Wise Startup Blog

The majority of posts I read online are debating one form of SEO versus another, and a bunch of bull shit, so I decided to finally put together something that’s actually useful for those of us building a real business, and not just running a blog.

At our company we’re having a bit of trouble getting business credit cards, mainly because we don’t have much credit history. There are definitely ways to boost our credit, which we will be executing as soon as I finish this article :)

1. Open up some initial services in your company name: business phone, VOIP service (not vonage, it’s horrible)
2. Use the dnb.com Credit Builder ($299), it creates a credit profile for you and gets your account ready to be pinged by the various services you’re beginning to use.
3. Add historical vendors to your newly created DNB profile. These can be furniture stores, office supply companies (Dunder Mifflin), movers, cleaners, etc.
4. Now, once you have all these accounts, you need to use the bills you receive from them to apply for new credit accounts. So once you have a bill in hand, apply for a store credit card at Office Depot, Staples, etc. Send them the bill to verify your company name, and also add another vertical to your vendor profile.
5. Once you’ve been cleared for one of these accounts, you’ll want to wait 2 weeks, and then look to apply for a cell phone or internet or similar service.
6. So keep going along looking to randomly add different services to your account until you think you’re ready to start applying for some real credit lines. Be sure to immediately pay off any bill you receive, so it gets reported ASAP.
7. Once you’re confident in your score, you should be able to score plenty of credit lines WITHOUT giving out a Personal Guarantee, ie putting your social security number on the line.

Let me know if you have any other pointers, as they’ll definitely be appreciated !