24: What is A Grant?

All right, let's talk about grants. So grants are fantastic. And no matter what kind of funding you're doing for your company, you should always keep an eye out for grants. Because if you have a good opportunity to go after a grant, you should seize it, you should go after it. So what is a grant? A grant is money that you get that does not need to be repaid. That makes it sound like it's free money. And it's kind of free money. You can think of it more like it's free money with strings attached. It's not just that you ask for money from someone and they say, sure, and they give you money. Usually to get a grant you have to go through a fairly, not long necessarily, but specific application process. So they're going to ask you very, very specific questions because they have very specific things that they give money to. You have to go through this application process. It's usually very competitive, which means there's a lot of people applying for not a lot of money. If you get it, then they just give you the money. It does not need to be paid back. There will be restrictions on how you use that money. You do have to use that money for the things that you say you're going to use it for and you're going to have to, in most cases, prove it later. So grants usually have what's called a grant period. So it'll either be like a year or two years or sometimes four years, something like that. So let's say you get a grant that has like a two year period to it. So at the end of that period you will probably have to provide a report, which means you'll have to write up a couple pages and they'll give you outlines on what exactly they want to see in the report. It's not like a stressful thing, but you have to provide a couple pages and you, you might need to provide also documentation that says what you use the money for, how it affected your business and things like that. So there are some strings attached that different grants only fund different things. So you might find like a technology grant that will help you buy some new computers, or you might find just like a general startup grant that's possible and they do exist and we'll look at some in just a minute. But more times than not, they're going to be more focused so you don't need to pay them back. There is some tax things that you need to think about. With grants, they are often taxed as income, which catches a lot of people off guard. So if somebody gives you a $10,000 grant to the IRS, you just made $10,000 and you have to pay taxes on that. So when you get a grant, the first thing you should always do is call your accountant and say, is this taxed? And what's my best route to make the taxes as little as possible on it? And then if he says, okay, you're gonna have to pay two thirds of that or not two thirds. That would be insane. You know, a quarter of that is gonna have to be paid in taxes. Then set a quarter of it aside right away because you don't want to spend the whole thing and then get a tax bill. Okay, so in this section, we're going to talk about going after some grants, some techniques. I've done a lot of grant work in the art and music world. Grants are the main thing. So I've written hundreds of grant applications. I've been on maybe not hundreds, but close to 100 grant panels where we select who gets the grants. So I've seen this from both sides, inside and out. I know this process really well. So we're going to talk about some tricks for. Not tricks, but some strategies, I should say, for getting grants, places to find grants, and what to do when you get a grant or when you don't get a grant. Okay, so let's go into the next video now, and we're going to start talking about considering your niche and a couple other strategies for getting grants.