Welcome to The Accelerated Investor Podcast with Josh Cantwell, if you love entrepreneurship and investing in real estate then you are in the right place. Josh is the CEO of Freeland Ventures Real Estate Private Equity and has personally invested in well over 500 properties all across the country. He’s also made hundreds of private lender loans and owns over 1,000 units of apartments. Josh is an expert at raising private money for deals and he prides himself on never having had a boss in his entire adult life. Josh and his team also mentor investors and entrepreneurs from all over the world. He doesn’t dream about doing deals, he actually does them and so do his listeners and students. Now sit back, listen, learn, and accelerate your business, your life, and you’re investing with The Accelerated Investor Podcast.
Josh: Hey, what’s going on? Welcome back. This is Josh Cantwell with Accelerated Investor. Super excited to have you back with me again today and hopefully you’ve been enjoying all of the interviews and all the content and all the different resources and strategies we’ve been bringing to you through this podcast and interview series. And today I’m really excited to do with you to bring you a special resource that a lot of my real estate coaching students have been using to get their business off the ground and it’s funding. You know, how I feel about funding equals freedom funding equals freedom. You know, there’s a lot of different ways to make money in real estate and one of the specific strategies we’re going to talk about today is how to get seed capital for your business. You know, my philosophy, you know, if you’ve been listening to this podcast are following me for any length of time.
Josh: You know, I’ve done a lot of real estate deals. I did over 450 wholesale deals, over several hundred rehabs on a rental portfolio, made over 400 private lender loans and own nearly 1,300 units of apartments. And my focus today is on being less and less transactional and more and more owning assets. Well it wasn’t always that way, when I was getting started, you know, I started as a wholesaler, wholesaling short sales was very transactional just to make money because I needed to make money, I needed profits, revenue left my job as a financial planner. So I needed the money from wholesaling. But as I’ve grown up in this business and had a lot of success with it, I’ve focused my attention on owning assets. Assets is where you have the opportunity for cashflow, for depreciation, for tax advantages. And for a lot of people, they may not have a lot of their own private lenders yet.
Josh: They may be able to go get hard money, they may be able to go get some commercial financing, but there’s maybe some gaps in what they need. They need money for down payments, earnest money. They need money for rehabs or rehab draws need money to start their business and get their business off the ground. So I thought it would be helpful to invite one of my friends. His name is Bo Winder and he’s with Seed Capital. I’d thought I’d invite him to the podcast and interview him today because he and his company provides an amazing opportunity and amazing service to get funding for your business.
Josh: Now before I, you know, bring Bo on, I want you to know that even though I’m kind of positioning this and telling you how you can use the funding as a real estate investor, Bo and his company have worked with over 30,000 businesses and a lot of them outside of real estate. So if you have an ECOM business or you have a marketing agency or you have a manufacturing company or some business that just sells whatever bricks and sticks or whatever you sell, if you need any kind of seed capital for your business to get your business up and running, this interview is going to really be awesome for you. So, Bo what’s going on? Thanks for so much for joining me today. How are you?
Bo: Hey, I’m good. Thanks a lot for having me Josh.
Josh: Yeah, you bet. So Bo, I just, you know, started the interview off real quick, but just give our audience just a little bit of foundation, a little bit of color, a little bit of background about you and about Seed Capital.
Bo: Yeah, sure. So Seed Capital started in 2008 and I joined the team a couple of years after that. So we’ve been doing this a little bit over a decade and I’ve been here eight years this month actually.
Josh: Oh, nice. And so just talk about what Seed Capital is and a little bit more about what you provide and know in the show notes and the title of this thing, it’s about how to get, you know, $25,000 to $150,000 of unsecured seed capital for your business. And a lot of it, you know, in the first, you know, 12 months or 18 months at 0% interest. So what does exactly does Seed Capital do? How does it work? Just give us the big picture overview.
