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I currently own a cell phone refurbishing company I established in the spring of 2005. My company buys broken phones, refurbishes them and sells them only on Ebay. I have established many contacts over the years and I use my entrepreneurial skills to make large quantity purchases of salvage condition cell phones. There are over 4.6 billion cell phone users worldwide. An investment from an angel investor is exactly what my company needs to expand to a building, expand to more models, and hire more employees; this would increases our sales and profit exponentially.
I started from scratch when I was 20 years old in my parent’s basement. I am a self taught entrepreneur. I did not receive any formal training. I gained all my knowledge and refurbishing skills from hands on study and investigation of the inner workings of a cell phone. I realized the potential of this business from the start. Now, 4 years later I am in my own house running my business out of a small 600 sq foot workshop behind my house and have annual sales of over $700,000 in each of the past 3 years without even leaving my house and with only refurbishing 10 models.
My business has had many devastating setbacks, which would explain why I even need angel investors’ help at this point and time. In Oct 2006 my workshop that I run my business out of was broken into and $50,000 worth of cell phones were stolen before I could find a reliable insurance company that would cover me. This was devastating to my business and the capital I needed to run it, but I looked at it in my own entrepreneurial way “at least I had the money to lose than not having the money at all”. I made a simple security and insurance mistake early in life at 23 years old, and it cost me $50,000 instead of $500,000 later in life. I have worked even harder after being robbed and did not let that stop me in my goal to be successful; even though people told me I should give up and look for a real job. It was close to starting all over since it was basically all the money I had made that year, but I had learned a lot about refurbishing. I had the entire business rebuilt to that stage in less than 6 months.
Now I have a much bigger issue. Six months ago when my business was growing even larger in the economies downfall, one of the cities codes advisors came to my house while I was in Las Vegas at the CTIA trade show. I had to fire all 8 employees due to the city codes law that no home based business in the city limits can have employees that do not live at the household. Eight good employees that I spent months to find are now unemployed in a terrible economy and there is nothing I can do about it without the help of an angel investor.
This is one of the main reasons I desperately need funding to expand my business. I cannot afford the overhead of a building, payroll, and the purchase of inventory. Right now I am currently running my entire company with only $30,000 of revolving credit card debt. I have spent 3 years looking for funding. I spent a year writing a very strong business plan and meeting with bank after bank. It is impossible, in this economy, to receive funding from a bank to buy broken cell phones at the age of 25; most of the time I am laughed at. An angel investor is my last hope as an investment option for my company. My company needs this investment not to survive, but to be fast forwarded 5 years. If I received an investment from the sharks I could expand my business into a commercial building with hundreds of models of cell phones, and even negotiate refurbishing contracts with other companies which would create 100’s of jobs in the Nashville area over the next 3 years.