To Doug O and Ray Alcorn - Posted by Walt Carey

Posted by Walt Carey on April 04, 2000 at 10:28:14:

Hey Doug & Ray,

Just wanted to publicly say thanks for helping me out with that foolish biz plan I had to do for the banks on the MHP we’re looking at doing. I FINALLY got some demographics on the area where we’re building and from the areas we’re going to target our marketing. I gotta be honest with you guys: I ended using a realtor firm to do the demographics! They want the marketing contract for the park when we start building and I asked them if they did demo studies. They said they did and I said “Well, we’d be alot more convinced of your ability to market the area if you could do a demo study for us and show us conclusively this deal will work.”
They said sure thing and did it as a freebie! Ah, just wonderful…

Anyway, after I got all the data I had to sift thru it and put in what I thought was going to help us in the bank presentations. As Ray said, “it will take some time, Walt!” Well, after like a gazillion hours on the thing ,it all came together…and I even had a CREATIVE (thats unusual for a lawyer, huh?) last second idea to put in the plan a panoramic view of the land as it currently looks. But under time constraints of our meeting with the bank, I couldn’t hire a photographer…so I went out to the parcel with my wide angle lens and took pictures of it starting from left to right and after getting them developed and copied, SCOTCH-TAPED them together and stuck them in the biz plan notebook! The first bank we gave it to chuckled at my little “creation” but liked the idea as they hadn’t seen a panoramic photo done before of a site to be built on, even if was kinda “homemade”! Hey, it lightened up the meeting if nothing else! Haha! Things you do in desperation, huh? :wink:

Anyway, that first bank we did our dog & pony show in front of gave us an LOC just last week. And we got another bank we’re waiting on a decision any day now. It helped alot having that other LOC and this other bank knowing it. Ah, you gotta love competition!

If it wasn’t for you both giving me your .02 on here as well as on the phone, I think I’d still be floundering around trying to get that darn plan done.

Geez, now that we’re done with getting the financing, all we gotta do now is just build the darn thing! Easy! (yeah, right!)

Anyway, thanks again guys, I really appreciated the help!

Walt