
Ep. #1061 - Building Business Credit
In this episode of Startup Hustle, Matt DeCoursey and Jack McColl, Founder of Credit Stacking, discuss building business credit. Hear how you can leverage business credit to help scale your business and hopefully reap the benefits that could come with it.
Covered In This Episode
Building business credit is a crucial aspect of running a successful business. A good business credit score can provide access to funding and lower interest rates, which can help scale up a business. However, only a few entrepreneurs know that business credit can be a massive tool for them.
This is why Matt DeCoursey and Jack McColl are here to discuss building business credit. They share how leveraging business credit helped keep their ventures afloat and scale up. In addition, they also talk about other forms of credit stacking.
Tune in to this Startup Hustle episode to learn more about building business credit.

Highlights
- Founder’s backstory (01:18)
- How to use credit cards to fund your business (02:52)
- Perks of having good credit (04:18)
- Using credit as a tool that acts as leverage (07:17)
- Getting to 100 grand of credit on your business card (08:59)
- The importance of having a thick credit profile (09:47)
- Paying off your debt before the next statement date (11:59)
- How to use business credit cards to build comparable credit (13:33)
- What are charge cards and how to use them (17:06)
- How to determine what banks to build a relationship with (21:21)
- Other forms of credit stacking (22:05)
- The most common type of business owner who uses credit stacking (24:07)
- How the program works (25:43)
- How to get funding from banks (27:55)
- Raising money from 0% interest business cards (30:09)
- On writing a book (31:40)
- Founder’s freestyle (34:08)
Key Quotes
When we look at credit, it’s a massive tool as an entrepreneur or just an individual, but it’s a tool and like, you know, a lot of tools, you can use it for bad purposes and for good purposes. First of all, I want to clarify, when I talked about leveraging credit with what we’re talking about, Matt is leveraging it as good debt into things that appreciate or to cash flow for your business, not out there buying crap that doesn’t make you money or put money back in your pocket.
Jack McColl
I think a lot of people wait till they get there. They wait till they get their statement. And then they pay the bill, pay it off the day before you get it, pay it off, like the day before the statement closes, and have the statement close at $0, which is the same result, you’re gonna pay it off anyway. And that’s that utilization, meaning you don’t look maxed out.
Matt DeCoursey
A major advantage of these 0% cards is basically net nine months, net 18 months because it’s 0% for that introductory period, which is massive. If you’re in real estate fix and flipping or even buying and holding, you can use that capital to finance those deals. If you’re running a marketing agency, you can use that money to scale if you run an E-commerce business, you can buy a product and use that money to scale, which is incredibly important for business owners to have access to capital.
Jack McColl
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Rough Transcript
Following is an auto-generated text transcript of this episode. Apologies for any errors!
Matt DeCoursey 0:01
And we’re back. Back for another episode of Startup Hustle, Matt DeCoursey here, to have another conversation that I’m hoping helps your business grow. So you have a credit report does your business because you kind of do, and you can build and stack business credit. That’s what we’re going to talk about during today’s episode of Startup Hustle, which is powered by FullScale.io. Hiring software developers is difficult and Full Scale can help you build a software team quickly and affordably. And as a platform to help you manage that team. Visit FullScale.io to learn more. That’s my business if you didn’t know and we love talking to Startup Hustle listeners. So head on over to FullScale.io so we can help you find some solutions. With me today. I’ve got Jack McColl. And Jack is the founder of credit stacking, you can go to credit stacking.com. It’s really easy to go there. Just scroll down and click the link in the show notes. You can learn all about what they do over there. I guess without further ado, it’s probably a good time. So Jack, welcome to Startup Hustle.
Jack McColl 1:01
What’s up, Matt, it’s so great to be here. Thanks, everyone, for listening in. I’m super, super excited to be here. I’m going to be dropped in tons tons of free value. So I’m really happy you guys are here.
Matt DeCoursey 1:10
Looking forward to that man. Well, let’s start with drop a little value about your backstory, man. Let’s hear what that’s all about.
