Beach resort and media headquarters
Santa Monica, nicknamed SaMo, had 93,076 residents in 2020 across about 16 square miles. Wikipedia calls it a popular resort town owing to its climate, beaches and hospitality industry, with Palisades Park, the Santa Monica Pier, Ocean Park and the Hotel Casa del Mar among its historic attractions. It also has a diverse economy hosting the headquarters of companies such as Hulu, Activision Blizzard, Universal Music Group, Lionsgate Studios, Illumination, Snap and The Recording Academy.
Several video-game development studios are based in Santa Monica, which Wikipedia calls a major location for the industry, and the city is part of Silicon Beach and home to dozens of venture-capital-funded startups. Atlantic Aviation operates at the Santa Monica Airport, and National Public Radio member station KCRW is on the Santa Monica College campus.
Who sells to whom
The headquarters economy and the resort economy create demand for many small suppliers: restaurants, cafes, caterers, fitness studios, salons, creative agencies, photographers, production-support vendors, boutiques, and tour and activity operators. Each has a different cash cycle.
- Production and creative vendors bill by project, often with net-30 to net-60 terms, but pay crews and rentals in days.
- Restaurants, bars and cafes get daily card deposits but pay rent and payroll in monthly and biweekly chunks.
- Visitor-facing shops and activities see heavy weekends and holiday weeks and thin midweek stretches.
- Startups and small tech teams may be pre-revenue or irregular, so bank-statement history matters.
A cost-timing example
For illustration only: a boutique production-support company bills a client $30,000 for a three-day shoot, payable 45 days after delivery. It pays crew, equipment rental and insurance totaling $22,000 within the week. If it books two jobs in a month, it has $44,000 out before any invoice is paid. That is a repeating gap, and a line of working capital sized to that gap helps the owner accept the second job without strain.
The point is to cover a predictable timing difference. If a business needs funding because it is losing money on every job, funding will not solve that.
Keep the funding tied to a job
Santa Monica businesses often work project to project, and the cleanest way to use working capital here is to tie each draw to a named job or season. A production vendor knows the cost and the invoice date of each shoot. A restaurant knows the weeks ahead of a holiday. When the use is that specific, the repayment source is obvious and the decision gets easier.
The converse is also true. Funding to cover a general sense of tightness is harder to justify and harder to repay. If you cannot name the job or the season, look again at your costs before you borrow.
Requirements and next steps
We fund Santa Monica businesses from $25,000 to $5,000,000, in as little as 24 hours after approval. A FICO of 500 or above is considered. We request about three months of business bank statements and no tax returns, and the application takes about five minutes with a soft credit pull. Sole proprietors can apply.
See also our Los Angeles County page and Greater Los Angeles page, or apply now.