In states struck by natural disasters like the recent tornados that swept through both Oklahoma and Texas as well as Hurricane Sandy which recently hit New York, tens of thousands of small businesses are damaged or gone in an instant! This causes unprecedented challenges to the public and private mechanisms designed to address small business access to capital, community recovery and rebuilding of these towns.

Nothing but the shirt on their backs: Affected business owners are too often left without the necessary documentation or information for FEMA/SBA to process their claims and applications after a disaster.

The longer it takes for a small business owner to painstakingly re-construct their documentation, the more likely it is that they will give up and the JOBS they created and their tax revenues will be lost forever.

Why we need to solve this problem now and mitigate the economic impact:

With global warming clearly creating an increase in the amount of natural disasters desimating entire cities and towns we must have a better way to rebuild small businesses that we can all participate in.

Responsive and prepared government agencies can mitigate the economic impact of disasters through crowdfunding where the general public can donate or invest their money into these businesses in a transparent way and there’s an urgency for this to be implemented now.

Businesses that reopen quickly after a disaster realize increased business revenue, can put people back to work, create new jobs, and provide much needed sales, property and payroll tax for the impacted communities. Early successes are also critical to boosting morale during recovery efforts and can have a substantial positive effect on the community rebuilding effort.

The Technology Solution

Make it easy, make it available: We have the technology to solve this problem now and increase the success rate of rebuilding American small businesses and towns long before they may need it.

It’s called the http://crowdfundingroadmap.com, a standardized private label licensed cloud-based SBA and Crowdfund compliant, transparent multiple choice business plan and due diligence reporting system and repository, where all information required by the SBA for a disaster loan or the SEC for crowdfund investing is included and can be retrieved from anywhere at any time.

See the list here as required by the SBA:

https://disasterloan.sba.gov/ela/InfoNeeded.aspx

See the JOBS Act requirments here:

http://www.crowdfundingroadmap.com/sec/

Crowdfundingroadmap technology can instantly play a very important role in preparing entrepreneurs and small business owners ahead of time so they can compile and protect financial documents and information in a virtual standardized reporting system that is ready in an emergency for the process of applying for a FEMA/SBA small business loan or launch a crowdfunding campaign or any other necessary capital. It’s designed for compatibility with crowdfunding portals, or websites.

It facilitates collaboration at a distance in real time. Items with finite answers are formatted with an easy to use multiple choice Q&A system. Navigation is easy. Crowdfundingroadmap streams video presentations and indexes downloads of required supporting documents in its repository, as well as providing a Crowdfund Disclosure Report to facilitate the required due diligence process.

Completing the Crowdfundingroadmap enables a business to look ahead, allocate resources, take key steps, meet challenges, solve problems, and embrace opportunities.

It provides a place to compile facts, upload and store securely online all of the answers to the mandatory questions and the documents lenders and investors require during the review process for capital. And with its task and action plan entrepreneurs can create all the elements of a crowdfunding campaign and set it up ahead of time. Including the video, social media and due diligence information. This preparation would make it easy to launch a campaign on a crowdfunding website as soon as possible if a disater were to hit your area or small business.

Improve Staff Efficiency

Go virtual: Instant access to this critical information will allow FEMA counselors to assist in the recovery efforts of those FEMA staff on the ground in the disaster states, remotely and quickly helping to determine the current and future status of a company.

Go mobile: This information is accessible on mobile devices and provides instant access for review by crowdfunding investors, donors, lenders, SBA/FEMA or insurance companies, helping small businesses transition back to productivity much more quickly than by using outdated methods. Crowdfundingroadmap helps claims processors to quickly and accurately determine resources to be distributed to claimants after a disaster with complete security and transparency.

The Participants’ Journey

Keep everyone calm, make the process smoother: Post-disaster processing staff, instead of commiserating with victims and giving them a nearly impossible to-do list of required documents, could instead be receiving applicants armed with everything they need. Claims and loans could be processed in hours, days or weeks, instead of months, years or never. And entrepreneurs could instantly share with the public their skills and abilities to encourage donations and eventually investments once the SEC completes the rule making process which can help these great American job creators to rebuild and get back to business faster.