Jack McColl 1:17
Yeah, so my name is Jack McCall. I am the founder of credit stacking. And really I teach over 1500 entrepreneurs on how to get access to over $100,000 of 0% interest through business credit cards. When I started in business over eight years ago, I didn’t understand that you could leverage your personal credit to get access to such capital, I was strapped for cash. And really, each business venture taught me a different way to fund a business. The first business I had I just self funded, which for me was very hard because I maybe had 510 $1,000 to my name. So I was extremely limited. And it really made the growth much harder. The second business I learned how to bring on an equity partner. And they brought the money I did the work. And so that was how I financed that business. Fast forward to the third business was which was a travel company, it was called to send it Cabo, which when you said full Full Scale, full send it reminds me of of our company name send it Cabo. But through that business, I took on a high interest business loan, or I call it high interest because I’m used to now 0% interest. So we took on a business loan, it helped us scale, but we were paying interest so much it made the growth much more difficult. Or I should say the profitability much more difficult. But then I learned about business credit cards and the fact that the business credit accounts, don’t report to your personal credit profile. So you can actually get approved for 100 $200,000 when leaving your personal credit score unaffected. So once I learned about that I just went deep deep down the rabbit hole and become a fanatic over the last few years. And that’s exactly what I teach people.
Matt DeCoursey 2:52
Well, I’ve been down that rabbit hole myself Jack and my second book million dollar bedroom, I talk all about how I funded that business with a stack of my poker buddies credit cards, I have my own, and some others now there was a little a little bit of strategy there because I actually owned a ticket business at the time. So you know, having their cards and their mailing addresses and all that. And you know, that’s how that that that got going. But I did a lot of credit stacking myself, including use of business credit cards and stuff like that, in fact, I actually have an upside and a downside with that because on one of those, I had a weird limit. And then they hard kept me and I went from having a bunch of available credit to like needing to come up with about 50 grand to get back to being maxed. So there’s there is there are there are other sides to that, that we can talk about. But yeah, if it wasn’t for, I mean, I did that for years. You know, and you look at like a business like that when it’s been a long time since I’ve been a ticket broker. But, I mean, we really got clever over the years at how to leverage credit. And then also for us, because we did such a high volume of purchasing it was the rewards game. Like I Yeah, yeah, I got like $1,000 worth of points one year. And you know, that’s it’s interesting too, because that’s that’s those that goes under rebates, or something like that. It’s not a taxable thing. So, yeah,
Jack McColl 4:18
yeah, so an amazing byproduct of having good credit is you can get the high you can get the hike that the best cards that give you the most points and rewards which you can use for statement credits, or you can use for free travel, which is incredible. And really, there’s there’s a couple of ways to leverage your credit for business, you can either max out your personal cards, which is much, much more risky and that will affect your personal score. Or if you do it on the business side. Since those accounts don’t report you can max those cards out utilize the cards and it doesn’t affect your credit whatsoever.
Matt DeCoursey 4:48
Yes, Citi card was doing three three times rewards on entertainment stuff for like two years and obviously as a ticket company, those all came up as that so I mean It was three cents on the dollar back and rather we didn’t cash it in for travel and other stuff. We you could get gift cards. So we kind of funded our lives I had like bricks of of get like Target Lowe’s like I mean, they were literally bricks because we had, you know, rubber bands around them and almost like making it hail or rain or whatever. However that would work. You know, we have a money gun at the at the Startup Hustle studio, I doubt it would shoot cards out. But yeah, so I joke it was when we shut down the ticket business. I myself and many of my friends and family were really disappointed about the lack of free points I didn’t buy I had kids during that time, I didn’t buy a diaper for four years. So when people complain about diapers and accosted shoulder, and I was like, let it’s free, right from free, gift cards, but okay, so guys
Jack McColl 5:53
jump in real quick, a lot of people don’t understand all these points and benefits that come with good credit and having the top cards not only having good credit is gonna save you on auto loans on mortgages on any type of credit products, you’re gonna get a much, much better rate and easier approvals into nice apartments. So that’s, that’s the basic level of having good credit. And then you can get these top cards like we’re talking about, and you’re getting these two to four points per dollar spent, which you can use for cashback, if you compare that to a debit card, you know, you’re missing out on that two to 4% margin that you could just get for free by having these cards.
