How Faith to Finance Works
If you are familiar with how a venture capital company works then you have a pretty good idea of how Faith to Finance works. For the most part we operate in the same way; the only difference is that one of the things that we look for when we are choosing companies to invest in is that they are Christian businesses. We do this because we believe that there is more to business than making money, although we do intend to make money.
The way that Faith to Finance works is that we first go out and find investors who are looking for a way to get a good return on their investment and do it in a way that promotes Christian beliefs. Obviously you have a lot of options when it comes to ways to invest your money and what we are looking for is investors who want more out of their investment than to simply make as much money as possible. Certainly we expect that you will make money but we want investors who understand that it is not the only thing.
The next thing that we do is to go out and find companies that are in the early stages of their development that we can invest in. Due to the fact that we are a Christian venture capital company we obviously look for companies that have a Christian cause. This does not necessarily have to be an overtly religious type of business, although we do invest in those, but it can be any business that holds Christian ideals. There is a fair amount of room within this definition obviously but we are comfortable that the companies we work with will meet our investor's approval.
The next thing that we have to do is to analyze the business to determine the likelihood of it being successful. Although we have a mandate to help Christian companies we are not a charity, the businesses that we work with have to be profitable. That means that we look at their business model, their management and their growth to date. This is what any other venture capitalist would look for as well. We are looking for companies that can be profitable while being good corporate citizens.
Although the main thing that we look for when we are assessing a business is the chances that it will be profitable, we do tend to invest in companies at an earlier stage of development than other venture capitalists. The reason that we do this is that a lot of Christian companies have a hard time getting an initial business funding so we sometimes have to get involved earlier than would be normal. This does increase the risk a little bit since it means that it will take longer for the company to become profitable. Nevertheless we think it is worth it to get involved with these businesses.