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Hi, my name is Heidi Gibson. I'm the Commander in Cheese of the American Grilled Cheese Kitchen.
name is Bill Lasher, I am the Managing Partner of Lasher Sport LLC. We make wheelchairs and
hand
cycles. Hi My name is Marty Metro, I'm the Founder and CEO of Used Cardboard Boxes, Inc.
My name is
Elizabeth Scarbrough and I'm a co-owner of Ellessco LLC and we make American Made travel
accessories. In today's hangout we will be discussing how these four small businesses
used a grant from
Chase to support their business growth. I was inspired by the chopper shows and the
hot rod shows and
the bicycle industry and was wanting that to happen in the wheelchair industry. People
kept saying
grilled cheese, grilled cheese, it's what you do, grilled cheese. So I finally caved
and opened a grilled
cheese sandwich restaurant. It's really grown from moving boxes to shipping and industrial
boxes all
across the country. But it turned out to be a lot harder than we thought and about seventeen
prototypes later, we just wouldn't quit. Let's go around and talk a bit about some of the
things you've
been able to accomplish with the help of the two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand dollar grant
and what it
has meant for your business. This grant has enabled us two things. One, to have some cash
flow to be
able to continue our growth and two to have the confidence to be able to go out to a fortune
five
hundred company and say yes we will be there. With the grant we were able to invest in some
new
equipment that both reduced our costs and increased capacity and that's really really
huge for us to be
able to stay in the US. It allowed us to hire an additional employee to help out with the
fabrication of
the bicycles. It's allowed us to build, strengthen and even create some new relationships with
people in
our local community. It really saved us a lot of headache and a lot of risk around opening
a new location.
We'll be signing our lease on our new spot down in Las Vegas. Our goal really is to have
five or six
locations in the Bay Area within ten years of our first opening so you really got us
back on track with
that. Receiving that grant said to everybody in my company "yes we are doing the right
thing", it's not
easy. I get choked up just talking about this.