Matt DeCoursey 6:27
Yeah, and then a lot of it’s the leveraging factor, that was the thing that really helped us because there aren’t really a lot of people out there writing investment checks to online ticket brokers, especially ones that had just started their business. So it was, you know, the access to funding wasn’t wasn’t really there. But one thing most people don’t know is most ticket brokers are buying stuff and trying to sell it for the most part as quickly as possible. So it creates that created, you know, just this this cash flow cycle, that, you know, we should probably talk a little bit about the risks to that too, because you can get on the wrong side of these levers. And if you do it can be it can be kind of a pain in the butt. What do you advise people that go to credit sacking.com to do to try to avoid being on the wrong side of the lever?
Jack McColl 7:17
Yeah, so really, when we look at credit, it’s a massive tool as an entrepreneur or just an individual, but it’s a tool and like, you know, a lot of tools, you can use it for bad purposes and for good purposes. First of all, I want to clarify, when I talked about leveraging credit with what we’re talking about, Matt is leveraging it as good debt into things that appreciate or to cash flow for your business, not out there buying crap that doesn’t make you money or put money back in your pocket. But a good thing with the 0% interest business cards, it’s 0% for the introductory period, so this could be as little as only six months, and as high as 18 months. And if you ever need more 0% periods, you can always get more business credit cards and balance transfer the debt from the first card over to the second card. So during that period, it’s 0%, you just have to pay 1% of the balance each month. And then after the introductory period, the interest does go a bit high, you know credit card interest, which is around that 20% Currently, so it does create some risk if you’re not able to pay it back. But a lot of investors people in their business, they need quick money to start a business or to scale their business. And generally, most businesses fail due to a lack of working capital. So businesses, business owners who have additional working capital have a higher chance of succeeding in that business.
Matt DeCoursey 8:34
So what’s what Jack’s talking about? Should I really want to bring the set this is a lot different than like the typical Amex business card which requires a 30 day repayment and fall and they’re gonna hold your feet over the fire. If you don’t pay that back quickly. That’s a lot different than than some of the things I believe you’re talking about. So So you think it’s a pretty easy path to 100 grand Is that Is that about the norm there?
Jack McColl 8:59
Yeah, it is a very easy path if you know exactly what to do. And I’ve created a very unique framework over the last few years where it’s a blueprint of what works very well every single time and the first thing you want to do is optimize your personal credit profile, which we can go into then you want to look at your entity, entity setup, what kind of entity do you have in terms of business category type, and then some banks will require you to open business checking accounts that will help you get these high limits on these high on these business cards. And then you need to understand what cards to apply for when to apply for them. And then how exactly to apply for them. So that’s the high level framework if you want we can start with optimizing your personal credit we can chunk that down and and teach people on how to optimize and how to start.
Matt DeCoursey 9:47
Yeah, I did you know I learned a lot about that myself over the years too because trying to flex this stuff up. I can Yeah, but lead the way my friend lead the way.
Jack McColl 9:56
Okay, awesome. So when we’re looking at personal credit optimization It’s much more than a score. So someone can have a 750 credit score, but their profile can be extremely thin, thin, in terms of the account limits, how many accounts, they have the payment history in terms of age of that history. So you want much more than just a good score, you need to create a thick profile. And so we’re talking about having at least $15,000 of collective primary credit limits. So if you added up all your personal credit cards, what does that collective limit look like? Is it 10 grand? Is it 1000? Or is it 40,000. So the higher limits you have on personal cards, the higher limits you’re going to have on the business cards. And when it comes to payment history, that is something if you have late payments, if you have any derogatory marks, that’s actually the very first thing to take care of, to go hire a credit repair company, they’ll dispute those, get that cleaned up first, then you can continue the optimization. So we talked about payment history, we talked about some of the accounts. Another thing you want to look at is the average age of your profile. So if you’re over two, if you’re between two and five years of average age, that’s a decent range to be in five plus years of average age is superior, and anything under two years is very young. And so a very easy trick for you to increase the average age on your credit profile is to actually get listed as an authorized user of someone else’s old credit card. So maybe your mom, brother sister has a credit card that they opened 10 years ago, if they add you as an authorized user, that account is going to report your personal credit profile as an authorized user, and it’s going to increase the average age. So the average age is very important. And you can easily easily increase that. And then you want to look at your utilization on your revolving personal credit accounts, the best utilization is going to be under 10%. But really under 30% on each revolving account is going to be best. So once you got a trick with
