If he gets a PhD, he could try for a K01 grant, if he conducts experiments on his customers.
You'd think. The paperwork is just ridiculous.
It's pretty clear that we're heading toward the kind of society were inherited wealth is going to establish your status. Like a Jane Austen novel without the dignity.
Anyway, if you can't inherit from parents, you need to take a page from Anna Nicole Smith.
Have we ever been any other kind? Aside the postwar period, I suppose.
Yes. My dad ended up a whole three or four steps above where he started (units are standardized measures of Jane Austen's martial status scale).
Yeah, but am I right that he would have been a white Nebraska boy, where Nebraska is literally one of best gini-coefficient states in the nation, in the 40s and 50s and 60s? I mean, that's a whole lot of stars aligning for social mobility.
Yes. But he had brothers and cousins with the same background who didn't go to college.
I don't think any of them thought to marry an heiress.
Honestly, none of them had the gym-toned body for it.
Actually, I think one of his cousins did. But I never talked with him.
Anyway, if you want money to invest in a business, you can probably ask at a bank. I've never done it, but I've heard about it. They may be looking for loans that aren't in real estate because of the coming housing crash.
I don't know specifics, but a lot of programs are administered by people who are into the goals of the program. I would be maybe looking around to get a human being on the phone for some handholding and guidance, if he's a sympathetic guy who's really the kind of person the program is supposed to serve: he might find someone who'd be excited to help him out, because I bet they get a lot of applications from sophisticated business owners who might technically qualify but aren't really the intended recipients.
The final boss he needs to face is a guy wearing a suit covered in question marks.
Yeah, but am I right that he would have been a white Nebraska boy, where Nebraska is literally one of best gini-coefficient states in the nation, in the 40s and 50s and 60s? I mean, that's a whole lot of stars aligning for social mobility.
I was just reading this article about social mobility in the UK, and I don't know enough to tell it makes an important point or if it's just an obvious point and the author has an intellectual axe to grind.
The sociologist John Goldthorpe has spent almost fifty years developing and championing his version of the class analysis approach. It has become the international norm in sociological research and is the basis of the categorisation used by the UK's Office for National Statistics. Jobs are characterised according to their employment relations. Employers, the self-employed and employees are differentiated, with the last (and much the largest) group subdivided according to contractual status. Zero-hours contracts are an extreme case of the commodification of labour already implicit in working for a wage; salaried professionals and managers are in a 'service relationship' which typically gives them more security and better prospects. Find out someone's occupation and their parents' occupations when they were young, and you know whether they have been mobile between social classes and, if so, in what direction.
Erzsébet Bukodi and Goldthorpe's Social Mobility and Education in Britain tells a very different story from the conventional wisdom rehearsed in Major and Machin's chatty Pelican book. Elegantly organising many years of empirical research, it shows that the UK should be placed mid-table in the international rankings of social mobility, and that there has been no reduction during the postwar period. Their dissenting account derives mainly from their distinctive way of understanding what social mobility is. They pull no punches in their critique of income mobility research in general, and of the 2005 study in particular. Survey respondents can only guess about the income coming into the home when they were children and are less willing to answer questions about income than about jobs. In any case, class position gives a better overall sense of an individual's place in the distribution of advantage: two people may currently be earning the same but their 'social position' will vary greatly depending on whether or not they are stably employed and have a reasonable expectation of career progression. But Bukodi and Goldthorpe are even more scornful of politicians and media commentators, who simply do not understand what they are talking about when they talk about mobility.
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In the postwar period when the structure of class positions - the outcomes that opportunities are opportunities for - was improving, [advantages for people who grow up with better than average resources] mattered less, or at least the injustice was less apparent. Lots of people were moving up, fewer were moving down, so there was little obvious cause for complaint. Even those who weren't moving up could expect to live better, longer lives than their parents had; the social ladder was really an escalator. So attention was diverted away from the persistently unequal distribution of mobility chances: it wasn't salient how few people from higher origins were moving down. Today, for many, the escalator has ground to a halt, or even gone into reverse. To increase upward mobility from here there are only two options: create again more room at the top for people to move into, or weaken the mechanisms by which better-off parents can protect their children from moving down. We need more of the better jobs and/or less hoarding of the opportunities to get them.