Bo: Yeah, absolutely. So for those who may not be familiar with us Seed Capitol, we do this for a lot of big companies. Subway, Seven 11, FedEx, Maco, Meineke. We’ve done over 2 billion in this type of funding. So far we funded over 30,000 real estate investors, the small business owners, we do have a perfect day plus rating on the better business bureau. So we’re the very best at this particular type of funding, we do just focus on the one very specific type of funding, which is a line of unsecured revolving credit. And just like you mentioned, clients can get anywhere from $25,000 to $150,000 for those who approved and we can kind of get into, you know, what’s going to help someone to approve for that a little bit later. But you know, average client who goes through is getting about 7$0,000, but again, that is all in an unsecured revolving credit. And that’s the only thing we focus on.
Josh: So, Bo I know at our live events, you guys sponsor and attend a lot of our live events and several of our webinars. We’ve done interviews like this in the past for our active coaching students. And this, this podcast interview will be out in the public that everyone can hear. So I want everybody to understand if you haven’t been introduced to Bo or to Seed Capital at one of our trainings. You know, I’ve had several coaching students that have come to me and said, you know, Josh, I need basic capital to get my business off the ground. I need to buy desks, I need to buy computers. I need to buy. Maybe get started with some office space chairs, whatever. I’ve had other students of mine come to me and say, Hey Josh, you’re like, I need money for gap funding for down payments, earnest money.
Josh: So I’ve got this property and I can buy it, I can be all in for $200,000 buy it and rehab it for $200,000. But my hard money lender wants me to put 20% down. My hard money lender also has a monthly interest only payment that I have to make. My hard money lender also wants me to fork over some of the rehab portion, the rehab funds first and fund part of the rehab and then I get the money back when I get basically construction draws.
Josh: So these are all some of the different ways that we see investors using the money, real legitimate and practical ways that I would use the money if I needed it. So Bo, just help us understand when somebody applies for this funding and they get approved, and we’ll talk about the approval process in a minute, but what are all the different ways that you’ve seen investors use this funding for, to get their business going specifically in real estate and even outside of real estate?
Bo: Yeah, so technically, I mean the short answer is people can technically use the money for anything that they want. And that is a common question that we get is, you know, what restrictions are there on the use of funds and the money can be used for anything. We do see it used for marketing expenses, coaching and educational programs. A lot of people will have some existing high interest credit card debt that they’ll want to transfer over onto these new lines. And a lot of people are even turning it into cash to become a hard money lender with it. So it’s real flexible. By far and away the most popular use of our funds over the last four or five years especially, has been using it to purchase, fix and flip properties, especially as a down payment or gap funding on the properties. But really people can use the money for anything that they want.
Josh: Yeah, fantastic. You know, there’s more and more, I would say institutional private lenders, like there’s real, like mom and pop private lenders, people that have money in their 401k, self directed IRA and then there’s institutional private money, which is like my company Freeland. That’s a private equity fund where we invest in properties, we fix and flip properties, but we also make loans and we fund deals for people. But a lot of cases, you know, there’s going to be some out of pocket expenses. That’s what Bose talking about, you know, so if you’ve got $1,000 of earnest money, you got to put down to the seller, you could use your Seed Capital for that.
Josh: If you have an appraisal that you have to pay for, let’s say it’s $350 bucks, you could use it for that. If you’ve got another hard money lender or private money lender that requires a down payment, we a lot of times don’t require down payment, but if you’d have a 10% down, 20% down, you might have $10,000, $15,000, $20000, $25,000 out of pocket for the down payment. You could use it for that. And you know, again, the monthly interest only payments or starting your rehab and then getting reimbursed. So if you’re using a hard money lender, let’s say it’s another institutional private lender, hard money lender out there, very few of them allow you to truly get 100% funding.