Matt DeCoursey 11:59
that, to that I think a lot of people wait till they get there, they wait till they get their statement. And then they pay the bill, pay it off the day before you get it pay it off, like the day before the statement closes and have the statement close at $0, which is the same result, you’re gonna pay it off anyway. And that’s that utilization, meaning you don’t look maxed out
Jack McColl 12:21
exactly on the personal cards, you can max the personal cart out, but you ideally want to pay it off at least four days prior to the statement closing date. Even on Chase, for example, the payment due date is three days before the statement closing date. Even if you pay on the due date, it will still report that amount to the credit bureaus for the next month. So I like to pay before the payment due date. And that’s how you bring your utilization low. So basically, once you’ve kind of fit all those all those boxes, then you’re probably in a good position to think about the next steps. However, if you don’t have that, for at least 15k of collective personal credit limits, you’ll want to apply for one to two, not too many too fast, but one to two is reasonable. And I like to recommend specific high limit personal credit cards, these are personal credit cards that I’ve seen give very high limits relative to all other options. And I’ll list them the apple card is a high limit personal credit card, the Chase Freedom Unlimited, the chase, Sapphire reserve is a really good card, you need a little higher score for the Chase Sapphire reserve. And the fourth card I would recommend is the American Express Delta gold, those cards I’ve seen to give the highest limits. And it’s very helpful because that builds your comparable credit, which makes you more attractive to the lenders when you apply for business credit cards.
Matt DeCoursey 13:41
And by the time we were done with the ticket business, it was stupid, our credit because the you know, we’d started they give you the they’d be like, Hey, here’s 10 grand, you know, and then they see your spending, they see you paying it off. And then it’s 20 3040 and like we looked at one point, my wife and I were like, we have fucking like $600,000 of credit card limits if we want it, you know, I mean, I was like what that was got to is, I mean it was it was whatever algorithm determines that loved what we were doing and that and it was that same formula and there really was like, you know, there was a bit of a science to managing especially when it came to cash flow because there was one point when I can’t remember what happened it it shit was just a little slow for us. And you know that what what they give us they can take away and I think it’s important when you do some of this stuff that Alright, so the when the pandemic hit I remember talking to our CFO and we we actually asked and this was just from experience I was like should we just Max our credit lines? Cuz I felt that they were probably going to take them away. And they did for a lot of people. There was you know, cabbage at the time was a pretty well known you know, cash Low lender and they literally took everyone from wherever they’re at to zero. They like basically shut everyone off and sold their business to Amex. But, but some of that is a you know, it’s important and that’s why I say like, I want to get into an episode like this and, and paint both sides of the, you know, sunny day and rainy day because remember that, that you don’t have a right to that credit limit for these revolving accounts, they can take them away, and that algorithm that looks at you. So I’ve learned this as a business owner, because you know, I’ve self funded everything I’ve done, basically, I mean, I’ve got 10s of millions of dollars in revenue, now at my business, but with that, you know, I mean, you sign on stuff and you do things. And if you’re, if that’s where you’re at as a business like that can be a little tipsy at some point. And you know, when you go some of these things, and yes, there can be a separation between the two. But, you know, if you’re super maxed out on one side of your life, I find that lenders kind of figure that out anyway, so I’ve actually seen, like the business flex things up and like, yes, there is an EIN and employee identification number that separates me from the business, but there’s still a connective tissue there. On some level, when we were going through the pandemic, there was a couple of times when we kind of leveraged the business cards up a little bit. And I noticed that my, my limits went down. I got some notifications about that. I think some of that depends on the way the economic winds are blowing, because there’s going to be, you know, I saw that happen as well, during the financial crisis in 2007, through nine like, there’s Yeah, so will these companies have X amount of available credit that they can dish out, and if you’re not using it as well, that’s almost the same as having it, Max. So I kind of run into that now, because I don’t have any balances on any cards. And I’ve gotten a couple letters over the last several months that are like, we’re not going to give you a $50,000 limit, we’re going to, you know, so whatever. But
Jack McColl 17:04
okay, so I have a couple follow ups there. You mentioned about 600, grand and limits. And I think you’re using the AMEX charge cards, which you mentioned before, which those are, they’re called charge cards with technically, there’s no spending, there’s no limit on this.