I took a look at the sba.gov website, and it was underwhelming as a thing that a normal person might be able to understand and use. First, a bunch of it is for people who want to reply to a government RFP, for which they have things like minority set-asides and stuff. But I'm assuming your gym owner wants some money to grow his business, rather than specific targeted stuff like "managerial and technical assistance." He's probably better off going to a bank, but then, he probably doesn't have collateral. Maybe he could change his name to either "Trump" or "Biden."
I haven't talked with him about this much at all, but I'm anticipating that he'd be nervous about his ability to repay a loan. He may realize intellectually that businesses are allowed to fail and walk away from debt, but I bet in his gut he doesn't think that's something people actually do. If that makes sense.
I feel like Witt is the person to ask about how you would go about applying or at least how you would find out how to apply.
That's a good point. I'll reach out to her directly.
My sister in-law works for a community theater group as a fund raiser, and in addition to gladhandling potential donors, her job includes knowing about how the government (non-science) grant world works.
She's in the UK, so her expertise wouldn't apply, but is there some similar person in Heebieville you might know?
Hi guys! Thanks for the bat-signal, heebie.
You're right that there are a ton of scammers and grifters out there that want to take people's money just to send them a *publicly available* (!) list of federal grants they probably aren't eligible for.
And I wouldn't particularly start with Grants.gov -- it's definitely overwhelming, not necessarily in the design sense, but in the conceptual sense. It's also very tough for small businesses to get money DIRECTLY from the federal government -- it's much, much more common to get federal money that is disbursed through a local or state agency, or a nonprofit, that serves as an intermediary.
There are three types of intermediary organizations that might be of some help. All of them vary in quality from the mediocre to the excellent depending on the geographic region they're in and other variables. I don't recall quite where heebieville is located, but we can follow up offline if any of these seem potentially useful:
1) Federally funded Small Business Development Center. These are usually housed at a college -- a state university or a community college. Depending on who staffs them, they can either be minimally helpful (here's a list of federal programs! good luck!) or incredibly useful (let me sit down with you and talk through your hopes and plans for your business, and then explain what resources are available to help you grow)
2) Stand-alone Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) or those that are part of larger initiatives or organizations. CDFIs can be like the social-good version of a bank. For one thing, they will consider loans that most banks think are "too small" ($50K) and under. Again, vary a lot in quality but the good ones are REALLY good. They are more focused on the money piece (loans, obviously, but occasionally they also administer grant funds) but some also provide business advising services.
3) Local economic development initiatives. This doesn't have to be "local" in the sense of your town or even your county. It can be a regional thing. They often know about strange little pots of federal or state money that can be used to support goals (revitalizing a business corridor! that you didn't know was un-vital!) that his business might fit into.
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I'm curious - is this supposed to fill a gap of some kind? Did a lot of patrons leave when the previous owner did? Is there reason to think this gym could be a self-sustaining business in general? I have to imagine that most of the grant programs, and all of the loan programs, are supposed to be some kind of boost to get something closer to a sustainable steady state, and not just a subsidy of operating expenses.
I think there are any number of ways a loan infusion could make the business more viable, no? Marketing, more classes to bring in members...
Sure. I'm wondering if this is a new hole they're in, related to the change in ownership, or if the gym was always being subsidized somehow.
I was going to suggest he talk to an SBDC, but I see Witt got there first. This seems to be the closest one.
I would also echo everything else Witt said, especially about needing an intermediary. There are programs out there to assist small businesses, but they're not really designed for the business owners to interact with them directly.
Is there reason to think this gym could be a self-sustaining business in general?
I've wondered this too - is this actually a workable business model? And I think the answer is "probably not quite". But I also think that this owner has lots of things he'd like to try, based on his experiences at other gyms, that he can't implement without an infusion.
Ie the current model is not quite sustainable, but maybe he can transform it to something that is.
Isn't the key to a successful gym to entice lots of people to sign up for an annual membership in January and then have them stop going by February?
And covince people that moving your Amazon boxes for you is actually a really good workout. Which might actually be true.
31: Wow, Mossy, that has a real Tom Sawyer feel to it!
Convince people to come to the Amazon warehouse for their personal training, and then they pay you to do your job! Genius!
I think that's one model. The other is to get people to sign up for and attend classes/personal training.
I went to one of Canada's top business schools and had a similar idea
We have a Nathan. You need to pick a different pseud.
Witt, Teo, and others: this is super helpful, thanks.