How I learned to write better grant applications to fund my bookstore

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thinking like a grant maker so why are they giving money away and how does your business operation affect whatever impact they're looking to make right so it's not what are we trying to do it's how does what we do create the impact that they're funding welcome to the Curious Cat Bookshop Podcast the podcast of the independent bookstore of Winsted, Connecticut creating a literary community in Northwest Connecticut bringing our local authors to the world and the world to our community in Northwest Connecticut welcome to the Curious Cat Bookshop Podcast I'm Stacy Whitman I'm your host and the owner of the Curious Cat Bookshop in Winsted, Connecticut and this is season two of the Curious Cat Bookshop Podcast finally! I've been a little bit sick and I had no voice for most of February so here we are finally back here on this podcast we talk about all of books from the writing process to the editorial and publishing process the art process and the book coming out and how it works in bookstores and so when we talk about bookstores I'm going to be talking a lot and I have been talking a lot about how I run my business and just running a small business in general the things that you have to learn and grow and so I have here today a return guest our first return guest on the podcast Jennifer Gonzalez and they are the person who helped me to craft an application for a grant that helped us to get computers for our employees last year Jennifer is a lawyer and a just all around expert when it comes to all of these things so I'm going to ask Jen to introduce herself then we'll dive into the conversation sure hi I'm so glad to be back I am a grant and organizational resilience consultant so I came out of law after about a decade of working in immigrant rights but before law school I actually worked for the grant agencies in the federal government so I worked for the National Institutes of health later for the department of justice and then after law school have worked with nonprofits and a lot of social impact work and so grants are just lifeblood of how all of those things move uh huh so yeah I've kind of had that 360 perspective on grants and I have this habit of seeing really cool community-based work little small organizations who are like we need some extra funding how do we do grants so I've been working with you and then with a few other small nonprofits a couple big things and a lot of it centers around how do we capture some grants or how do we realign what we're doing to go for grants and one of the interesting things about independent bookstores is that we are for profit business but there's a lot that we do that serves the community most of the time when you think of grants you think of grants for nonprofits right but talk about what you've seen as far as grants go for funding for profit businesses yeah what does it mean for a small business to look for grants okay so what you gotta understand is a grant is not a gift and I think we often think oh it's free money and because it's often tied to social impact of some kind or community impact I think in terms of oh I want to prove the worthiness of my project so that they will gift me something to to make it happen grants are a transactional relationship between a funding entity and an organization that is going to actually implement their mission right so you're actually more like a contractor than you are a gift recipient and so when you think of it that way there's a lot of ways especially something like an indie bookstore right someone who's got a brick and mortar facility someone who's we built a third space for the the community all of those different pieces come together and there are funding entities that go hey we want to help accomplish something that you can help us do and so when you think of it that way you think okay who is interested in the things that I can do and for a small business especially a small business that has a very clear community anchor there are lots of grants that come through both the city government, county government, state right so a lot of government based grants and then there's also foundation grants that that often work parallel with those government entities right so not all foundations are funded exclusively by say a private family or a private corporation some of them are funded kind of is these intermediaries so there's lots of little things that look at your business and then there's also because you're an entrepreneur right because you're working with diverse literature all of these different pieces to to your business there are folks who want to encourage those kind of businesses and want to invest in you as an entrepreneur so that's another place to think about who's offering grant yeah and like for example the grant that we worked on last year is the NHE3 grant which is out of New Haven and it's a foundation in New Haven that works to it's an economic development committee or something commission something yeah it's a it's a community foundation yeah community so community foundations actually that's a great segue ha ha so community foundations are one of those sort of like middle entities right they may come together out of working with different businesses in the community they're working with local government but they're really are an investment entity they're investing in the community in ways that align with their mission and in in the case of NHE3 which I that's the name of the grant I'm blinking on the exact name of the New Haven it's New Haven something or rather economic development or whatever and a lot of people think of it as New Haven only which is about an hour and a half from us up here in the northwest corner but their grant actually not only benefits New Haven but also what Connecticut as a state has designated as economic development zones and so up here in the northwest corner we're very rural and we are former manufacturing towns and so we're basically the Rust Belt up here yeah and so the state has designated our rural area as an economic development zone and that's why we qualified as a business in this area so like go ahead I was going to say I want that's awesome the way you described that and as you were describing that I want to kind of key in to connecting the dots right so the beginning of a good grant application is understanding what is the mission and how are you accomplishing their mission the number one challenge the number one problem you see with early grant writers folks who who don't have a clear vision of how to do this is again, they default to here's what my mission is and let me tell you why you should fund my mission and and what you're actually trying to explain to them like a job application right here's how I can accomplish your mission so this is a foundation that's centered in New Haven but they also recognize that if we're focused on economic development in our town our neighbors matter they're part of our economic ecosystem so their interest in New Haven expands to everyone who's connected with that economic development right and so there's another keyword economic development that's what they're investing in businesses that grow businesses that grow businesses right like they want people who are sparking economic growth in the surrounding area so let's talk about how the process that we went through as you were helping me to because I had a whole bunch of ideas that I had thrown out in this document of here's what I'm trying to do and I had a general sense of what I'm trying to do and how it meets what you're looking for but the way that you're describing it you brought it into focus so go ahead and and talk a little bit about how you helped me to refine that how do we get to focus right so we start and it's kind of like the Venn diagram right oh I actually pause before we get there because a lot of people who are thinking about starting a business will be like but how do I find a grant so let's actually start at