Josh: Now if you get real private money from, let’s say a guy that just retired or a doctor or a teacher and they rolled their money over to a self directed IRA, we teach our students to get all that funding from the self directed IRA for purchase, rehab, closing costs, soft costs. But a lot of my students say, you know Josh, I’m not comfortable doing that yet or I haven’t, I haven’t raised money before. So they’ll match up institutional private lender or hard money lender with seed capital and that still allows them to do the deal with no money out of their own pocket.
Josh: And you know, they might spend $20,000, $30,000, $50,000 grand on with their seed capital funds, but then when the deal sells, they get all that money back from the proceeds of the sale. So Bo, I know you’ve got a bunch of different examples and some deals that you’ve seen your clients and some of our students using your capital, but maybe walk us through an example of an example deal. Like what did they pay for it? You know, what did they use the money for? So just step us through an example.
Bo: Yeah, absolutely. So one example that I like to use, this is from one of our clients who purchased a home in North Las Vegas. This was a home that was selling for $107,000. So, you know, fairly low cost, the total rehab costs on it was $15,000 that they needed to put in, I think that was for flooring and some appliances and the air conditioner went out, which is a big deal obviously, you know, in Las Vegas. So the total cost to purchase the property and to rehab, it was $122,000 and this particular client had enough seed capital that he was able to cover actually the whole cost of that on these lines of credit.
Bo: And so within about a month and a half, the property sold for a $169,000, so that, that netted him a profit of $47,000 in a month and a half. But it’s just important to note, you know, he didn’t have to work with, you know, any other type of lender in that situation. He was just able to use all this money at 0% interest, pay it right back and keep in mind these are revolving lines of credit so he’s able to just, you know, pay that back and use it again and again without paying any fees or any interest.
Josh: Yeah. Fantastic. And so with a lot of your students and a lot of your clients, my students, your clients that have gotten approved for this, they’re able to get this with, you know, about $75,000, sometimes between $25,000 to $150,000 grand, but typically around $70,000, $80,000, they get approved for it. But I don’t know that we mentioned or put enough emphasis on this for the first 12 to 18 months, 0% interest, right. And then even after that, you guys have some techniques and strategies to basically roll the money over and continue doing it at 0% interest. So just explain that part of it.
Bo: Yeah, that’s right. So the money is all, you know, to cover the terms it’s all unsecured revolving credit, which usually banks are hesitant to give out at all because, you know, they’re taking on the risk with it rather than the clients. So, the national average on that is about 19% or 20% interest. Just like the credit cards that you have in your wallet, it’s the same thing. So banks are usually giving out these tiny amounts and charging very high interest. What makes us special or a popular with these real estate investors is we have the ability to come in and get hundreds of banks and take those very best, maybe, you know, five or six banks at any given time for that particular individual situation. And then we combine those banks together in a way where they’re not interfering with each other at all.
Bo: And so the end result of that is we’re just, we’re able to get people a lot more in this type of funding than they’re able to get on their own. As you mentioned, average client gets about $70,000 to $80,000. I got $127,000 when I went through and some people get north of $150,000, just depends on their credit situation, which we can talk about. But more importantly, we get much, much better terms on that money. So this money is all, as you mentioned, 0% interest for at least the first 12 to 18 months. And then we do have ways to keep that going if the person maintains good credit and in some cases up to over three years.
Josh: Yeah. Fantastic. So we’ll talk about the credit qualifications in a second because there’s, you know, different types of funding out there. There’s asset based funding and a lot of times when there’s a really good asset collateral, there’s private money lenders and institutional private lenders and hard money lenders that will lend against the asset and do asset based funding. And you guys are more credit based because you’re giving out unsecured, you know, there’s no collateral your credit based. So this is important. There’s not a hard minimum but there’s kind of a minimum credit score but about a 640 score that you’re going to need to qualify this. But if you don’t have a 640, you know it’s still apply for this. Take a look at it if it makes sense for you because they’ve gotten people approve that are, you know, close with 620 or 600 and there’s been some of our students that have had closer to a 680 that have gotten declined.
