Okay, so having spoken about the internal sources of funding, let's talk about a few sources of funding that are external to the corporation that you can still have access to. The first group I'm going to talk about are what I call customer and vendor financing. Customer financing is available to a good project because the customers truly have a vested interest in the success of your project if it helps further what the customer is receiving from the product or service that you're actually selling to them. So the customer may actually invest, or provide other resources to enable the project to be funded. And some of the ways they can do that is they can pre-purchase product, maybe in exchange for discounts, but maybe not in exchange for discounts. This is an especially useful way to fund projects if the start-up costs are high. And they may even consider an equity investment in the company via some type of a customer buying group. If the project is large enough, and they're interested enough in it to provide funding, assuming of course that you can't get the funding internally. So that's customer financing. They have a vested interest, and they're loyal to the company, generally. And they offer, they can also help provide advice and also refer you to other companies that you may be able expand your revenues base or your sales number by the customers referring you to the people outside of the organization who they know would benefit from the product they're buying from you now. So the next piece we're going to talk about is vendor financing. And vendor financing is obviously financing provided by a vendor, meaning a supplier. And it's actually becoming the fastest growing source of resources of all resources. These numbers that we show here on the slide, the vendor financing is, this is according to a website of an association that basically deals with customer and vendor financing. They estimate that vendor financing was $13 billion in 1998. And now, in 2010, it was over a half a trillion dollars. So, it's growing and is something that you should seriously consider when you're looking at your funding sources. The thing about vendor financing, you can obtain financing from companies of all sizes, assuming that they have a vested interest to make it worthwhile. Now, they may be supplying you a product that you're using in production of your service. That benefits them, so they're probably prepared to help finance those purchases. The vendor financing is also nice because they may also provide other types of useful resources like research and development or advertising and promotion. Then they co-advertise with you. And, again, they can also, if they know customers that are interested in what you're doing, they can refer you to those. So, when you're looking for sources of finance and you're looking outside your traditional sources, don't overlook vendor financing. It's a very large source that you should at least take a look at.
