MEMPHIS, Tenn. — For Crystal Oliver, running a business is about working hard. But it’s also about being smart.
“It’s not going to happen overnight.”
She doesn’t expect immediate results, and she cautions new business owners from thinking success works that way.
“We don’t have anywhere to educate us to say, ‘Well, this is the first step,” Oliver said.
After realizing their was a need, she’s now using the wisdom she’s picked up on her journey to Dream Team Solutions LLC. She’s helping guide people who are looking to run a business.
“All we know is what friends say. ‘Oh, you just go get a business license and now you are a business.’ And that’s not the way it works,” Oliver said.
As a black business owner she knows firsthand how cut and dry the process can be, but says it’s not so simple.
She says business credit makes a difference.
“Business credit, the score goes up to 100.”
Oliver say using your own personal credit to do business can be bad news. That’s a lesson she learned when she opened her first business, a bakery, in 2011.
“I made the same mistake myself at the bakery. I had a lot of vendors, I made a lot of purchases and I did not establish business credit.”
She says business credit can keep your personal credit from taking a nose dive while building up your business. But many business owner don’t know that and choose to rely on their personal line to get and keep things going.
“It weighs your personal credit down when it wouldn’t be like that if you had them separate. They are two separate entities.”
Oliver says that when it comes down to it, knowledge is the real secret on running and keeping a successful business going.
“They don’t have EIN numbers. They don’t have a LLC, and that is imperative.”
Oliver says employee identification numbers are free through the IRS and forming an LLC takes a few hundred dollars and the right clicks online.
Later this month, Oliver will be holding a seminar at the University of Memphis to teach business owners all about establishing and building business credit.
