A Chat With March's Profile, Jason Blake, founder/president, The Pond Guy, Inc.

Now we've gotten to the point where the company's a little more mature and stable. But there was a point in time when every time we mailed a catalog we hoped the phone rang, because if it didn't we didn't know if we'd be in business the next week.

We had to start borrowing money — I didn't borrow money for the first eight years I owned this business. Now we work on a line of credit a few months out of the year, which is a big difference. We had the luxury of not doing that before. Those are small challenges.