Matt DeCoursey 17:20
Revolving those were revolving accounts that just built up over the years. Yeah.
Jack McColl 17:25
So the cool thing with the charge card is they have the the the spending power. So based on your your spending history and payment history with American Express, they can scale your limit up higher and higher. It’s basically like a muscle, the more you work it out, the bigger it gets. So the more you spend on these charge cards, the higher the limit gets, but if you stop spending, they’re gonna start reducing those limits. One thing I will say on your second point there is by banks reducing limits. The reason or the reason they can do that, or they for sure can do that. But the reason they do that is because they’ll run soft credit checks on your credit report. And they’ll look at the spending history of your credit cards you have with that bank. So as long as your personal credit is still optimized, great score, and you’re using the cards, they’re probably not going to reduce your limits. However, if you’re maxed out your personal cards and AmEx runs a soft credit check on your credit, they’re going to see your credit is is wrecked. And so they are going to think about reducing the limits they gave you on the business credit cards. So it helps to not only get good personal credit, but maintain good personal credit. And that’s how you keep the high limits. And then of course, you want to be using the cards if you can.
Matt DeCoursey 18:32
I’ve been real sensitive that as a business owner over the last 10 years, you know, just meaning like, you know, it’s you can it’s some people don’t don’t feel like they care. They’re like, I don’t need credit, I’ve got cash or whatever. But I mean, that’s a good thing to maintain. Because eventually if and when you do need money, it’s just always cheaper when you have a you when you have a better credit score, and that’s speaking to cheap, and not necessarily cheap. But we’ll say more so affordable. That’s what Full Scale can help you into when it comes to building a software development team. You go to full scale.io And you can answer about two minutes where the questions and our platform is gonna match you up with available developers, testers, and leaders that are ready to join your team go to full scale.io to learn more. So I you mentioned the AMEX card and I actually in million dollar bedroom. I quit using Amex about halfway through that story, mainly because I got tested AmEx, and that was an interesting story. So the AMEX gold card basically, which is where a lot of people start. I mean, they’ll let you flex that thing hard, hard, and we hit some threshold and they called our office and someone answered that wasn’t me and answered a couple questions and next thing you know, I got an email that was saying that they had put a hard cap on on the card itself. So I that’s I mean, that’s why I got mad I was pissed about that. For years, dude, cuz like I said it put me in a we weren’t in a poor cash flow or anything situation. It was just something weird about where that was set up and who, you know, whoever answered the phone answered the wrong question I call them back I tried to talk to him about it, they didn’t give a shit. So I went from, you know, that probably had like, and we paid that paid that card off diligently for like two straight years. And you know, went from you know, like I said, Being operating well to all of a sudden, we had to, you know, come up with a whole lot, a whole lot of dough just to get back to be maxed. That’s, that’s when I went more towards the like bank owned, you talked about like Citi card and stuff like that, which were a little more revolving in their credit. So there’s a difference, like the AMEX business card is a charge card. Now it’s evolved a little because now they have some more options that are more like, Hey, pay a lower amount, they have some different products like that. But at the time, and this is, you know, 10 or 12 years ago, or 10 years ago, actually. And you know, at the time that you would charge that card, and you had to pay that balance off, you had a 30 day from that when that statement came out. So you needed to really be careful if you didn’t pay that it was it was expensive. expense. And
Jack McColl 21:21
one thing I will say on on city that reminds me of something very important is determining what banks you want to build a relationship that I only advocate building relationships at banks who have business card products, specifically 0% City, for example, does not have 0% interest business cards. So I personally don’t advise to build a relationship ship there. Because instead, you can build a relationship with a bank like Chase, or Bank of America, or American Express or US Bank and that relationship you build with those banks is going to give you a lot more value because you can get their 0% cards, Chase, everyone, I recommend having a business checking account to every single entrepreneur, listen to this call on everyone in general, a relationship with Chase will go a long way. And same with Bank of America.
