crowd funding with a difference

[casey1]

I am curious to know if anybody may be interested.

I have a business importing supermarket products; mid to upper end products

It has been a lifestyle business whilst not making me rich, I have enjoyed simple things.

It has been a small family business (4 employees)., which has undertaken everything in house, sourcing, importing, clearing, licensing with FDA, and distribution to clients

These include; TOPS, Gourmet Market, Villa Market, Rimping, Foodlands and now Lotus.

We also supply speciality stores, sales through social media, and have sales direct to consumer

Unfortunately and my bad, I placed complete trust in my now ex wife and never had a check and balance in place. I concentrated on sourcing and logistics inbound and domestic, and my ex wife looked after administration and accounts.. She is a problem gambler and managed to hide it for the 6 years we were together. At her level it is a disease and not an addiction. Just to be clear, she is very well university educated and extremely intelligent, and if you have ever had experience with Gambling as a disease, you will know it is quite something else and no cure. She put us as close to bankruptcy as it is as possible to get.

I have managed to stay afloat until this point in time. However I am faced with closing the doors if I cannot find a way forward

I have missed many sales opportunities and find myself in a predicament of suddenly being asked to substantially increase supplies to existing customers and have had new ones come and and want our products as supermarkets increase trade post covid...

I am cash flow poor to the point of being hog tied.

This business has substantial experience in negotiating and meeting the requirements of Thai regulations for FMCG, and we are now diversifying to make this an alternative income stream. Even Thai companies and people have used us to help negotiate Thai systems as they cannot understand their own country's systems.

This is our fundamental asset; we can do everything from ex-warehosue of supplier to purchase by the end consumer.

As a small business with no appreciable collateral assets: (we lease our office and warehouse and have office equipment, a car and a van), we are not seen in a favourable light by lending institutions.

Which is ridiculous as if there is one trade that needs to keep accounts paid it is supermarkets and they are always reliable, people need to eat.

Thai banks all promise no collateral borrowing but that's nonsense and are not business expansion friendly.

Suppliers tend to be risk averse about international supermarket trade, which again is ridiculous as they face similar trading terms in their own countries, and the catch cry of global trade is simply empty nonsense.

Normal supermarket trade here relies on credit terms of 60 -90 days., which if you are importing and having to pre-purchase makes for long time for money to come back.

So how to do? And how to do now?

 

As a way of thinking outside the square, I have come here to see if there people whom may be interested in a version of crowdfunding  done directly between me and them

I am looking at 20,000THB lots on a 90 day return with 10% return. I would like to achieve a target of 1 million THB but can be staggered over next two to three months.

 

If there is interest, I am happy to go into in depth detail and I am happy to be as open and transparent as required to satisfy any questions or queries people may have.

I will invite you to our premises and sit down with interested people to work through how we can all be satisfied and understand and accept the risk.

Example; I am happy to share purchase orders from our customers and our orders to suppliers. We can offset any funding against specific purchase orders if desired

 

I have tried to keep this short but with enough information for people to understand and decide if they want to know more

 

Thank you for your time to read this and happy to see any comments and interest come or not...

 

 

 

 

 

[DrukenMallardy]

Man, sorry to hear about the ex-wife, cos it sounds like you had a good thing going.

 

Selling to the modern trades if <deleted> difficult, getting in and keeping up with their extortionate charges.  On top of that navigating the FMGC regulations in Thailand is a minefield,  I've worked with them in the past and it made me want to shoot myself in the head.  The level of corruption is beyond me - literally, like I couldn't get something approved and spoke with some Thai friends who had to go through like 5 degrees of sepeartion of friends before they managed to find the right person to "convince" to get something signed off.  Their system is transparent as a brick wall.

 

Sounds like you have a deft skillset there, best of luck with your endeavours!

[JayClay]

Is your ex-wife still involved in the business?

[watgate]

I am the furthest thing from an expert on these matters and you sound like, and most likely are an honest guy who is looking to increase his business volume with the help of outside investors. What concerns me is I am always reading about how investors in Thailand are always getting stung and ripped off by unscrupulous shysters who promise their investors huge returns in return for their investment in their scheme. Most time it is a ponzi scheme where the investor starts to get their agreed upon huge returns and then eventually the payments stop for one reason or another. The fact that you have little collateral to use to obtain a loan from a bank is troubling. In this day and age, I am continually amazed at all the sophisticated, and some not so sophisticated schemes that enterprising shysters think of to squeeze money out of greedy investors looking to make a killing with their initial investment(s).  I do want to emphasize again that I am not trying to lump you in bed with the many unscrupulous shysters out there and hopefully someone on this forum has the business acumen and knowledge and experience to be able to clearly look at your business enterprise and make a smart decision whether you are legitimate and can negotiate some terms which a fair and equitable to both parties.   Good luck