Once our operations stabilized and were running effectively, I needed to start focusing on how I would finance my growth and future opportunities with Videotron as my personal line of credit was already invested in Utopia Image. I got to learn, pretty quickly, what I had been told for so many years, by so many people: You need money to make money!

During 2007, we didn’t really have any liquidity since most of our expenses were related to our bi-weekly payroll and our receivables came in on average every 45 days. Hence, the liquidity we had was to cover our short term expenses. One of my themes for 2007 was “Sleepless Nights”. We had tremendous financial pressure to support our payroll and our expenses with only our receivables because we weren’t able to get any financial support from our bank. Every pay week was a struggle, but we made it every time with a couple of dollars to spare. The particularity of our services, which was responsible for this financial pressure, was that as Videotron increased their demands for our services, we needed to hire additional people to support the demand and incur the expenses immediately, while receiving payments for our services at a much later date.

After meeting with executives from Videotron, in April 2007, and securing our technical support contract, we decided to negotiate a working capital loan with the BDC (Business Development Bank of Canada) in order to finance our move to our larger office. With the help of the working capital loan and a couple of capital leases, we were able to finance the acquisitions of IT & Telephony equipment and office furniture.

Finally, after securing the technical support contract, we were able to transfer our financial accounts, in December 2007, to the RBC Bank and secure a larger working line of credit which helped us, in the short term, with our cash flow and growing operations.

Anthony.