Small businesses can rapidly grow their revenue by offering financing to their customers, so what stops them? Pulling credit, processing, recording payments, and handling collections when customers don’t pay can be overwhelming to an already stretched-too-thin business owner.
Jared Zemp, a Utah-based entrepreneur, aims to make it easier.
Zemp’s company, Transfer Credit, is a web application that handles the approval, payments, and collections process. Even better, it can also attract investment capital by offering the loans for sale to investors to make money on the interest.
“We’re helping companies make more money by offering financing to their clients,” Zemp said. “Whether their customers are consumers or other businesses, Transfer Credit helps them pull credit scores and then document the loans in a way that they can actually be bundled and then sold to investors.”
To help grow his business, Zemp enrolled in the Master of Business Creation (MBC) program at the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business. Through the program, he gained access to experienced mentors and received meaningful feedback from his peers. The MBC gives Zemp all the benefits of a world class incubator and a master’s degree on top of that.
“The mentorship and support from the faculty makes launching a company so much more manageable,” Zemp said. “A master’s degree has been a personal goal of mine that I didn’t think I could accomplish while launching a business.”
Zemp originally got his idea for Transfer Credit when he started a math boot camp business for college students. While the boot camp was profitable, Zemp was burnt out, and the company wasn’t growing as fast as he would have liked.
He realized they had empty seats in their classes, and it wouldn’t cost him anything to add students to the class. Students saved thousands of dollars by taking the class, but the $1,000 price tag on the course was more than some students could pull together. By offering loans to make the boot camp more accessible, he could fill his empty seats and earn interest on the loans. Enrollment exploded, but they quickly ran out of space for additional classrooms. Investors were not interested in a small math tutoring company, but they were interested in taking over the students’ loans so they could earn the interest.
Zemp sold the loans and used the money to buy other businesses. He quickly discovered that in-house financing could work well for many other small businesses. That discovery sparked the creation of Transfer Credit.
“Another major market is businesses that are offering vendor credit to other businesses,” Zemp said. “A lot of companies offer huge vendor credit lines willy-nilly and never collect on bad debt. We can fix that.”
Transfer Credit is a web app for high-margin product or service companies. It enables small businesses to finance customers in-house, keeping the interest on the loans in-house. While there are many services that establish recurring payments for customers, like Klarna or Afterpay, Transfer Credit helps businesses earn the interest themselves or sell it to investors for needed capital.
Small businesses in the United States make up the second largest economy in the world, yet many small businesses struggle with growth as well as selling to investors. Many business owners in the United States feel as if they can’t retire or pursue other opportunities because they don’t have someone to take over the day-to-day operations. Others are sure their lifestyle businesses aren’t attractive to investors. Transfer Credit helps small businesses level up to attract an excellent manager or investors that will let the business owner enjoy their next phase of life.
For more information on Transfer Credit, visit xfercredit.com.
