In just two years of owning Four Corners Variety Store in Maine, DeCesere has had her share of difficulties with her local lender. She concedes, “Financing has been the biggest challenge. The bank that I am with right now didn’t give us any working capital. So, that was a major struggle that first year. We used all of our savings and maxed out all of our credit cards just to get this store up and running.”

Located in the small town of Lagrange, Four Corners Variety Store is a convenience store with gasoline sales. “We have a fairly small customer base,” she noted. “There are only around 800 people in town. We’re about 30 miles from the nearest city, which is Bangor. It’s not too far away that you can’t get what you have to get in Bangor, but still far enough away where people don’t want to travel that far for the basics. We’re in such a remote area, that if this store were to close down, everybody would feel it.”

To this end, thank goodness for RapidAdvance riding to her rescue, she stated. DeCesere reports that securing funds via the company has “alleviated a lot of the stress of ‘Oh my God, how am I going to buy this?’ or ‘Oh wow, this bill just came in, and I didn’t expect it. How am I going to pay it?!’ It’s been almost too easy. You expect to jump through hoops like you do with a bank. When that doesn’t happen, you think: ‘Well, something HAS to be wrong!’ But there were no hoops. RapidAdvance said, ‘You’re getting this amount of money, and it’s going to help here and here and with that.’

She continues, “You call up and give what little information RapidAdvance wants, which is basically just your merchant statements and that’s it. You don’t have to fill out an application and then a personal financial statement. You don’t have to wait for somebody to make a decision and do a loan-to-value and a debt-to-income. It’s just so much easier and so much less paperwork than going to a bank. And the speed is just phenomenal. Within three days, I knew I would get the money. Within a week, I had the money in my checking account.”

One of the obstacles DeCesere had to overcome was a personal one, namely her friends and colleagues telling her not to go the non-traditional financing route. She remarks, “I used to think that if it seems to good to be true, then it probably is. But that’s not the case with RapidAdvance. Sometimes it IS just that easy. I was advised to not do this, that cash-advance places don’t work. ‘It’s a scam!’ people said. I’ve found that sometimes you just have to take a leap of faith, and that’s what I did.”

Looking ahead, DeCesere and her staff plan to continue growing the business and making improvements both inside and outside the shop. She concludes, “We just had our grand re-opening a couple of weeks ago. People had a good time, dancing and laughing and eating. We used the RapidAdvance money to make some great improvements on the outside of the store. We’re still working on getting the outside painted and fixed up, but it’ll happen. Things are really working out."