the beginning how do you find a grant so the first thing you do to find a grant is actually figure out what it is you're doing right you need to figure out how to talk about what it is you're doing in terms that grant funders are interested in and so for a small business that goes back to your business plan and I've read your business plan it's fantastic because you talk about what are the community ways that you're anchoring to that community right you talk about being a third space you talk about literacy you talk about I you could probably rattle these off the 3 Cs of bookstores which are community, congregation well actually, now I'm blanking on it but convening community and something else but actually I got that from a white paper from a guy from Harvard who just decided he wanted to study why bookstores matter OK OK that's wonderful right so one of the first steps that you can take is rather than go look for grants for what I'm doing and you'll be like nobody's funding what I'm doing or maybe there's three out there and they're way they expect really competitive or right or that yeah or if you're trying to apply for like the American Express that $25,000 that they give to retailers between Small Business Saturday and the in the middle of January exactly the time that I have time to write a grant right OK we'll come back to that OK so again thinking like a grant maker they want to get money so let's go back to rule number one which is it's all dirty money even though billionaires wanting to to feel better about themselves oh it really it who are the big foundations when you think about big foundations that give away money Carnegie Hewlett Packer all the names that are listed at the end of every PBS program and viewers like you so those were those were families or corporations that put all this money in an investment vehicle in a foundation that invests it and they make a deal we will not have to pay taxes on this if we distribute a certain percentage of it every year in grants now that's not to say that the people doing the grants or going for the grants don't care about social impact cause there's a lot of great people doing cool work but it's an it's an economic system and at the heart of it is is we are selling grants are selling tax deductions and so when you're talking about a corporate grant A) a lot of those if you're getting that year end it's cause it's tax year end we're trying to get money off the books or right at the beginning of the year or whatever I don't know how their accounting works but the timing is likely tied to a business objective corporate grants small businesses are great for corporate grants cause it's kind of a brand it's a step up from from say being a brand ambassador it's it's a mutual investment because it's community connected and because you're aligned with their branding corporate grants often are actually coming out of marketing departments and PR departments mm hmm so I have a good friend who's worked in nonprofits for like 30 years and she always talks about like her first lesson was so there was a huge corporate scandal of like the main company in the in the city that she was based in and the development director was like, oh yeah they're going to start pouring grants out to balance the PR get ready to write for'em because we're a good fit they're going to come right and yeah it's PR but like, we'll take the cash because it's accomplishing what we want to right right so so when you rethink about that like that's why the timings work the way they do they have different fiscal years they have to distribute that money on a certain cycle to meet the the legal tax obligations that they have as an investment vehicle so so that's what's behind sort of that like what is a foundation and when you understand that it's about lining yourself up and what I what I tell folks when I work with them is think about your impact and your mission and your mission as your anchor and then align to where they are and see what's in between mm hmm and so what you want to do is think about what are the needs of your business what are things that you if you had the money
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a storefront upgrade or internal things or programming for the community or whatever it is that you are good at doing and would love to do if you just had extra money think about all those things and and see what else those things are doing and then go think about who else cares about the thing that I'm accomplishing what is the impact that we're both anchored to and I think that what you just said ties right into what I was going to say that is important for somebody like a small business owner like me is to be out there networking in your business community because that's where you're going to find the local stuff absolutely so I go to here in Connecticut we have the WBDC which I've talked about here on the podcast before I got a startup grant from them of twenty five hundred dollars and that allowed me to have a local carpenter build our front desk that has this beautiful slat wall and I was able to stain it myself and so that saved me a little bit of money but now we have this instead of an old dresser that was converted into a counter now we have an actual counter it fulfilled a business purpose for them the WBDC the Women's Business Development Council their purpose as a council is to help women entrepreneurs be successful and that's education you know they have free classes they have all sorts of things and that's for grades so let me ask you this how does your counter accomplish that for your business it's not the face of the business but it's where people come to pay and it's where they come to ask us questions and it creates a good workspace for us and it makes it possible for the shoppers to have a better experience it anchors the space right it anchors the space visually it anchors the space functionally and creates a more useful area so that you can interact with folks all of the things that you know you need to do to build your business to to drive profitability are improved because you have this and you were able to hire local do something bespoke anymore, a lot of businesses it's built in with IKEA furniture it's expensive to do things like that custom and so that's right that's a great investment up front and being able to ask that of a local carpenter I mean I couldn't ask a local carpenter to build all our shelves but having that as a centerpiece and being able to know that we are circulating that in our local economy and that's another thing about these missions that a lot of the foundations that I've seen so far as far as local goes is that they want to know that we're contributing to the local economy that we're not just going to go buy something online yeah we're not just going to order from Amazon a bunch of stuff so that's the other thing so once you got a sense of what it is you do and what the impact of what you do is right so when you read The Curious Cat Business Plan you talk about being a third space and there's a lot of discourse and I'm sure on the podcast you've talked about like what is a third space right actually I haven't we should I should definitely put that on the list okay because why haven't I talked about that right there's there's a lot of discussion in sort of sociological spaces about for those who don't know can you help people know what a third space is yeah so a third space is where we gather that isn't our home and isn't our work so we think of these as community spaces this is parks, libraries shopping centers, restaurants the places that we go outside of our two main hubs right cause home and work are the two places we all go and so it's the third space and I think that when you're talking about a third space I think it's even a little bit deeper than just going to a shop to a place that you shop at right the place where you can meet other people in the community so one of your Cs is congregate or convening convening there we go it's got it's it's a C word for gathering haha yeah haha