Josh: It just depends on the credit situation, but it’s credit based funding instead of asset based. And what I love about this is that we’ve given the example already, but take an asset based loan from a private money lender or a hard money lender or a bank to fund, you know, 80% of your deal, 90% of your deal, and then use credit based funding like seed capital to basically make up the difference. So Bo, anything to add to that as far as credit? Like, you know, I think we’ve talked for a long time. We’ve been working together for years. 640 is kind of the number, but it’s not really a hard floor. So just comment on that for a second.
Bo: Yeah, yeah, that’s exactly right. So we don’t need, just you said we don’t need the assets tied to, we don’t need business plans or financials. We just need to show the banks that you have good credit. And that’s one of my favorite parts about this. So typically about a 640 or above means you’re in good shape. You know, just like you said, it’s not a line in the sands. There’s a lot of other things that come into play, different factors like, you know, bankruptcies that might still be reporting, collections, judgments, liens, credit inquiry activity over the last six months.
Bo: You can have some inquiries and still approve, but if there’s a really excessive amount, you know, sometimes we need to wait for some of those to fall off. The nice thing is we have a system that analyzes all of that instantly without putting any kind of a hard pull on the client’s credit and lets us know exactly how much they would approve for it. But I would say as a general rule, anybody that thinks they might have a credit score above a 600, it’s definitely worth taking the 30 seconds to take a look at it.
Josh: Yeah. Yeah. So the website that we’re going to put out is a special website. It goes through S, R, E, C my company Strategic Real Estate Coach. So SREC.US/Seed SREC.US/Seed. That’ll be in the show notes and stuff like that and you can take a look at it, click on it. And what’s cool about this is when you go and actually do the application, they’re able to pull this without actually doing a hard pull on your credit. So when you inquire to see how much funding you could potentially get, they’re not going to do a hard pull. There’s not going to be any effect your credit score whatsoever. So check it out at SREC.US/Seed. It’s a resource we’ve been using for years. Our students have been using it for years and which just highly, highly recommend Bo and his whole team, Matt, all the guys at Seed Capital and you know, all of our students can always use more funding.
Josh: The most expensive funding you can ever get is the funding you don’t have.
When you have a deal where you can make a $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 profit or more that’s the most expensive funding because you don’t have the funding. It’s a $50,000 profit that you just lost. So don’t be in that situation, you know. Again, I believe funding equals freedom because we all got into real estate for passive cashflow. We got an a real estate for legacy wealth, passive income, recurring passive income. So if you’re a wholesaler, that’s great you could still use Seed Capital. You could use it for mailers, you could use it for direct mail, postcards, bandit signs. You could use it for, you know, paying for software. If you use a software like our software, Accelerated Investor Office, you could use it for all those things even if you’re not ready to buy assets.
Josh: If you’re ready to buy assets, the great thing is you use it for down payments, use it for earnest money, buy that property, then get, you know, private lender to fund the rest of the deal. And you’ll be able to cycle the money, use the money again and again and again. And if you’re a new to intermediate investor, again, you want to get every source of capital you can possibly get. Private money, hard money, seed capital, institutional, private money, bank loans, lines of credit, you know, self directed IRA’s, private lenders, friends and family, every stitch of capital you can get.
Josh: Now, when you’re an advanced investor, and we’ve always got a lot of advanced investors that listen to these interviews, you know, you can be more selective about what capital you decide to choose from. You know, if you are on Shark Tank or you were on a show and you were selling off a part of your business and are looking for funding and you’re very, very experienced and have a big balance sheet, then you can pick and choose which banks, which lenders, which private lenders, which are going to give you the best terms.
