Next Generation Auto Body

Jennifer and Chris Wiser started the business in 2013 with two other partners and continued to build it over the following five years. Then the other partners decided they wanted to sell their portion of the business and pursue other interests. “We needed to get a loan to buy them out,” Jennifer relates.

Jennifer and Chris went to their bank to see how to proceed. Their commercial loan officer referred them to David Reardon, Business Counselor at the Lord Fairfax SBDC in Culpeper. “In order to get the loan, we had to present a three-year projection for our business,” Jennifer continues.

At that point David guided Jennifer and Chris through the loan process. David entered three years of company balance sheet and income statement records into ProfitCents, a financial software tool, to develop financial projections.

“After we applied for the loan, the Small Business Administration underwriter came back with a request for additional information that included a complete income statement for 2018,” Jennifer says. To meet this requirement David used ProfitCents again to enter six months of real data and six months of extrapolated data that tied into the 2018 projections. With the SBDC’s help, the applications were completed, and the SBA loan was approved, allowing Next Generation to continue to serve the Culpeper community. “It’s our busy season now,” Jennifer explains. “Cold weather and deer!”

Jennifer and Chris are grateful to the SBDC for smoothing out this hurdle in their business plan. “The SBDC did help us tremendously with the loan process,” Jennifer says. “We had to have these reports to get the loan we needed. I would not have been able to do it by myself.”

This is the first time Jennifer and Chris have used the SBDC. But it won’t be their last. The SBDCs have the tools and the talent to help solve problems that small businesses encounter. “We definitely will consider working with the SBDC in the future,” Jennifer concludes. “I would recommend the SBDC to other businesses.”