cause we need the book people need the alliteration and I respect that deeply haha I am first and foremost a book nerd English major who's moved into all these other things well and I think for the sake of a white paper you need something that people remember exactly three Cs and that's why it's hard for me to remember them to be quite honest because they're not the first thing yeah I think so if you're really focused on your business a lot of small business owners have a lot of history in their industry they've grown up with that maybe they've inherited maybe a business that they helped build and so they know their business but it's hard to imagine what your business means to people way outside your immediate industry and your customers and so one of the ways you can can start to build your understanding of where you might find grants is to go to places like your industry organizations look for what they're talking about where are they investing where are they looking for investment where do they think people should be investing in that industry and as you hear what they're talking about it'll start to collect connect with what you're doing you'll be like oh okay my 12 book clubs that we host are accomplishing not just the economic of we're selling books but we're we have a gathering space that's considered a third space it's open to people beyond just being customers and it's a place where people gather and build relationships within the community and so if oh a lot of local governments are talking about how do we encourage third spaces now I'm thinking okay I have an economic hook so that's one set of grants is folks who want to grow the economy in my area and those are usually some of them might be industry specific if you're in or they might be your chamber of commerce a lot--I was going to say most of them are location anchored so that's it's geographic it's local start with the chamber of Commerce call up the like the business people at your local city usually they have kind of a help desk or well here in Connecticut most towns have an economic development committee I don't know how that works because this is the first state that I've actually successfully created a business in I had started another business but then I got pulled out to New York to start it with Lee and Low so yeah look for that kind of look for that concept in your area look for anything that's about community or about local investment those are places where you're going to you're going to find either information about what is the priorities in your sector in terms of grant investment but you're also going to start to hear about actual grants local grants the more local your grant maker the more the relationship matters the more distant and and global your grant maker if it's a national program or an international program the more your mission and your impact is what they not just that you're doing the impact but the verification and the data you have about your impact right yeah because you report later I'm at I'm I think almost three years at the three year point since getting my startup grant and every quarter or every six months I forget I still get a survey from WBDC asking about how that grant impacted me yeah I was putting together some ideas for grants and I came up with the three A's so AAA--the first one is alignment so why are they giving money away and how does your business operations affect whatever impact they're looking to make so it's not what are we trying to do it's how does what we do create the impact that they're funding mm hmm so it's a triangle of thinking getting that that baseline alignment until you understand what that is you're just not going to be able to write a application that's going to pass muster it used to be there was kind of a put as many as you can out there and hope you get them grant making has become a lot more sophisticated in terms of like we know exactly what we want we want you to tell us how you're going to accomplish that it's very clear and and the goal is to be clear right the goal is to make it easier I honestly don't think most people need a grant writer they just need a friend to give them 20 minutes of here you go right because you can do this and grant makers are making it easier for folks to do that so number one is that alignment number two is anchoring and that's kind of what we talked about so one you can anchor to impact and then how do you anchor to data because they're going to ask you essentially for what is our ROI what number of something are we getting back and so you've gotta have some number anchor we're part of getting it done we invested in a local craftsman etcetera etcetera reporting back here's how we spent the money and here's how it matters sometimes your anchoring is coming from the data that you're collecting especially if there's sort of a chain of logic between what I'm doing and what my impact is and you need to show those numbers but a lot of times we're anchoring to external data to show that the impact is there even though you're just a small piece of it because you're one bookshop and so you as we've worked together on your business a lot of times you pull up a couple websites of bookseller associations I don't know what they're called the American Booksellers Association and we have a regional association here every region of the US has a regional association we're NEIBA, N-E-I-B-A right so they're providing all of this data because they're doing studies and they're collecting surveys and things like that that they can talk about what's going on in the industry they might be able to help give you those ROI numbers to say OK we know that for every dollar spent on improving the the business visible environment there's generally a 2% drive in this or whatever right so they're going to give you some of those those study numbers that you can say this is why your money has a logical reason that it's going to give you that this ROI right and it really depends on your industry so like for us the American Booksellers Association the survey that they do every year is called the ABACUS ABACUS, just like the machine, it stands it's fantastic I they they call it the ABC's of bookselling the ABACUS and there's something if we don't have a literature we gotta go alphabetical alright yeah sorry right right but a B and C stand for something that I don't remember accounting something and but my point about the ABACUS is that they survey anybody who wants to voluntarily submit their data and it gets anonymized then from that data they give us a report back how our store compares to all other stores in the United States and they have a a General Abacus report that then says here is how much percent the most profitable bookstores spend on cost of goods sold how much percent they spend on staff how much percent and so they could be what we would how much benchmark yes it's for cost of goods sold--benchmarks exactly so the benchmark might be how many books should you be selling every year how much should you be selling per square foot of your store or something like that yeah so there are all these these data exactly that help you to know am I spending too much on rent am I spending too much on employees and that's actually what got me thinking about maybe I am spending too much on employees when we're not making enough money that kind of thing that return on investment like what is it it's part of this thinking about your business in three time zones it's where are we right now where do we need to be to be sustainable and how are we going to grow into that and then you're looking back at your data and trying to figure out what parts of my past experience are still relevant and I think it's important for relatively new business owners to know you won't always know how to interpret this data from your regional or your industry association until you've been in it for a while when I first looked at the ABACUS like right as I'm writing my first business plan I was like I don't know what you mean by percent of this or that but now I can see as