’re qualified to borrow. We’ll then make the, the final offer, and if the, if the business owner wants to take the offer, then, you know, that first time they borrow, then they go through our KYC process, right? Our know your customer process, where we’re going to validate their business, validate the business owners, the controllers, the beneficial owners.

Vira: 29:31

Mm-hmm.

Eric: 29:31

It’s not a difficult process, but, you know, it does mean you have to to, you know, you’re going to have to scan some business documents, scan some personal identification documents, go through these steps, um, so that we know that, you know, we’re giving, you know, money to the legitimate business owner. Now, the nice thing is you, you’ve also connected an Amazon store, right?

Vira: 29:50

Mm-hmm.

Eric: 29:50

Or Shopify store, and there’s real order data in there. So, you know, that, that, that’s a huge part of our KYC process is, is the connections and, and, and the KYC data we can gather. You know, from Amazon, from Shopify and whatnot, that really helps speed the process along. Um, once that’s done, then you accept the terms of the offer. It’s, you know, it’s, you do it all in the app. Um, and then we move the money. Um, we use, um, uh, same-day ACH. So depending on the time of the day, that money may get to you today. Otherwise it’s going to get to you tomorrow. Um, or, you know, next business banking day.

Vira: 30:27

I see. Wow, that’s quick.

Eric: 30:29

Yeah, it’s real fast.

Vira: 30:30

That’s awesome. That’s awesome. Well, I found this phrase on your website and I think it makes total sense. We don’t succeed unless you succeed. And I think it’s a very fair statement and I really like the whole business model that you guys are using. And if our listeners want to learn more about you or what you guys do, where should they go?

Eric: 30:55

Sure. You can learn about us at https//www.onrampfunds.com. We’re also on Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter. So OnRamp Funds is the name and we’re here to answer your questions. And then if you come to our homepage, our phone number is also there. So if you’d like to talk to one of our associates here, we’d be happy to answer any questions and make sure you really understand what we’re doing. and see if we can be of use and helpful to you.

Vira: 31:23

Thank you so much, Eric. It was really nice having you on the podcast. Thank you for answering all of the questions, and I’m sure our listeners will have even more questions and they will reach out to you guys. So, thank you so much for coming. It was fun having you here.

Eric: 31:36

Yeah, thank you for having me. It’s been a great conversation. I really enjoyed it, and it’s an honor to be here.

Vira: 31:40

Awesome. Guys, if you like what we do, as always, please leave us a review. It helps a lot. And if you are interested in getting some more advice on how to establish a solid email marketing strategy for your ecommerce store, please visit flowium.com/contact and sign up for a free consultation. Thank you so much for listening, and we hope to have you guys back here next Tuesday. Take care. Bye.