Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, April 8, 1993 TAG: 9304080370
SECTION: NEIGHBORS PAGE: S-20 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: STEPHEN FOSTER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
STRIKING OUT ON HER OWN WAS `A BIG TASTE OF REALITY'
A year after Debra Napier established Master Security Co., a financial brokerage firm, she's still waiting for the big money to start rolling in.But most of the money Napier's made - about $10,000 through commissions on loans acquired from lenders for small businesses - she's reinvested in her company.
Napier's had to augment her income by working part time out of her home as a loan officer handling residential loans - "bread-and-butter loans" - for a Portsmouth mortgage firm.
The past year was "definitely a big taste of reality," she said. Still, "I don't think you could drag me out of this field."
Napier runs the brokerage by herself. She says she works six days a week, sometimes 12 hours a day.
In her small, windowless office in the back of the Peters Creek Plaza building, she is surrounded by hundreds of forms, flyers and brochures, packets of information and stacks of newsletters she puts out quarterly. She bought a computer for the business, and admits she doesn't always have the time to immediately answer the phone while she's entering data.
Many of those calls come from out of state. Napier's sights are set nationwide, and she advertises in the Wall Street Journal and the Atlanta Small Business Journal.
But the local market's been hard to penetrate, she said.
"I have to get out there and meet people," she explained. The key to what she perceives as a more conservative business environment in the Roanoke Valley is talking to people - networking. Her out-of-state clients work with her over the phone and by fax.
"Each call is different," she said. Clients call her looking for money for all sorts of reasons: to expand, restructure their debt, or acquire real estate or venture capital.
Napier tries to work primarily with people who've owned small businesses five years or less, a time when the rate of failure is greatest.
"The start-up person does not have the capital - I know myself," she said. So they come to her looking for help.
By no means, though, can she satisfy every client. "By the time [a proposal] goes to the lender, we've done our homework. We put it through the rigmarole.
"The hardest thing is turning people down," she said. "But I absolutely have to.
"I've had clients call me and talk to me for hours about everything but financing - their life stories," she said. "Some guy wanted to borrow money to make his payroll."
Napier works on a commission basis that depends on the size of the loan she gets a lender to make to a client. That might range from 3 percent of a $50,000 loan acquired to one-quarter percent of a million-dollar loan.
And those earnings are cut if she works with other brokers to close the deal, or with the International Alliance of Financial Counselors, based in Boulder, Colo., which helped give Napier her start in the business.
Business hasn't exactly been booming in her first year, when she completed three deals, said. Napier's working on four more that she says show promise, but commercial deals can take six months or several years to complete.
For now, she's struggling some.
"I know all about business failures and why they fail," Napier admits. However, "I've always been enterprising," she said. "I'm going to stick it out."
Give her until 1994, Napier said, to start pulling in real profit. Give her until age 40 - she's 33 now - and she hopes to retire.
"I don't have a problem believing I can do that."
Master Security Co., 1314 Peters Creek Road, Suite 242, Roanoke, Va., 24017, can be reached by calling 982-8407.