the money comes in I'm throwing our card sales into my POS savings system square has a savings account that you can throw things into and you can put them in folders and now it makes sense to me because I'm like oh if I throw X percent into rent and I throw X percent into payroll utilities etcetera if I am breaking out my expenses like that for the purpose of savings hello Tabitha hahaha then every month if I am not hitting that benchmark of having saved enough every month for rent or having saved enough every week for payroll then I'm not hitting my benchmarks on a regular basis and I'm not going to hit my long term goals yeah starting to the the logic mechanics the mechanics and the logic of it are starting to make more sense to me now than they did two and a half three years ago so I also want to just point out to newer business owners that if you feel a little bit overwhelmed by the data that you're finding that's part of the process right it's part of that going from knowing your business to knowing your ecosystem right so when I work and knowing how you fit within that ecosystem when I work with nonprofits the first thing we do is an ecosystem landscape and positioning report and it's what is the world you're working in and what is going on with the money in that world right now mm hmm and until you know that there's don't start don't go I want to do this let me go find a grant for it go what are grants being offered for and how does that intersect with my existing plan and if it's not automatically there don't try to build your plan into the grant but take the time to build your plan without the grant and then see where you can plug money in once you kind of got that going exactly so it's not just like what did you spend it on and what are the rules it really is how did you get the mission done and when you work with say a nonprofit accounting where you have to be really strict about those kind of decisions and what money goes to what you discover is a lot of it starts with how do you frame what you're doing both for your grant application but also for you as a business right what impact are you actually aligned to and the better you're aligned to that the more likely it is that you're going to get into that top review pile and that you're going to get through kind of the slush pile into oh these are folks that are doing a thing and now you're competitive so alignment anchoring so a loan, when you're accountable you have to pay it back somehow for a grant the way that you're accountable is how are you accountable to your impact how are you reporting back to that sometimes it's very easy right so you have I know you had a grant where you put up your awning yes and that was the facade improvement grant yeah how did you do it we we did it here's the receipt right like that was a very simple accountability but you did have to send in some kind of proof that you used the money for what you said you were going to do and that it met the amounts and whatever the criteria was of that grant so I think I actually still have to spend like $300 and I've been meaning to put a film on the window it's not really a facade improvement but it will help our books not burn in the sun but that would be and I'm putting up a mailbox as well sorry which will improve your window look yeah it'll it'll improve our displays because our and it will help us to stop losing money on books that have faded like pink and yellow books just always in the sun speak to me if they're faded I will the insides are the same color hahaha but um yeah the the only I will always catch your your trash books I will I was hahaha yeah we got we've I think so far we've got a total of three grants so it's the startup grant which paid for the front counter and a few other things like it paid for a vacuum which I mean certainly makes the store more pleasant right and it's a it's a it's an investment because what a lot of folks if they're starting a small business for the first time get the the sticker shop comes from when you need industrial grade products and maybe maybe you still had a retail I actually just bought a commercial shark but but it has to be something that was going to last and that can yeah handle the kind of foot traffic yeah I didn't just go buy a 90 dollar vacuum I went and paid a little bit more for something that I was hoping it'll and it's been three years and it's lasted yeah something that's going to last and that's part of the grant right they want to give you something that's going to take that expense off your books for as long as possible and so that's another thing when you're thinking about what kind of things you want to spend grant money on the more disposable the less likely it is that they want to fund it and a lot of grants will disallow right so it's not just hey you're funding the impact but it's how you're spending the money what you're spending it on and that actually gets into a very important thing that you have to pay attention to when you're applying for grants because they often have rules as to what the money can be spent on so the WBDC the first grant that I got from them the 20 five hundred dollar grant as long as it was for something for my business great I just had to tell them what it was and why I needed it and show them my business plan and part of it was I couldn't even apply for the grant until I had taken a marketing class so I had a full marketing plan out of that class and then we presented to a panel of judges and got feedback from local business people on you know how we could improve our marketing plan and that kind of thing so it was a whole process that I think really challenged me on some of the ways that I was thinking about marketing and what I was prioritizing and it pushed you to be getting advice and feedback from folks that have experience that you that you would have otherwise had a difficult time getting an audience with right right the big challenge with my next application and that's what we're going to get into in a minute is the ignite grant for WBDC is a 10 thousand dollar grant they have three tiers the 2500 dollar is your startup grant and I always forget what that's called the ignite grant is $10,000 and the I forget what it's called again but the next grant level is $25,000 for people who have gotten the ignite grant like a year after you get the ignite grant okay so that's really that's really common that grant makers have tiers and in the industry we we talk about different tiers so you have micro grants which are like 5,000 25 these are whatever like college like mini scholarship type stuff it's enough to do one little thing well right so those are a good starting point and then what you're doing is when you apply for those is you're proving that you're grant worthy which means you're proving that you're accountable you're proving that you're in alignment right what are the expectations in order to just get to the grant for a lot of small businesses there's there's a level of profitability or a level of cash flow you have to show that you're actually making money if you're just hustling over there trying to like capture stuff and it's it's hard but they want to see that you've been able to establish your business before they're investing in the next step exactly there's a start of the birth or something else might be willing to work with you because of what you're doing or where you're at in the process well actually they had a minimum of you must have been making at least 25 k a year in revenue not in profit in revenue and so they want to see that you have an established business but you can be brand new exactly yeah that you're moving that you're moving economic right you're moving money system because they're investing in making more money move through that system exactly, and you can either take the marketing class or you can take the business plan class and that helps you to build your business a little bit more and you might not have even started your business yet when you're taking the class but by the time you apply for the grant you