Celebrating 5 crazy years at Cash Doctors

The last 5 years have been a wild ride.

It all started with Sean and I exchanging stories about eating rice and running out of fuel.

Everyone’s been there. What’s happening in your life and your bank account doesn’t always match up.

We did a little research and found no trustworthy small loan lender in Australia. A few dodgy loan sharks and 1-2 websites waiving wads of cash at people – more or less insulting their intelligence.

We were sure we could do it better so we bought a domain (picture on the right) and opened up shop.

Straight away people really liked it and within weeks we’d used up all our money for lending and building Cash Doctors.

On top of this we had no income or savings so we mowed lawns one day a week each. If we knocked out 12-13 lawns a day we made about $400 – not bad for a day’s work. If we did nothing except work, surf and watch Big Brother we could easily survive.

But we saw a great need and pushed on.

We were 30 at the time and our average client was also 30. So we stood in the same shoes as our members.

In hindsight it was quite good that we had no money during the start up. This meant everything about Cash Doctors revolved around the needs of clients. Ethical, transparent, fast, convenient and not too serious.

We also listened to members’ feedback just as we do today. They supported us through the paperless application, 24/7 cash advances plus the mobile phone browser – which is getting a severe facelift soon.

But it’s been far from plain sailing…

We’ve had some growth spurts and let a few people down which really sucked. On Christmas Eve, 3 years ago, I had to drive from bank to bank to get cash. We’d cleaned out the local branch. Then I had to walk around with wads of cash shoved up a golf wood cover.

Now we have a vibrant team of 60 and thousands of Australians get instant cash injections every month. It’s cool, but it’s still early days. Hardly anyone in Australia knows that you can get a short-term online loan in a few minutes from a trustworthy source.

The best thing is… 5 years later we still love it as much as ever. The whole team gets a big kick out of reading testimonials and stories about people getting instant cash relief.

The challenge over the next 5 years will be to preserve the culture and maintain our transparency along with ‘WOW’ customer service. So let’s see where the next chapter of the Cash Doctors story takes us…if it’s half as crazy as the last 5 years it’ll be fun.

Oh yeah I’ll email you a link to some shots of our 5^th birthday/xmas party next week.

Cheers

P.S. Check out some of our early logo ideas…