Josh: So no matter if you’re new, intermediate, or advanced, when you can get 0% revolving credit, that is purely just, you know, again, based off your credit, there’s no reason why anybody would delay and not have this as part of their tool in their toolbox. So again SREC.US/Seed. So Bo, I know I wanted to keep this quick down and dirty real fast, kind of do a commercial for you guys because we really believe in what you guys offer and believe in what you guys have done for all of our other members and wanted all of our people in our family, our ecosystem to really know about you guys and what you can provide. So is there anything I missed or anything else that we want to cover?
Bo: No I think we covered it pretty thoroughly.
Josh: Fantastic. So yeah, guys, listen, 30,000 clients can’t be wrong. A plus accredited rated by the better business bureau can’t be wrong. We’ve been with and working with Seed Capital for about four years, got lots of people that have used them. If you’re looking for additional funding for your business, your real estate business, your ecommerce business, your brick and mortar store, and you want 0% funding, check it out. It’s SREC.US/Seed and then again, they’ll get on the phone with you, explain all your options, what you got approved for. And if you don’t get approved, they’ll leave and come back and say, hey, here’s some things you could do over the next 3 months or 90 days or something like that in order to get approved going forward. So listen Bo we’ll put this out on all of our social platforms, YouTube, ITunes, Facebook, etc. etc. Really get the word out for you guys. So just want to say thanks so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it.
Bo: Yeah, thanks for having me, Josh.
Josh: You’ve got it guys. Listen, I hope you enjoyed the interview. I hope you use this as a fantastic resource as a tool in your tool belt. If you have any questions, you can just leave them right on the social media platform that you found this. This interview and my team is going to be monitoring those platforms for questions, comments, we’ll feed those back to Bo Winder and his team at Seed Capitol. And we just, again, we just want to bring you amazing resources that will help you be a bigger, better, smarter, more wealthy investor. So thanks so much for being here. We’ll talk to you soon.
You’ve been listening to Josh Cantwell and the Accelerated Investor Podcast. Leave a comment on our iTunes channel and let us know what you want to learn next, or who you’d like Josh to interview. While you’re there, give us some five star rating and make sure to subscribe so you can be the first to hear new episodes. Follow Josh Cantwell and his companies, the Strategic Real Estate Coach and Freeland Ventures on all social media platforms now and stay up to date on new training and investment opportunities to start your journey toward the lifestyle you’ve always dreamed of. Apply for coaching at JoshCantwellCoaching.com.
Finding the right source of seed capital for your business can be a daunting prospect. But, whether you’re a real estate investor, small business owner, or entrepreneur, there are credible, trustworthy companies out there that are ready and willing to help individuals who are financially responsible.
In this podcast, Josh is joined by Bo Winder of Seed Capital, a company that has provided $2+ billion in credit-based funding to more than 30,000 entrepreneurs and startup companies. Seed Capital specializes in lines of unsecured, revolving credit. Because these are credit-based loans, no collateral or assets are involved.
The average Seed Capital client receives around $75,000 to use toward business costs – although the company has funded upwards of $150,000 for some clients.
And the best part? Depending on your credit situation, you can receive at least the first 12-18 months of the loan at 0% interest. Individuals with excellent credit scores can receive up to 3 years of no-interest funding. Pretty awesome, right? And you can trust Seed Capital because it has an A+ Better Business Bureau rating.
Take a listen to hear what Bo has to say about this type of funding, which can be really difficult to secure from traditional banks.
And be sure to check out PreQualifyMe (see link below) to determine the funding amount you may qualify for. Bonus: it’s a soft credit pull – so it won’t negatively impact your credit score!
What’s Inside:
- How Seed Capital works with investors and small business owners to provide lines of unsecured, revolving credit
- The approval process for this type of funding
- The credit score threshold that Seed Capital typically requires when pre-qualifying you for a loan
- How investors and small business owners can use this money
- How Josh transitioned his REI business from being “transactional” to focusing on assets
Mentioned in this episode
Seed Capital
PreQualifyMe (Quick Pre-Qualification for Startup Funding)
Strategic Real Estate Coach
Josh Cantwell Coaching
Freeland Lending