need to have started your business have a business checking account and be making enough money for them to go this is a real business you're committed to it and now the ignite grant and this is the the thing that I was going to say is about the rules of what you can spend the money on the ignite grant has very specific rules because what I could really use as a business owner right now is working capital I just need to be able to pay myself I need to be able to pay my employees I need to pay for rent yeah stuff like that and right now we are in the slowest season from January to early April it is we are 20% down this year and the holiday season wasn't great because the overall economy isn't great we're not the only bookstore we're not the only retail store dealing with this but cyclically January to early April is a hard time for any retail store and bookstores are included in that my point is what I could really use is working capital but that is not aligned with what they're saying that you need to invest the grant in they have you cannot use it for construction costs you cannot use it for any kind of working capital costs like paying payroll or paying a subscription or anything like that has to be a project that expands your business and makes you more profitable right so there's an underlying assumption and this is very common grant makers don't want to pay you to do what you should already be doing right and as a small business you should already have figured out how to run your business and make money you have and you're also struggling with capital because you don't have a huge investment base behind you and I don't have a like a huge savings account or anything right you don't have secondary income streams all of those things that having been laid off to be real right to be real very few small businesses can pay themselves just off their straight up profits especially in retail especially in something like books so and our and our profit margins like well I've talked about it on the podcast before not necessarily with you on the podcast but I've talked about on the podcast of how the profit margin pie works in books and if you are lucky as the owner if you're really really good at what you do and about managing costs and getting your turns just right which I'm not if you're really lucky your profit margin is anywhere from 2.5% to 5% a year yeah no it's of your top line revenue it's a tight industry but so grant makers at least right now that is not how they think about it right they want to do add on they want to be able to say what could you not do that you can now do because of us and some of that is for their own what when we talk about their PR their interest like what is it that they care about they want to be able to say look what we did uh huh not just we kept everyone go we kept it alive yeah right we talked about part of this podcast being a brainstorming session yeah and I actually think that I finally hit on what I need not what I need but what I could do that would fit this because I think I've told you before but let me let me just go through the list of things that have been suggested to me as well if you did this then it would qualify I should buy a van for the business so I can do more pop ups well pop ups are not that profitable especially school book fairs I'm actually pulling back from school book fairs because I did the numbers and I wasn't even paying myself but if I were to pay myself an hourly wage for the amount of time that it took me to put the books in the crates put the crates in my car take them to the place set up the school book fair be at the school book fair and the best part is working with the kids and giving them recommendations and talking with them about the right that's the best part of doing a school book fair but that that's like that's my that's really my profit the delightful middle yes it's really your profit but then by the end I am like literally throwing my back out trying to load everything else up by myself because these are schools where often times the parent volunteers are thin on the ground so even though I ask for parent volunteers I might get one or two parent volunteers if I'm lucky I've been doing all the physical labor myself I have to rent a U Haul or something or I have to do like an hour long drive twice to get everything there because my little car doesn't care everything so so my point is when you do the numbers a little bit I want to walk through this analysis because I think it's a good example OK so they would love to buy you something that makes you able to do more business right and for so they're like OK if you bought a van you could do more school book fairs right and I could take I could take it in one trip what were you going to say in all that timeline that you described of work and effort and cost the U Haul cost is what gets replaced not even the gas just the U Haul it's $100 over the course of a week and that is probably the one of the smaller inconveniences the smaller costs your time and energy cannot be easily replaced because like I said I did the numbers because you give the school a portion usually about 10 or 20% and part of that might be giving a discount to the kids if you're talking about you're in a like a low income school or whatever sometimes you give a discount to the kids and then you give a portion to the school to their annual fund and that reminds me I need to actually from my last I need to calculate from my last school book fair so I can make the donation so that's a certain amount of money and then anywhere from 50 to 60% of what you make during that just goes to cost of goods sold that goes to buying the books and there are bookstores who do enough of this business that they can get book fair accounts with publishers at a better discount but I don't do enough business and I have no place to put separate inventory to be able to keep it apart the simple way of catching that is to be able to say that is not a market but my my is expandable for you right so right my point is like what's left is about 15 to 20% if you break that down by hour it's about maybe six or seven dollars an hour for my labor right including the cost of the van and stuff like that that doesn't even like break out that cost right exactly so like when you do the numbers that doesn't expand my business to become more profitable right if you didn't have to pay for the the U Haul and you're now getting nine bucks an hour or whatever right like it's just not making a big enough difference and then that goes to gas and maintenance of the van and where do I park it to give ROI right so you have so once you think about what is their return on investment you also gotta think about where is my return on investment I think for small business owners that's the tricky part because your immediate business concerns cash flow, staffing keeping things stable through all the ups and downs and there's a lot of ups and downs these days those are things that are hard to just help you fix cause they're ongoing economic situations so what you gotta think about where are my business growth or my profitability growth opportunities exactly and can one of those line up because let's say you were in an area where there were lots of school book fairs and a really good mix of affluent and right all of that but a band would be a great investment for that person so what is it for Curious Cat that actually gives you that boost well, and the next suggestion was you should get a bookmobile well, and the next suggestion was you should get a bookmobile you should buy a bookmobile this is a ten thousand dollar grant I was going to say that's not going to buy you crossed out of a book mobile like we're talking about more like a little minibus now that would have to be outfitted and like tricked out yeah little and and to go to more like fairs or farmers markets and just set up the bus essentially essentially a mobile location it's a mobile location it is a mobile bookstore so and just getting that set up and outfitted could could cost upwards