Guest Speaker - John Dimmer

Last Thursday we got John Dimmer has as our guest speaker. Mr. Dimmer has a B.S. in Finance from University of Oregon and after getting a degree, he started working at Puget Sound Bank. He shared that he took a job to after graduation to get experience and looking for opportunities. Then, he built the company named Free Range with Andrew Fry in 1994 and they had a happy exit in 1999 by selling it to Luminant Worldwide. When the new owner bought the company, they require Mr. Dimmer to have an employee agreement with them because they want to keep the company’s stability. However, after the short time, he was ‘sack in call’ due to the reason “we don’t use your talent appropriate”.

He became an angel investor in the technology area and build an air-streamed and Honda dealership. He talked about a lot of interesting experiences about this. One of an example, his using ‘golden cuff’ to keep talented people. Mr. Dimmer has a great employee named Ted and he was successful in using ‘golden cuff’ to keep and move him to air-stream business. Then he hired another great guy and he has another problem which is figuring out how to keep him. In another example, Mr. Dimmer shared that the leader must choose between gaining market share and being profitable. Gaining the market share is a great thing, but then due to the revenue is smaller to the expense, the company will have to face with the problem of being acquired by a larger company and the large company will enjoy that large market share. Therefore, firstly we must be profitable, which means keeping revenue larger than expense, so we could be in control and do a lot of things we want.

About funding, there are different types of funding. The first one is debt, which include commercial source, banks, SBA, relatives and investors. The second is equity, which is funding raised through selling an ownership interest in your business, which include hybrid, debt or preferred securities convertible into equity. Some other methods include price money from business plan competitors, government grants, etc. All of them are really helpful for us in order to look for a funding for our business.