March 28, 2024
BANGOR DAILY NEWS (BANGOR, MAINE

Venture capital offered> Broker proposes loans for firms providing `social value’

WISCASSET — Coastal Enterprises Inc., which for 17 years has loaned money to new businesses, plans to launch Maine’s first investment fund aimed at companies that provide a “social value.”

Ronald Phillips, chief executive officer of Coastal Enterprises, said that the new subsidiary, CEI Ventures Inc., has raised $3.1 million already.

More than 600 businesses have benefited from CEI loans since 1979, said Phillips, and now the company has created an opportunity for CEI to invest in, rather than loan to, businesses that pay employees well and pump money back into the community.

Phillips started the for-profit subsidiary in 1994 and by late spring will be ready to make equity investments. CEI’s venture capital could grow to as much as $6.1 million by that time if pending negotiations work out, said Nathaniel Henshaw, Ventures president.

Phillips and Henshaw want to invest in companies whose goal is building, what Phillips calls their “second bottom line,” as well as their “first bottom line,” or profits.

When a business creates jobs, provides full-time, rather than part-time employment, and offers adequate benefit packages, they’re building their second bottom line, Phillips said.

Those are profits that can’t be calculated in dollars and cents but help to keep the local economy healthy by raising the employees’ standard of living, he said.

CEI put up $400,000 in CEI Ventures Inc., Phillips said. The rest has come from outside sources — foundations, banks and the federal government.

Ventures is looking now to invest in three or four companies that plan to use some of their profits for the benefit of their employees, Henshaw said.


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