of $200,000$10,000 is not even a drop in a bucket toward the cost for something like that so obviously my whole point of saying this is that a lot of people who do not know your business are going to throw ideas at you that have no clue what's actually they just think wouldn't that be great it would be really great for you and a lot of business owners and and small organizations it's easy to get caught up in what we could do based on what the funders are offering to think about okay well, what kind of business could we do if we purchase these you know a vehicle or something and you always want to push back on that because you need to stay anchored to your business and what it needs and think about again what are things I would do anyways if the profits were high enough to reinvest and here's where I think I've landed and you were in the meeting with me and one of my business advisors when I threw this out but as I think about it more I really do think that this has potential to expand our events program and to apply for $10,000 and say we will use this to bring in bigger authors at bigger venues at places where we charge we control it so we can charge admission because we had a really successful event with Sarah Beth Durst we sold about 40 tickets and and we hosted it at a local brewery who were kind enough to donate the space it was a little bit too noisy for the recording of the podcast because that's actually those of you who follow the podcast you'll have seen that episode of me interviewing Sarah Beth Durst it was really great to have that partnership with the local brewery and it was really awesome of them to host us because people bought food they give us the space but it was a mutually beneficial relationship exactly and I'd love to do more things with them but maybe not this because 40 to 60 people in a very noisy area that's also it has people eating dinner nearby and some live music and stuff like that the big challenge that I'm going to have to go through if I do this is figuring out what the right venue is here locally because the library would love us to to do events that are bigger let me back up to to explain to those of you who don't understand take a breath cause you've backed up three times in this conversation and I and I I want to anchor a few things for you one the idea of bringing in bigger authors is such a good fit for you not simply because you're a bookstore and bringing big authors sells books but because you Stacy have a fantastic Rolodex of fantastic authors from your time in publishing and you've worked with folks and you're in the industry so your ability to reach out to some of these authors and to connect and the likelihood that you will succeed at booking and marketing these events is much higher because of that and so again like finding the project that aligns with your business interest that works with us and works with what they're to amplify and is amplified by what it is is your secret sauce in your business what is your competitive advantage and so that becomes your competitive advantage in the grant as well and what I'm getting at is there are advantages and then there are challenges what are the challenges that are how are you going to overcome them uh huh because the challenge for us is yes I can bring in bigger authors but if we're hosting them in our space we have a fire code limit of 28 people in that space so you want to be able to so find yeah so you need if we go to the library we can't sell tickets we can sell books but not tickets if we go to a couple of other venues in the area we can sell books but they want the ticket money so the challenge for us is finding a space that's big enough to like we had more than 100 people come just for the signing portion of Sarah Beth Durst from as far away as Worcester Mass that's two hours from us yeah like that's a big draw it's a draw for people who maybe they might not want to take the train into Boston maybe they'd rather take a drive in the in the hills and then you know explore a little town in Connecticut and have a whole day trip of it so so I love that you separate like there are the advantages and then there are the challenges and the challenges what what is really fantastic if you get yourself in kind of the grant community as a small business as a startup as as a community anchored business when you run into those challenges it's this invitation to do the kind of deep strategy thinking that a lot of business owners want to spend time on because they know it has payback but they can't prioritize and so part of the investment of that grant even if you don't win is you get a good marketing plan you get a great business plan you get a good strategy you've run the numbers you now understand your business and how to do something to grow it in a way that a lot of times you have to pay for a class to get through exactly or hire a consultant to come in and give you extra time and energy to get there and the grand conversation that you're having with yourself and your application and whoever is your sounding board and you should always have a sounding board with your business you have a couple of those right is giving you the opportunity to work on your business in a way that often you don't get to and so don't always think of if we get it great and but if we're not going to get it it's not worth it because the work they're asking you to do should feel in alignment and if it exactly doesn't it's part of the cost of the grant and the reason why I feel like this is the most aligned thing for me is because this is something that I want to do anyway it's just a matter of funding from a grant like this could make it more possible to to accelerate it and to bring in people we might not be able to otherwise because they might be further away maybe it would help us to pay for travel costs and and um lodging all of those things and or or it might help us to pay for the venue if there's a deposit required it's the kind of thing where it's an investment that hopefully it will pay back if we were to do one or two of these a month really big ones that we really promote and get a lot of people to come to even if the ticket is $20 and then we sell some books multiply that out by 200 people if we had a venue that big or 80 people or whatever yeah that is more than 28 people buying a book in our store and that's a fantastic strategy right especially to offset things like natural dips in your selling cycle so again it's thinking about that strategy and showing grant makers that you've done that work and you've done those numbers you found the way through and they're going to be part of that and always understand that every grant comes with the costs right so you've brought up challenges and there's two pieces to that there's going to be costs that go with putting on event that might go beyond with the grant can cover and you've got to be prepared for that right it's not going to necessarily fund everything or advance everything you need cash flow wise so there's those direct costs but there's also what's it taking for me to get it together and is the qualifications and prerequisites that they're expecting helping my business anyways or are they a detour and the more that you're detouring the more that you need to calculate they're giving me 10 grand but they're actually I'm only getting seven grand grants can be seen as profit if you're in the black you're going to have to pay taxes on that funding so that's part of the cost of that grant so the actual dollars in is not the number on the grant that's an important thing to be thinking about I mean I have not been in the black so I haven't had to worry about that yet but it's like really important thing to think about you got a major tax liability cause we're still building and that's how you know and that's pretty normal for the first three or four years of a business exactly so which is why startup grants are a good place but when you get to that tipping point or you're getting into corporate marketing like grants and things like that community and