Matt DeCoursey 22:05
Yeah, let’s shift a little bit because there are some other forms of of credit stacking. Alright, so before I was an entrepreneur, I used to work for the world’s largest maker of electronic musical instruments. And with that, we had all kinds of accounts all kinds of places, if you if your business happens to be in the business of selling a product that someone else makes, this is another form of credit stacking that I think it’s overlooked, it’s not just a it’s just a credit relationship with the vendors for which you sell products. And if you have a favorable payment history of favorite remember the people that if you own a store, let’s just stores easiest way to look at and you sell products from Company A, you can continue to build that relationship and negotiate terms and a lot of people don’t think about this. So you, you hear net 30, net 60. Net 90. And then a lot of times they also have relationships with companies that will basically floorplan your merchandise, which means you may get that same kind of 0% interest feel out of it, you’ll have to have a couple extra accounts or something there. But that helps that helps manufacturers sell stuff faster. Because you’re not like ah, I don’t know if I can sell it that faster. Well, what if whatever we gave you net 180. So that I mean, that’s for a lot of places that sell product that can actually be a bigger amount than the credit card itself. So like that’s, that’s a popular form for a lot of businesses. And I think that you’ll never, and by the way, if you’re just paying for your product from any manufacturer, and you’re just paying for it right away, you should probably ask for a discount, or payment terms. Yeah,
Jack McColl 23:54
for sure. And one thing you mentioned about that, Matt, which reminded me, you know, you’re talking about net 30, or net 60. A major advantage of these 0% cards is basically net nine months, net 18 months, because it’s 0% for that introductory period, which is massive. If you’re in real estate fix and flipping or even buying and holding, you can use that capital to finance those deals, if you’re running a marketing agency, you can use that money to scale if you’re if you run an E commerce business, you can buy product and use that money to scale, which is incredibly important for business owners to have access to capital. And even if you don’t need the capital now, optimizing your personal credit and getting into a position where you may be able to apply for the credit it takes time to get to that point. So it makes a lot of sense for all entrepreneurs to build your credit and to put yourself in that position just in case you need to get access to capital and the people who are not building strong credit right now. They’re going to be massively left behind.
Matt DeCoursey 24:49
So for the people that go to your site once again, credit sacking.com I mean what what is your most common type of business owner
Jack McColl 25:00
Real Estate Investor ecommerce consulting coaching offers any type of business This strategy can benefit. But I’ve a lot of real estate investors, essentially what they’ll do kind of what I just referred to real estate investors will use a business of business to get access to 50 to 200 grand of 0% interest up to 18 months, they’ll be able to liquidate that credit into cash and then use that cash as a downpayment on a real estate property, do some renovations, and then either rent it out or sell it, and then they get the cash back and pay off the card. Literally any type of business venture this really works for if you need to scale.
Matt DeCoursey 25:40
So how does your program work?
Jack McColl 25:43
So first of all, it’s all there’s 20 hours of coaching content, we have weekly coaching calls, and we help people optimize credit and get access to the to the business credit. But yeah, I mean, we’re, we’re helping over 1500 people do exactly this. But you know, before we wrap up this podcast, I want to make sure I can give as much free value as possible. But if anyone is interested in joining the mentorship credit stacking.com, to learn more. But thank you guys, for being here, I’ll definitely you know, make sure it’s more worth it for you to keep listening. But back to what I said about building those relationships with banks, one thing you got to understand is your business type, there’s a certain category of risk on that business. And the lower risk, you can classify it with on with an NAICS code, the more funding you’ll be eligible to borrow from that bank. So when you go into the bank, they’re going to ask you what type of business you have the lower risk, you can tailor that answer to the better code, you’re going to get on that bank account. And that’s going to make you more eligible for funding. So for example, if you had a brick and mortar gym, but part of the business was online fitness coaching, that’s classified as consulting. So in that scenario, I would list your business as a consulting business, because that is much, much less risk to the lenders. So try to ask yourself, you know, what is your business do? Is it a marketing business? Can it be spun as a marketing business like real estate wholesalers, that’s marketing, you’re finding leads, you’re finding buyers, that’s marketing. So try to think how you can low tailor your business. And then make sure you use that specific NAICS code, which will help you get more funding. And then when you open the bank account, if you can put some liquidity in that bank account, let it sit for a few weeks, that’s going to even help you get more capital.
