You don’t know me, but I attended your seminar in September at the Nashville ASBDC conference.

I was reminded of you yesterday as I was working with an ACE hardware store and plugging the industry composite for Ace stores. I have used your financial analysis software and techniques for many years now.

I will never forget a time, about 10 years ago, when I was a young loan officer for a rapidly growing credit union. My job had always been consumer loans, but as the years went by, I found myself helping commercial customers. Someone would retire, or quit, and pretty soon there I was, making commercial loans.

I was totally incompetent at the time…I remember I would run a personal credit report on the owner, compute some sort of debt ratio, and try to work it that way. Someone forgot to send me to school, or train me, or something. I was god-awful and lucky I didn’t make too many bad loans.

One day, a friend brought in about 8 video tapes and said, “Hey Alan, I went to this seminar at Bank IV. Watch these tapes, they might help.” I thought to myself, You want me to watch 8 video tapes of the most boring subject on the face of this earth? 

I watched those tapes, and there you were, teaching financial management. It was interesting! I don’t know how you made it that way, but it was! Perhaps you were a comedian in a different life. I must have watched those tapes 5 or 6 times all the way through.

Immediately, I began building the spreadsheets and ratios as you prescribed. I remember by this time Windows 95 had just come out, and your software wouldn’t work on my new computer, so I had to use Excel to design my own, based totally around your material. 

Anyway, people at the Credit Union began thinking I was some sort of “financial guru” - they thought perhaps I had learned this in college or something. I never told them my “Secret” - that everything I knew was taken from what you taught in your seminar. Today, I use your principles all the time when working with SBDC clients.

I wanted to let you know that your principles and financial instruction are the best tools I have ever seen for helping small business succeed. 

In the Nashville seminar, I picked up even more knowledge that I had either forgotten or you have added in the last ten years, and as always, it was interesting and comical. Anyway, keep up the good work and if you are going to teach part 2 of the seminar in San Diego, you can bet I will be sitting in the front row!

Keep up the good work,

Alan Oswalt,
Garden City, Kansas