Business View Magazine | December 2019

23 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE DECEMBER 2019 P lease provide a brief overview of your company, the service you provide/product you make, and the main audience you serve. Founded in 2016, Redline Steel specializes in custom home decor manufacturing and distribution. Our focus is on products created primarily from steel, but we’ve recently transitioned into using other materials such as canvas and candle products. We have plans for expansion into even more items including wreaths, cutting boards, lamps and rugs — really any product within the home decor industry. Based in Huntsville, Alabama, Redline Steel is a veteran-owned and operated company and 100 percent of the products are manufactured in the United States. Redline Steel With CEO, Colin Wayne 1. Did you ever explore VC or other equity funding? If so, explain why you did not move forward with that option? Prior to the capital infusion from Decathlon Capital, all of Redline Steel’s financing had been bootstrapped. We had been able to sustain growth from month to month with the revenues we made, but we had reached a point where we were ready to scale in a big way. As the sole owner of Redline Steel, I have a very specific vision for this company over the next several years and I’m not ready to give up equity just yet— so venture capital and other equity lending was not an option I wanted to pursue, especially since the company is still fairly young. I also wanted to find a lender who would be a strategic business partner and who could offer more than a simple cash investment. A true financial partner can elevate growth opportunities for you to maximize the rate of return, and you won’t see something like that in a traditional bank loan. 2. What were your original goals with the funding from Decathlon Capital? We went through a very difficult fourth quarter at the end of 2018, where we had scaled the business into a larger building and increased our production. It took a little bit more overhead cash flow than we had anticipated, and we were struggling to keep up with the growth. In Spring 2019, we partnered with Decathlon Capital in order to continue on this upward growth trajectory and expand into the larger building, as well as leverage some assets that we had previously purchased. In the three years that Redline Steel has been operational, we’ve scaled from a 5,000-square-foot building into the 110,000-square-foot building we are in now, and we’ve produced over 4 million products in that time period. We are on track to have our products in over a million homes by the end of this year. Right now, we are 100-percent direct to consumer with plans to expand into wholesale bulk orders next year. The capital