A Chat With David Isham, president/CEO, National Roper’s Supply

From a financial standpoint, the catalog is a cash flow nightmare. So one of the first people I hired as we were getting into the mail order stuff was a CFO. Someone to handle the accounting side of the business. That was one of the smartest things I ever did, relieving myself of that burden. When I hired him, one of the first things he helped me do was establish a line of credit. That’s probably a piece many people are after, but many small businesspeople don’t take it seriously enough. They don’t put enough work and time into being professional in the financial side of the company. Banks are willing to loan money to growing businesses, but you’ve got to have all your ducks in a row. Hiring the CFO to keep us in order allowed us to get the line of credit that allowed us to be well-capitalized. That allowed us to bring in the necessary inventory and hire the number of employees we needed. It allowed us to ship more and more catalogs over the years.