Guest Speaker: John Dimmer

We had the pleasure of having John Dimmer come speak to the class. John is an entrepreneur who knows quite a bit about finance. He currently runs the investment firm Firs Management, which invests in startup companies, as well as being an owner of a Honda dealership as well as several Airstream trailer dealerships all around the Northwest region. John Dimmer started out by getting a B.S. in finance from the Oregon State University, after which he moved into a job at Puget Sound Bank. After His job at Puget Sound Bank, he moved to a job working at Alliance Surety Bonds, where he learned a lot about accounting and learned skills which would become helpful with his businesses later on. He got his start in business with Andrew Fry and Free Range Media, which was sold in late 1999, before the dot com bust in early 2000. After that, he opened a Honda dealership in Oregon, then after that, he started branching out into other franchises. He opened his first Airstream trailer franchise in the Portland area in 2010, and that did so well that he opened another in Covington in 2011, and another in Boise in 2012. All this to say that John Dimmer has some serious experience operating companies. He talked to us about the different levels of funding, as well as the different types of funding. All in all it was a very helpful conversation to have and it cleared up a lot of points about funding of a startup company that we would not think about right out of the gate.