By implementing http://crowdfundingroadmap.com a new technologically advanced standardized reporting system, governments and its citizens can reach victims faster and farther away, engage more easily, and deliver access to capital faster while creating quantifiable results. This holistic, integrated and unified approach to this critical data empowers everyone involved and will revolutionize our ability to preserve the businesses of the hard working entrepreneurs who have built this great nation.

Can you give us a brief background and overview of your company?

My company has been around for a while in the table top gaming industry. I pioneered the first e-book site for table-top games in 2001 (http://www.RPGNow.com). We own 3 hobby game stores in the Milwaukee, Wisconsin area. About 4 years ago we started producing board games as Minion Games.

As a champion crowdfunder, what inspired you to leverage crowdfunding 7 times as a main source to fund your company?

It’s very costly to produce a board game and you are taking a wild guess at the desires and trends in the industry. We did this for our first round of games, some sold well and some didn’t. Our second year of games hit us hard and we had a lot of inventory costs and not enough sales. So for our third year we thought we’d use this new site/funding method called Kickstarter to make sure our products were in demand and to help offset the up front costs. Our projects did well for the time and helped pay the bills. In the last year though, Kickstarter has been paying for all the upfront costs of printing and selling more copies of games then I would without it.

In your opinion, had it not been for crowdfunding do you believe Minion Games would be as successful as it is today?

Definitely not. In fact it probably saved our board game company. Kickstarter helped turn our company from seeing dept from any new games to having profits before even printing a game. Crowdfunding helps you gauge the demand for your product before you produce it and that helps get enough made and lowers the cost for everyone.

What has been your most successful Kickstarter campaign to date and why?

A game called Hegemonic that raised nearly $90,000 (January 2013) – while it’s a great game, that’s not the reason for it’s success. Our game The Manhattan Project is on many Best of 2012 lists yet it only raised $8,600 (in August 2011) which didn’t even pay for the print run. The reason? Social networking and proven track record.

How big of an impact would you say social media played in the overall success of your Kickstarter campaigns?

A huge impact as stated above. Without being a part of the community or having a large following of your own from a brand, you will not raise much money in crowdfunding.

Do you have any specific advice you’d like to share with fellow entrepreneurs who are looking to launch their first ever crowdfunding campaign?

I suggest they review the plethora of information on my blog site, but especially the entry “Kicking & Screaming”

But in short, the primary things are:

- Build a social network of followers BEFORE you ever start your campaign.
- Research your real costs and actual development issues before you start.
- Don’t dilute your profits with massive amounts of stretch goal incentives.
- Remember this is going to be a full time job during the campaign

Statistically, it’s estimated that only 30% of crowdfunding campaigns are successful. In your opinion, what do you think the main reasons are for your campaigns having such a high success rate?

Initially it was setting my funding goal as low as I could and communicating well with our backers and the community. Nowadays it’s because we have a good track record of producing good games using crowdfunding and many of our past backers tend to back our future games.

Since launching your first Kickstarter campaign, what significant changes (if any) have you noticed when it comes to the rapidly evolving crowdfunding industry?

Global and mainstream acceptance of the concept and thus the amount of new backers that brings to the show. More backers are joining the crowd as oppossed to leaving.

Where do you see Minion Games 5 years from now, or where would you like to see it?

We hope to continue to make great games and doing so with revenue generated up front. I expect to be in a position of constantly having an active crowdfunding campaign throughout the whole year. In fact I hope to do that much sooner than 5 years.

Up until now all of your crowdfunding campaigns have been donation based. What is your take (if any) on equity based crowdfunding & the JOBS act and how do you feel this may change the procedure in which people launch new campaigns?

While I keep an eye on this, I am in no way well versed on the subject. I do feel this cannot be any worse than playing the stock market and see no problem in the concept. Not everyone has the ability, time or social grace to hunt for investors. This will maybe level the playing field a bit and we’ll see some great new companies come from it. But, will those companies survive with management that might only consist of techies?

To learn more about James visit his personal website at: JamesMathe.com.