My name is Michael, and I’m building Homegrown for people like my parents, Frank and Elena.
This is my living rejection of the hell they went through building their first business when I was a kid.

They put it all on the line, and when things didn’t work at first, it led to a period of time that we refer to as “the dark years.” This was not pleasant.

Anyone who glorifies entrepreneurship should heed stories like my family’s. You have a dream, you get after it, but you don’t really fully know what you’re doing (who does?), and you make mistakes. Those mistakes cost money, and when you were Frank and Elena Davis, that meant life savings wiped out, and…

Credit card debt so brutal you could barely breathe when the company called to ask why you were behind, three months behind. Depression. Arguments. Health issues. Sleepless nights. Moments when you felt like you were trapped in a box that was shrinking and you had to push with everything you had to escape.
But the box didn’t have any give, and it wasn’t just you in that box — it was your family and their dreams along with you.

My parents experienced this, and I did whatever I could then to help them, oftentimes staying up into the night because my Dad was still awake working and I didn’t want for him to be alone, as he pushed against the walls of that box.

But you know what? They f*cking held it together.

They held it together long enough to eventually catch a break from this amazing company called Honda that to this day is still an anchor customer of the successful business my parents still run alongside a group of warm, hard-working employees who almost never leave.

As they proved their model, more customers came knocking, and I couldn’t be more proud of the resilience my parents showed and I couldn’t be more grateful for the (hard earned) lessons in business building they gave to me.

From the very beginning to this exact moment, I’ve never been able to accept just how hard it was for them to get through the first ten years of their journey. Even after the business had been working and profitable for years, it always seemed so hard. Why?

I spent decades thinking about this singular problem of why growth was so hard for American entrepreneurs, and time and again I would come back to one particular limitation: financing.

The landscape my parents (unsuccessfully) navigated is the one entrepreneurs today are still wading through. It’s comprised of banks, government lending programs, private equity investors, venture capital investors, angel investors, chia seed investors, merchant cash advance & point-of-sale funding providers, and of course the new-ish wave of online lenders.

It’s overwhelming to navigate this, even for me. My family, with no access to growth capital and no experience working on Wall Street, just slowly re-invested earnings over 20+ years to get to where they are today, but it did not have to take so long, and it did not have to be so damned hard. There should have been a better way.

Our entire team walked away from more “stable” careers to ultimately try and fill a financing void that exists for brick & mortar entrepreneurs in America today.
When these entrepreneurs are supported, not only do they win, but so do their employees, and their communities.

We believe that funding growth is a way to kickstart and accelerate virtuous cycles in the places we all call home…
And so, we built a more empowering, lower-friction financing platform, even amidst quite potent skepticism about our model.

Lending is not in vogue, and it is extremely hard to build new funding companies. The only narrow lane through involves heavy automation.

Everyone tells builders like us to race towards automation and, as people who love technology, we could not disagree more.
We believe that AI alone isn’t the future; it’s real human relationships on top of the models.

We believe some other things too… We believe that you should not have to:

• Leverage your house to get capital

• Sell your hard-earned equity to grow

• Deal with balloon payments

• Fill out twenty of the same forms on five different websites to get financing figured out

• Drive to the person you want capital from; they should come to you

And we believe that you should be able to:

• Get funding that actually allows you to execute your full growth plan, especially once you’ve already proven that your business is working

• Get a decision quickly, ideally within a week or two

• Have the option of fully skipping equity dilution on your way to having a 10–50+ location business

• Benefit from flexible payments that shrink when your sales shrink and grow when your sales grow – have a partner that is aligned with your business

• Have a longer time to pay back growth capital (than most existing options), and capture savings if you return capital ahead of what’s projected

• Talk to a real, dedicated human. Ideally, someone who understands entrepreneurship from an operating perspective, not just from studying it in school

We have built what we believe in, because it didn’t exist and it should have.

And since we started back in mid-2023, we’ve realized that our way doesn’t just sound good in a slide deck; it’s actually game-changing for entrepreneurs, who tell us things like:

“Homegrown helped me double my growth pace without selling any of my hard-earned equity”
“Homegrown believed in us before other traditional finance providers did”
“Homegrown helped me skip a round, if not two, of equity financing”
“Homegrown has helped me protect my dreams.”
“You have helped me to do it My way”
“You were a dream come true.”

This is why we do this.
It’s for the moments we’re lucky enough to hear the words, and for the many more where we won’t.
It’s to build a product that empowers entrepreneurs to win at one of the hardest parts of entrepreneurship: expansion.

We have endless love for and belief in entrepreneurs building up our communities and will spend decades building products and experiences for them, because they deserve better, and when they win, communities win.

If you’re building something, we’d love to hear your story.

Michael

If you want to follow along on our journey, sign up here, follow us on LinkedIn, or reach out to us at hello@joinhomegrown.com.

If you’re wondering where Homegrown’s capital comes from, it’s largely from private investors who care deeply about America’s entrepreneurs and communities.