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RULE SEVEN: Remain true to your humble beginnings. Since Aldrich took on a manufacturer's representative to market his candles at gift stores throughout New England, Village Candle's annual growth has averaged more than 100%. But Aldrich has remained cautious. "We only grew within our means," he says. "I could have grown the company 200% to 300% a year if I had wanted to borrow money, but then you lose quality control." Thoroughly committed to using internal financing, Aldrich has rejected overtures from bankers wanting to lend the company money to fuel faster growth. "Our philosophy," he explains, "has always been to build the business one brick at a time."

SHAMELESS PLOYS

If you've got chutzpah, do you need money? Well, yes, but chutzpah sometimes can compensate for a lack of resources. And sometimes poverty may leave an entrepreneur little choice but to try a boldly desperate act. No wonder, then, that bootstrapping lore abounds with tales of shameless ploys. Some examples:

• To drum up business for Save the Date, a New York City events-planning company that was launched with only $50 in 1994, Jennifer Gilbert spent long days cold-calling large corporations. "I had called one bank over and over, and they never returned my calls," recounts Gilbert, whose company posted roughly $15 million in revenues last year. So she showed up in the bank's lobby anyway, carrying 50 yellow balloons, and waited for five hours with a sinking heart. But when the bank executives finally emerged, she says, "they took one look at me, cracked up, and they've been a client ever since."

• Jack Briggs and Todd Baker crafted a scheme to impress their bankers to get financing for Innovative Systems Technology (now called Briggs & Baker), a financial-services company based in Valencia, Calif., which they started with $200 in 1996. The two planned a direct-mail campaign that was timed so that their phones would ring like crazy during a meeting with their banker. But at the last minute the banker rescheduled the meeting from 2 p.m. to 10 a.m., a time when the company's phones were generally quiet. But Briggs and Baker didn't panic. "We had everyone on our staff call our main line when the bankers were here," recalls Briggs. The bankers offered to lend $100,000 to the company--which now projects $3 million to $5 million in sales for 1999.

• In April 1993, Stephen Schuster had just arrived at a high-tech trade show in Minneapolis when he received a message. It was from the human-resources director at the Massachusetts-based company where Schuster was general manager. Effective immediately, she told him, he was fired. Scarcely missing a beat, Schuster wrote on the back of his business cards "Rainier Corp." (named after the mountain) and his phone number. The next day he handed out more than 50 cards at the show, explaining that he was leaving his old company to start his own advertising and public-relations firm. "I left the show with my first two clients," says Schuster. He needed a fast start, as he had no savings to invest in the start-up of Rainier Corp., based in Princeton, Mass., which last year generated sales of $2 million.

• Seven years ago, when Joe Donnelly launched Donnelly Display Inc., a showcase-hanger and mannequin manufacturer in New York City, he had to be very resourceful: he had only $20 in capital. When a display manager at Macy's told Donnelly that other hanger manufacturers couldn't provide him with eight china-red hangers, Donnelly said that was no problem, that he could handle the job. He was able to make the hangers himself, but to get the color right he had to have them spray-painted at an auto-body shop. "The manager loved them," Donnelly recalls. Now Federated Department Stores Inc., which eventually bought Macy's, accounts for 20% of his $2 million in revenues.

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Donna Fenn

Inc. contributing editor Donna Fenn is the author of Upstarts! How GenY Entrepreneurs are Rocking the World of Business and 8 Ways You Can Profit From Their Success (McGraw-Hill, 2009). Both this blog and the book examine the ways in which GenY is changing the entrepreneurial landscape with new approaches to starting, growing, and managing their companies. Learn more at http://www.upstartsrock.com/.

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