Matt DeCoursey 27:29
I recently recorded an episode that had a guy leave the business was Excel a fund. And it was the topic was you know, a lot of people have accumulated 401k Over time, and there are ways that you can invest that into your own business and not get browbeaten by the penalty that goes with it. I think the bottom line is there’s a lot of really clever ways like I mentioned funding, you know, the million dollar bedroom business with a stack, those were my friends credit cards, you know, at the time, and we obviously kind of expanded on that. I mean, there’s a ton of different things. Now the space that I’m typically in, in talking about and working around is technology and software companies have frickin miserable time at the bank. And this has been a really hot topic, I’ve actually gone far enough to piss off quite a few banks for talking shit, because they come to the startup events and solicit all of us for business and they don’t want to give anyone a loan. And we want to credit and the reason for that is what so Jack was talking about businesses that oftentimes have tangible things. And there’s different codes, if you have a if you have something that a bank can like look at as collateral or anything. So the laughable thing was there was a company here in Kansas City that got acquired for $450 million dollars that wasn’t even profitable at the time. And they wouldn’t have been able to get a loan bank, because they don’t have but somewhere there’s some specialty manufacturer that makes bolts or something weird, that only serve one purpose, then they have a truckload of them somewhere and the bank looks at that as an asset and they’re like, Sure, we’ll give you wouldn’t give you a $250,000 loan and I’ve got like bank CEOs telling me they’re like, Yeah, I’d rather invest in the other company. But I can’t. So yeah, I think the bottom line is, is understand what the rules on the playing field are and how they work for or against you and figure it out. Man. There’s a lot of clever ways I think that I’ve seen I’ve seen this whole ecosystem of funding, an early stage business and cashflow cycling, like really evolve over the years when I first really started my first one I’d say this my real business. You know, it was hard to get investors hard to get funding we’ve seen changes and laws and rules involving you can crowd fund buy in buy equity in a company now you couldn’t Do that years ago, there’s a lot of different stuff out there, I mean, Kickstarter, and some of those settings kind of got people popping on a lot of two.
Jack McColl 30:09
Couple things I’ll say there one, raising money through 0% interest business cards is far easier than any other option. All you need is good credit and understanding how to make a bank account, build that relationship, which does not take much effort, and then understanding what to apply for and how to apply for it. The hardest thing is optimizing your personal credit. And it’s specifically hard, because it’s not taught anywhere, you can go to an awesome four year university study business, and you won’t learn how to optimize your credit. That’s why someone like myself, I’m here to teach people on how exactly to do that. But for people with brand new businesses, with brand new businesses, 23 years old, we’re able to get people approved between 50 and 150, grand of 0%, interest capital, no income verification, no tax returns, all you need is good credit. So you mentioned the business where you need collateral, etc. That’s referring to business loans, which you have to show financials for, you have to show collateral for in that example. But in terms of everything, I’m talking about, no income verification, no tax returns, they’re only looking at your personal credit, the age of the business, the type of the business, and the relationship you would you have with that bank. And that’s why it’s the easiest way to raise money.
Matt DeCoursey 31:16
I mean, I think I’ve leveraged it all at some point. I’m coming up on 50 years old man, I’ve tried it all. It’s it’s changed over time. Now, for those of you interested, Jack does have a book. It’s called credit stacking. It’s on Amazon. Pretty easy to find Jack McCall. So how was how was writing a book? How did that go? I’ve done three of them. And I think I’m done writing books.
Jack McColl 31:40
It was it was a fun process. I first started with a ghostwriter. And once I got it from the ghost, right, I realized this is nowhere near where I want it to be. It did help to create a template. So I started with that template that was provided to me. And then I worked on it for three to four months, an hour or so a day kind of here and there. But it took a lot of effort. I basically I tried to add as as much value to the book as possible. It’s I think, $18 on Amazon. It’s epic, epic value. So definitely check it out credit stacking on Amazon. And yeah, if you guys want to find me on Instagram, it’s king of debt, like credit card debt, king of debt.
