My name is Sam Tetlow and I’m the founder and CEO of Grant Engine. It’s important to think about how Grant Engine got started. We were interested in a company that I had created about five years ago and we were looking at equity, we were looking at non-dilutive funding sources, and I had hired a grant writing company to help us progress without success, no grants, and an unfortunate result.And I said to myself well, I think we can do better with me and my team and said, I’m going to give this two years and see how we do. And, lo and behold we set up a process and added some key steps that improved our outcomes and two years later we had four and a half million dollars in awards.
Then, a friend took me out to breakfast and said, Sam, you have to start a company doing this. And they said, well, you’re good at getting the money but more important than that, you’re great and your team is great at turning that money into building equity value. And, it just hits me.
I said okay: there actually is a need here in the marketplace. I said to myself, I’m only going to do this if a few things are true. The first thing that has to be true for me is I’m only going to work with high quality people, and to me that means good character, smart, and good tech. Number two, I’m only going to charge our clients what I would want to pay myself as CEO of a company, and I had some other internal things that I wanted to make happen.
So, I put together pitch and brought that to eight people. And, the outcome of pitching that was three people wanted to be clients, two people wanted to invest, and three people never called me back. So, I think we knew we had something and that was about three years ago and we’ve been completely full every cycle since that time.
Earlier this year in April, we submitted forty new applications and in September, we’re gearing up for seventy-five, so we continue to grow in a methodical way where quality and customer success come first.
Recent Comments