Stroll-n-GO was a company located initially Coralville, IA that was envisioned and created out of the founders prompting by the Holy Spirit. The founder of Stroll-n-Go ( SnG) is James J. Dierickx, and while he was attending the University of Iowa back in 1995 he felt the Holy Spirit impart to him a unique baby product invention. So to prepare himself for this unique undertaking he took a entrepreneurial management course to learn more about business. So on a Thursday right after spring break his professor said, " he was just back from Florida where he saw a mother struggle with a carseat in her arm , a diaper bag, and pushing useless stroller since the baby was asleep in the infant carrier carseat, and that I should make something to solve this problem and I would have a good product." So I thought about it and after class I had the idea that God gave me, to make this product, and with $23.00 (twenty three dollars) I went to a friends house and built the first conceptual prototype in his garage since I did not have any tools of my own. So on Tuesday I showed the unit to the professor and that is when it started we did some qualitative and quantitative market analysis and we thought we have a tiger by the tail so to speak.

Then in Nov 1995 my wife and I prayed about what direction we should take with this product , and God gave her a vision and said to her to tell me that we should start this venture upon receiving an insurance settlement that had been held up for around a year and a half. We were struck from behind at 55 Mph while stopped on a 2 lane highway while trying to make a left turn with extremely busy oncoming traffic, and it was Labor Day weekend of 1994 when this occurred and my wife was 8 months pregnant with our second son Joshua. It was a miracle that my wife and I walked away and there was no damage done to our unborn son. Anyway in Dec 1995 we got 4,800.00 in a settlement so I took this money and started the business , at around the same time we took on our first outside investors 2 people put in $5,000.00 , and the man who put $5,000.00 in the business told me to quit my job and work on this fulltime and he would raise all of the money that we needed to develop this Stroller/Carseat , but after $17,500.00 in equity investors he ran out of leads he was supposed to raise $75,000 in seed capital at a minimum. Well in 6 weeks we had a polished prototype so in Jan 1996 we did some market research on our first stroller/carseat and my first sales call was with a small regional retailer called K’s Merchandise Mart, the first sales call was a success or God knew I would have lost steam and never gone through the next 2 years of almost hell on earth in my finances. The first customer said to me what model number is this unit, and I had no clue so he said why not call it model 100 since I am going to buy 100 pieces as an opening order so I got an $7,200.00 order, and I was ecstatic, then the man ran out of leads and we were more than poor. I was poor with a wife and 2 kids , who now owed $21,000.00 to various vendors because we had spent more than the company had in the bank, since this man told me he would get the investors needed to get going, but it never materialized. I went broke and things went from bad to worse, anyway I was working 2-3 jobs and working on this business every step of the way. We were able to pay small amounts to all of the creditors on a monthly basis and we had around ½ -3/4 of our outstanding bills paid by myself during this period of my life.

This trial and testing went on from March 1996- Sept 1997 , then in July of 1997, I heard the voice of God tell me to visit this business in a research park here in Iowa City and make an appointment with the CEO of the company. I did and he met with me and I asked him what was my plan missing , or what was wrong with my product that I could not find anybody to back this business to totally capitalize it once and for all. So on Sept 18^th , 1997 at 28 years old lightning struck the first time as an act of God’s will , he had me learn some serious and hard lesson in this season and in the first dry season. Anyway this man signed a guarantee at a local Iowa City bank for $400,000.00 to get started and my life was on a fast track once again. We were supposed to be partners up to $1.8 M so things went along fine, in Oct 1997 we had developed some little trinket items to sell while the SnG 100 was being developed we chose to do this so our startup capitalization basis for federal taxes would be less so we had a $85,000 basis instead of a much higher $1,250,000.00 basis if we had only developed the SnG Model 100 alone before we sold our first unit. So we were able to divide the $85,000 over 5 years and expense every other item instead of the larger amount before we could expense items. Then we started making crib bedding and had a crew of 10 fulltime employees in early 1998 , then in June 1998 we had a shipment of 100 crib bedding sets ready for our first big sale , when a out of the blue a Tornado came through the small town where my business was located on a Monday afternoon , and every building was wiped out , my own building became structurally unsound , and my office was destroyed , but thank the lord no of my employees were injured. This tornado took some wind out of our sales since we were about tapped out cash wise, but in Aug the insurance company came and settled for $55,000 and we were in business again, through all of this the SnG Model 100 was modified, refined and prototyped and we were ready to start cutting steel to make our production molds , we were going to go with cheaper kirksite molds which are cast molds instead of machined mold since they were allot cheaper and we could have gotten some basic parts for the remaining $55,000.00 and one of the original investors put and additional $40,000.00 into the business so we had $95,000.00 in working capital to keep going forward since I did not want to go back and get more borrowed money we wanted to stay as low as possible. Then on December 2^nd 1998 , while in deep prayer I heard the Lords voice say to me, " stand firm and at the end of the day tomorrow a miracle will occur." I thought for sure we were going to get a $1 million dollar order, or something that positive would occur. Well on Dec 3^rd , 1998 we got a big surprise the backer who guaranteed my bank note for the company was a fraud, and his whole house of cards came down on him, in an afternoon. So I was almost in shock at the deceit that he had sown , and I felt blind-sided by this event. The bank called and said , we are going to dishonor any check written on the account hat they had frozen my account , even after I had gotten $20,000 as half of the $40,000 the one investor had put in. But they called back within a half hour and said they opened my account again, would leave things they way they were before , but would not advance us any more money on the Line of Credit we had. So they said to me don’t call us we will call you, and in April 1999 they finally got back to me 5 months later. I found out why they did not do anything, because the Lord gave me favor

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