Millennium

7 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 9, ISSUE 7 MI LLENNIUM who owned his own manufacturing rep business. “I went to him to ask about starting to stock and distribute our products directly,” he adds. “I wanted to buy a truckload of pipe and put it in the ground myself so that when I told people it was going to be there, I could guarantee that I was able to deliver on that promise.” Initially, there were hurdles, however. Kyle’s father-in-law explained that there were two potential issues. The first was that Kyle would be competing with his existing distribution channels. The second was the capital required to purchase the necessary conduit. “I had a decision to make,” Kyle explains. “Did I want to continue being a manufacturer’s rep and getting a steady paycheck or did I want to take a risk to better my clients and go in a different direction?” The first thing Kyle did was take a loan out on his house before visiting a number of banks in an effort to secure a credit line in order to establish a formal business. However, as this was just after the dot-com bubble, it was challenging to find a financial institution that wanted to get involved with the telecommunications space. “In the end, my grandmother gave us our first business loan,” Kyle admits. “It was a $17,000 certificate of deposit she had with a bank in Texas. I borrowed against that and started buying our first truckloads. And, thankfully, it worked out.” Kyle would put the products down in a yard and make the deliveries on his sales calls as he went. He’d then bill out the deliveries that night and, little by little, started to grow the inventory and the business. “From 2004 to 2006, it was just me doing everything,” Kyle notes. “I named the company Millennium, partly due to the new millennium, but also because it was ambiguous enough that if it failed, I could do something else with the James Kyle, founder and CEO