responsibility and investments you have to think about what is the actual cost of this money and what are what are the direct cost that is causing me to incur and what are my indirect cost and is that still giving me the ROI that I need to do something I wasn't going to do already right so let's do something more not just what you're already doing so let's move into you found a grant that you're interested in you feel like it aligns with you as a business how do you present yourself let's talk about how you you helped me to going back to what we were talking about earlier and then I backed up I had thrown out all these things that I was I needed computers I had staff at the time I actually I had to let a couple of people go this spring so they were able to use those computers for several months before we ran into some challenges not spring but winter they're they're also part of the businesses of it right exactly and so when I hire again they'll be able to use those computers again and so that is a long term investment but my point is to be able to get that grant I was like all of this kind of brainstorming that we were doing for this next one you were helping me with that but then I had to actually sit down and fill out the application and answer some very specific questions talk about trying to because it's for me I run very long and they had limits that I had to get to the point so let's talk narrative strategy and this is the fun thing about working on this was I got to work on it with Stacy Whitman who understands how to tell a story and how to build a story and craft a story in ways that most normal humans never are that great by the way this is Pyewacket right on schedule thank you Pyewacket is he the one anyway keep going is he the one in the in the wall mural no the wall mural is actually Mogget who passed away in 2020 that's right okay Pyewacket and Mogget coexisted at some point I think no, Mogget passed and I still had Tildrum and he was so sad and then I adopted Pyewacket and Juju I they were friends with Tildrum for about a year before he passed I need to commit it to memory I need to work on it it's okay so when you're applying to your grant you're trying to actually answer the question you're not trying to explain why you're just trying to answer the question so if your struggle is I just keep writing along cause I need them to understand all how all the big pieces work together that's great and that's a lot of what I did yeah and then what you gotta do is you helped me to be like you're like they don't care they don't care about that right so all this stuff that we've talked about thinking like a grant maker and it can sound a little cynical sometimes I think to folks that are not used to the just brass tacks of how grants work but really go back through like why are we in alignment what is my impact all of these things that helped us find the grant are actually the things they want to see so they're not in the application they're not well and I think also think about it like you are in the slush pile so and they have they the I'm sure as they're reviewing they probably get hundreds or thousands of these applications they're going to be reading very fast so there there are certain kinds of grants and certain kinds of industries that you really are in this competitive sort of trying to prove that you're the best one for it but most grants they're not just giving one away they've got a plan and they're looking for people who qualify and this is I think especially true of small business grants because a lot of them are mandatory distribution they have to find people to give them to and so what you want to do is make it easy for them to give it to you so take off your insecurity of I want to show you I'm so good and move into okay so what is it you need and let me tell you how I can give it to you let's go through the checklist and so think about how do you tell your story about your project and about your business in their words and in their terms so go back and read their website if you're using a lot of folks are going to end up using AI for this and Stacy and I have long conversations about AI and how we feel about it and the ethics and also it's there and to me work in the system to do good this is a good reason to use the tools but I think a lot of folks are going to use that and what I would say where AI can help you is sorting through their website sorting through all of their documents they're going to show who they gave the grant to before who else they give money to what are their priorities how do they talk about it what are their terminology AI is great for helping you kind of synthesize those key terms and ideas and then you can take that and and talk back to them about your business using their words so it's a little bit of a translation process use their terminology and then answer the question they're asking rather than try to like it's not a college application where you're trying to get creative information into a standard question well and I think it's important to remember you don't have to tell the whole history of your business unless they ask and that's what I think I was trying to do is yeah like I was trying to be like this is why bookstores are important and I think that and it's been you know six months or longer since we worked on that particular application but I want to say the reason why I did it was because that's how I wrote the previous two grants right yeah and I and that was successful but at the same time those were startup grants and I think they were a little bit more lenient and and they're looking a little bit more right like so those are more competitive startup grants cause lots of people are going for them and you are kind of trying to show that your startup idea has merit outside of just existing right yes and no for one yes and the other everybody in the class had already qualified for the grant as as the the basic qualifications and that was a mandatory distribution but you had to go you had to finish the class and then your proposal had to be good enough and you had a that particular one so you were sorry I said it was marketing and things like that so you were trying to promote your business and so that that works into what they're looking for right we want to help you promote your business apply to us and talk about promoting your business right and in the class they were like if everybody does a great job with their application everybody gets a grant you know they had enough funding for that but it had to the project that that you proposed in the grant had to fit all the criteria we've we talked about all of the alignment and stuff like that I think maybe three out of 10 didn't get it because they just weren't well developed enough yet so like they hadn't answered the questions they didn't have I don't I mean I don't know the details of what didn't qualify or anything like that but I have a feeling that that they went back and worked with their business advisors which with W b d C that's free and worked on developing their business a little bit more so yes some of them yes and some of them no it really just depends on the grant too well that's what I'm saying right so you've gotta you've gotta qualify and you've gotta show that what when they give you the money you're going to be able to do what you say you're going to do and for them they've set it their metric for that right is is your is your plan developed enough that it's whatever our threshold of actionable is exactly so when you go to your application you're answering those questions so one read the application questions go read the website read all the information and look at who else gets grants if that's posted and if it's a foundation you can look them up on Guidestar and get their 990 and they have to list everyone they gave money to so you can you can you explain what Guidestar is I actually don't know what Guide Star is for just quick purposes it's a website it's an organization that tracks and validates nonprofits so foundations are nonprofit entities