Using your credit card to fund business growth may be unorthodox, but that didn’t stop the founders of ConsumerChoices.co.uk.

Using your credit card to fund business growth may be unorthodox, but that didn’t stop the founders of ConsumerChoices.co.uk, as the company’s COO Jon Ingram explains.

As an online start-up, investing in paid search was critical to our business model.

Our credit rating was zero and we couldn’t qualify for a business account with search engines, like Yahoo! and Google. The answer was to plough our own money to the tune of £20,000 per credit card per month per manager.

By spring 2008 we were spending almost £100,000 a month on personal credit cards, with no guarantee of the company’s long-term viability. But it paid off: the company has doubled in size every year since inception.

We sleep a bit more easily now we have proper invoicing terms with all the search engines but we do miss the air miles and Nectar points we used to generate off the credit cards.