Someone should tell the folks at Bank of Ann Arbor that this probably isn’t a story that they want to be sharing, seeing as how Bee only started working with ZipCap after having been turned down for a loan by them.

Bee, as some of you may have heard us discuss a few weeks ago on the Saturday Six Pack, approached the Bank of Ann Arbor in 2013, at the height of their pervasive ‘we really care about local business‘ ad campaign and asked them for a loan of just $6,000. As she’d run her business successfully for several years by that point, and had a loyal customer base, she was hopeful that they’d be able to establish a small line of credit. They, however, turned her down, forcing her to go to a predatory lender, where she ended up paying an annual interest rate of almost 80%. And, with that, debt began accumulating rapidly, almost driving Beezy’s of business. Fortunately, though, Bee met Evan at ZipCap and, together, they were able to secure a more favorable line of credit by demonstrating the value of Beezy’s loyal customers, and their intention to patronize the restaurant over the coming year.

So the lesson here, Bank of Ann Arbor, is not just to retweet something because it’s accompanied by tags like: #localbusiness, #indie, and #localinvestment. I know those are all things that you want to be associated with, but you really need to ask yourself, before retweeting…. “Did the local business in question come to me for help, only to be turned away?”

[note to Bank of Ann Arbor: Do not retweet this.]