they're a subclass of nonprofit like a nonprofit charity or whatever and so the mandatory reporting is posted there they have audit assessments and things like that to show that and you said you said you can look at their 9 90 is that like accounting of where they give money so the 9 90 is their tax filing every year and that talks about where they give their money and certain foundations have to list everybody and there's all sorts of rules so you can usually figure out who else gets money and for what and how they talk about those projects again all of these are going to give you hints to the way they want you to talk about your project I did want to give another shout out in of a resource Candid which I think is probably connected to Guide Star they might be the same company but Candid is the foundation database it's usually a very ridiculous like a thousand dollar a year subscription or something cause it's meant for people who are doing large-scale grant searching but a lot of libraries will have an account so for me I'm in San Diego they have an account that I can access as long as I'm logged in at the downtown library which is great cause it's right on the trolley line and so frequently when I'm in San Diego I go from Mexico up the train stop at the library jump out sit on the Wi-Fi at the park next to it look up my grants on Candid Hahaha get back on the train and go off to wherever else I'm going to be going like it's a great FYI Tabitha is trying to like that is Tabitha hi Tabitha haha she is she's rubbing up against the computer and being like it's time to eat so that's another place to look for grants but it's not always a good starting point for a small business like your best starting point for a small business it's absolutely going to be local a good Google search really focused on local grants is going to get you enough starting points that you'll know what to start looking for oh and um one thing to definitely if you are in any way oh she's knocking things over now all right if you are in any way a marginalized person in your community there are often grants specifically aimed at women owned businesses black owned businesses minority owned businesses that kind of thing and anything that reflects a local community that that there's reason to invest in and so yeah there's looking for things that are in your industry and then looking for things that align with the communities and identities that you as an entrepreneur represents so you're looking substantively for alignment and then go back and again look at it rhetorically for what are those anchor terms and what are they what is impact what are metrics how are they measuring success and read those questions not as an open ended invitation to tell us as much as you can in whatever hundred words of whatever you know is awesome about you cause there's lots of things awesome about your bookstore they don't care about all that or maybe a nicer way to say that is they've assumed all of that that might feel better if you're assuming they're qualified they've assumed all of that what they want to know is exactly what they're asking and then they want you to show that you're going to be able to do it we are running out of time as far as the podcast goes so if a listener is starting a business or running a business or even a nonprofit and they like what you have to say and they want your guidance to help them do a little bit better on their grant writing or whatever tell everybody what your services are and how they can get in touch with you sure so you can first of all you can go check out www.fractalgrowth.pro which is my website and my I'll put that below consulting arm it's me hahaha you can contact me through my website and so my consulting is focused on organizational resilience and for a lot of folks grants are part of that and understanding alternative revenue so I work with folks not just in finding and writing grants which I think once you get once you get through one or two I don't think you need a grant writer and I don't think you need as much hand holding and so my goal is always to get you to a point where you know how to do this on your own cause it really shouldn't be an overwhelming process but also building the infrastructure and the system so that it's something you can manage so that's a lot of when I work with folks who do grants it's working with sort of more robust systems but I do a lot of one off sort of just coaching and consulting sessions you can book what I on my website the alignment diagnostic so it's an hour and 15 minute intense session and you're going to get a follow up email with suggestions and readings and all I'm a teacher professor at heart you're going to get homework but I love to work with someone hear your story and let's dig in small business owners I think they love homework because they know that it's going to make their business better I'm taking a class right now and I'm excited about doing the homework because it's going to make me a better book buyer yeah so the other thing you can do that's free on my website is you can take the organizational Resilience audit which is a short little quiz but it actually helps you understand how where your capacity is being drained as an entrepreneur and as a business founder and it's not it's a five minute little thing and you'll get a report and a profile with that and the other thing that I I often offer folks for free if you're one of what I call kin and community you're doing stuff that like like bookstores that just I can't say no to shoot me an email on the site and I will send you my clarity framework which is like my four key questions what do you want what do you know what are you afraid of and who is your community and this is how I have solved most of my life problems and most of my professional problems because it lets you see in a couple different directions at once so those are the resources I love to offer folks and if you're bookish you can always send me a book I work for books that's true I used to have a T-shirt that said will work for books I need to set up my my wish list so that you know hopefully someday I'll have fans who just buy me things on your wish list FYI you can do a wish list on the Curious Cat bookshop.com not the Curious Cat Bookshop on Curious Cat bookshop.com if you go to the Curious Cat Bookshop that's actually the one in Cheshire it's the one in in the UK OK we've actually had some fun uh crossover I really want to take a trip to England just so that you can do a podcast episode at the Curious Cat Bookshop my friend Amy who gave me this mug is going to London in I don't know may or something and she is so excited to every time she sees me I she's like I am going to go to Cheshire and I'm just going to walk in there and say I know a curious cat bookshop where I live too or something like that this is this is my next vacation plan I'm going to go on the curious cat tour because I'm I'm in San Diego to Yuma and they have a shop cat ha ha we have I'm jealous entire colonies of feral cats at the border it's a whole it's magic they're delightful so Tijuana has a lot of darling little kitties that are they run the show oh yeah so remind people again where what's the website address fractalgrowth.pro and thank you for being with me tonight on the Curious Cat Bookshop podcast and for those of you who are local check out our website curiouscatbookshop.com we've got events we've got book clubs we've got book bedazzling later this month we are going to be doing if you're watching this in March of 2026 we are doing postcards to swing states we're going to be writing postcards to Maine to encourage them to have some news literacy and we're going to be working on fighting misinformation this year so I think that's really important and if you join us on Saturdays this month we'll be writing postcards in the store come and join us and we'd love to see you in the store or if you're a little bit further away always follow us at@curiouscatbookshop on all the platforms thanks guys bye bye if we give you X dollars