Matt DeCoursey 32:17
Yeah, I went through, you know, the book writing process, I think the most common question I’ve received as well. The first one is, is it available on Audible? That is easily been the most popular question I’ve had as an author Come on people. And the second one is people like what did you really write the books? Yeah, I’ve read the fucking books. Man. I did have the same editor on three, I co wrote the third one, which I highly recommend, by the way, it’s kind of nice to I think a lot of people think they have a lot of stuff to say until they try to write a book. And then they run out about 30 pages. And you’re like, Oh, cool. You have an ebook. Now. But yeah, there’s it’s amazing the interesting things that are out there. The third question I get because among all my books have been number one on Amazon at some point. Oh, you must have made a lot of money, right? And I’m but writing books. Now. I’ll never breakeven, right for book sales. I’ve given a ton of them away, man. I’m going to I’m a speaker at an event. And I had a business and innovation district downtown tonight. And I’ll give away a bunch of books. I don’t want your money. So it’s a terrible business model Jack, but it seems to be working out for me because everything else is going pretty well. All right. So you got credit stacking got.com You got Jack’s book. I see her on your website. You’ve been on a couple other podcasts and have a lot of interesting stuff to say. As we kind of round out this episode, I like to talk to other founders and do what I call as the founders freestyle. Before we get into that a quick reminder, it says episode Startup Hustle is brought to you by full scale.io Hey, come by we build that we build development teams. It’s about 300,000 Open tech jobs in the US. But what about all the tech layoffs? Yeah, didn’t put it down in it. Those aren’t developers. So that’s what we do full scale.io Jack with the founders freestyle. What would you like to say to everyone on the way out before I take a turn as well?
Jack McColl 34:08
Awesome. Well, first of all, thank you so much, Matt, for hosting me and thank you everyone for listening. If you guys want to go to my Instagrams king of debt, I have a link in my bio that has links to other podcasts as a link to book a call with my team to learn about credit stacking to see if it’s going to be an epic fit for you and your business. And the book link is there as well. In terms of credit stacking my mentorship program, there’s not a more effective mentorship program to help entrepreneurs get access to over $100,000 of 0% interest business credit. We have an incredible amount of resources not only in the course content, we host or I host weekly coaching calls to help people get their business to the next level, making sure they can get the funds to scale that business. I have relationship managers at all of the top banks that I share with my group. We have a Facebook group. It’s an amazing community. A lot of people are winning absolutely massively. If you guys want to check out the results, it’s credit stacking.com/success I also have a results Instagram highlights on my Instagram page, but we’d love to have you we’re doing super super well and producing amazing results for our clients or for our members to help them get access to capital so they can start a business or scale a business. But yeah, thank you again, Matt. It’s been a great time being here.
Matt DeCoursey 35:12
Yeah, I’m on your Instagram got a lot of people following you, man. Good job. Thank you 100 440,000 people, those that’s a lot. You know, I mean, overall, I think that what I want to say on the way out is, you know, there’s, as I mentioned, there’s a lot of interesting ways to fund fund a business, pick the one that works the best for you. Remember, if you do borrow money, gotta pay it back. Well, most of the time, the only time you’re not going to pay it back is if you’re going to bring in investor funds and sell part of your business and you end up paying down the debt, which is just another farmer paying it back. There’s something out there that works for everyone. You know, there really is, and I’ve been, I’ve tried so many different things, I do want to say that I’ve been on the good side of the lever and the bad side of the lever. And I’ve managed to live through both of those. But you know, when you when that when you’re on the wrong side of the lever, man up, you can really you hear that thing, snap, and you’re like, oh, so just be careful, folks. That’s all I you know, I like to tell the real story, entrepreneurship, just work within your means. And don’t get too crazy. This is a form of business acceleration that we’ve been talking about. It’s not if you’re if you’re just losing money, hand over fist, borrowing more money to just continue losing, you might have the point as you might have other things that you need to address and fix in the business as well. But yeah, man, lots a lot of creative options and a lot of creative things. You had something else.
Jack McColl 36:41
I was gonna say one thing I would add there, Matt is if you’re ever doing something new, you want to be making sure you’re surrounded by the right mentors and the right community of support. So you’re not making mistakes that will cost you could be 1000s of dollars. So whatever you’re doing that’s brand new, you want to surround yourself with the right support network, so you don’t make those mistakes. And so you can get support every step of the way. And that’s one of the big things we do in credit stacking is making sure people have the support and they can do it correctly.
Matt DeCoursey 37:04
Yeah, knowing how to have knowing where to hit it with the hammer is a lot more important than just having a hammer. Alright, Jack, I’m following you on Instagram now, so I’m definitely going to see you down the road man.
Jack McColl 37:18
Awesome. Well, thank you, man. It’s been a pleasure.