Hi. First I am going to apologize for this being long winded, but I want you to know my story and understand what I am going through. First I currently own a "Wireless Internet Service Provider" (WISP) company. My Company has been in business for 15 years. We made it thru the tough times before but this time things are different. Before becoming a WISP, I was only an ISP with a software development company which did business with the government. As a dial-up company, I realized in 1997 that High Speed competitors were around the corner and proceeded to find a competing technology that would keep me in business. The technology was wireless, however, the equipment was poor back then. In 2003 I found what looked to be a good solution. I took what little R&D money I had and bought the equipment. I put up an experimental network and it worked flawlessly. However, I was competing with a large corporation who was threatening to bring a new wireless technology into the market. I took my prototype and made it live in August of 2003. I was the first and the other company did not come in, so I am still the only one there. It only covers about 1 square mile so it was not very profitable. Still with limited resources and dial-up customers leaving with promises to come back if I could provide high speed I was heading for trouble. My software business was flourishing, so I decided to keep putting money into the business and wait till I had enough money to expand. Well that never happened. In early 2007, the government decided that they wanted what was called 8a businesses to do the software work and my company did not qualify for 8a. So here is where I made my first mistake. I decided to take the prototype wireless network to a very rural area and do what other WISPs were having a hard time with. I should not have used my money, but went for a loan then. Well I didn't because I wanted to show any potential investor/bank that I could make the technology work and then once I did that and got about 50 customers in an area that could only get dial-up, then there would be money available from someone to expand. In the meantime I started to get about 10 calls a day which continues even today for me to expand the first network. I couldn't expand it because I had used all of my funds buying equipment. My wife and I worked feverously to get the network up and running and serving more than just a few miles but hundreds of miles of shoreline on a rural lake. Again it worked flawlessly. But this is not a fairy tale ending. I have exhausted our money in building this network and therefore do not even have any advertising dollars left. We need to expand and advertise to get more customers and without more customers we are heading for crash and burn. My FICO score is good, but I am using 53% of my revolving debt. I have no more money to put into the business and cannot supplement it with software work at the base. I have a complete updated business plan with projected financials showing very good returns. I do not do enough in Credit Cards so I have been asking around about loans and either my 53% gets me or because I didn't bring in the 120-150K last year so no one will look at me. I'm at the point where I may have to shut down the business and take some credit hits because I signed 3 year agreements for bandwidth that I can no longer afford unless I can get my subscriber base up. Does anyone know the steps I can take to recover from this or am I just doomed to losing the business and going back to work for someone else?
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