My name is Spencer Mecham and I’m a full-time entrepreneur and business owner.  In 2017 my business went in a single year from a random side-hustle for some extra money to a 7-figure real business. The kind that employs people and uses accountants.

I recently watched a movie about the 2008 recession in the United States. One of the major factors that threatened to kill the entire U.S. economy was a lack of credit for businesses. In the movie there is a scene where the CEO of General Electric is on the phone and says that he can’t get access revolving credit to fund the day-to-day operations of his company.

The movie details what could happen if credit becomes hard or impossible to get and the picture isn’t good. Most major companies grind to a halt.

This isn’t because the companies are using dangerous amounts of debt or are in bad shape. It’s just become the nature of the world economy. Businesses need and use credit on a daily basis to fund various operations.

I learned this first hand last year when my company suddenly started to see explosive growth.

I started out like lots of entrepreneurs. I discovered the world of entrepreneurship while still in college,  found something I liked doing, and started to try it as a side-hustle. My side hustle was called affiliate marketing. I loved doing it, despite making almost no money my first two years. In the back of my head I always figured I’d eventually succeed, but didn’t really think through the details of when or how.

Then one day I did.

I found something that worked, and worked incredibly well. It was an affiliate program and I was running ads to it. My ads were wildly profitable for the amount I was spending. The only problem was credit. While my ads were profitable, the program had a 45 day payout. This meant I couldn’t actually access the money for 45 days.

I knew the money was coming (pending some disaster) but that didn’t help anything. I had this fear that others would discover the opportunity I had found before I ever had a chance to capitalize on it. This fear was exacerbated by the 45 day payout period. I needed to be able to fund what I was doing for 45 days at least, and then probably beyond that if I wanted to scale quickly.

There was little risk  in getting access to the credit. The money was already due to me from a reputable company, I just needed to get it sooner.

As soon as I realized the position I was in I walked into a Chase bank and applied for the Chase Inc Preferred credit card. To this day it is my favorite credit card. Chase gave me a $35,000 limit on the card and it took less than a week to get approved and have the card in my hands.

To be honest I’m still in disbelief they did that. My company was brand new with very little in terms of proven results. I personally had good credit, but none of my personal credit cards came close to offering me $35,000.

For the first month after that I spent nearly $30,000 on ads on that credit card. Those ads were able to generate much bigger profits that would come to fruition in 45 days. As soon as my first payment from the program came in I was able to pay the credit card and get access to a little more credit.

Long story short for about 3 months my business was a revolving door. I spent nearly $100,000 on ads that have brought me nearly $300,000 in earnings at this point. I was able to use credit to explode my growth and keep my first-mover advantage long enough to get my business running smoothly and profitably.

I learned some valuable lessons in the process about keeping a good line of credit on hand. If I hadn’t been able to get access to the money when the opportunity came up my growth would have been dramatically limited. Others could have seen what I was doing long before I could scale to the levels I wanted to be at.

Even better, Chase gave me 3x points for every dollar in adspend, leaving me with nearly 1.2 million rewards points to spend on travel. That’s nearly $15,000 in free travel when booked through Chase. It allowed me to take my wife to Iceland for free. And because I was quick to pay off the credit and still am, I have spent little to nothing on interest charges.

I now highly recommend to every business I talk to to have credit available. Whether they use it or not, it never hurts to have it ready. When an opportunity comes that is virtually a guaranteed profitable venture, you don’t want to be stuck without the funds while the opportunity passes you by.