Author: Guillermo

Megan writes:

> Guillermo, from what I’ve witnessed, seems leery of profitable
> scenarios.

That's not quite true.  I'm all about making profits, I just don't want to do it in any way that jeopardizes the activist mission of LocalHarvest. If I was against profits I would have built a 501c3. LocalHarvest.org is a corporation.

Investors in 99.9% of cases are just looking for the best return on their investement, measured in DOLLARS.  Accepting their money means that you have to run things to maximize returns at the expense of everything else. They don't even care about "returns" in any other sense than having a big "liquidity event", like selling to a big corporation or going public.  Both outcomes would destroy the point of LocalHarvest.  I would never do that.  I'd rather scrape by and be an agent of change than get rich while facilitating more "business as usual".  No freaking way.  Sure, there are some investors, few and far between, that really care about building a sustainable business that's run not only for the bottom line, but finding them would be a full time job, and I'd rather focus on building the business.

It's very hard to build a business without capital, but I'm doing it. I've been bootstrapping all the way, and now LocalHarvest is a business that's in track for generating about $600K of revenue in its second year of operation (2005).  Our margins are small, so that equates to only about $60K of net income, but that is enough at this point to support our "skeleton crew".  Growth has been about 800% per year, and I expect that to continue.  I expect that in one year this thing will be pretty solid.  Yes, it's been hard work, but I have not sold out, despite having had plenty of opportunities, and I'm very pretty proud of it.

In a couple of years LH will be an employee owned company that generates enough revenue to afford a comfortable living to its employees/shareholders, while dedicated to an activist mission
of bringing some sanity back into America's food systems.

We're getting there....