What's the Business Behind Butter Bakery?

To most folks who've stepped inside Dan Swenson-Klatt's doors at 3700 Nicollet Ave, Butter Bakery Cafe would not seem like much of a credit risk. Flocks of people step up to the counter morning, noon, and night, for their taste of the eatery's delicious output.

However, when Swenson-Klatt went shopping for loans to help him move his business down the street to its new location in the Nicollet Square building, he found his bankers a little reluctant to give him a loan, according to a profile in the Star Tribune:

“I’ve gone back a couple times, and there seems less hesitation, but they don’t seem ready yet,” Dan Swenson-Klatt said the other morning after shoveling his south Minneapolis sidewalk and greeting customers. “So far, I use their credit cards up to about $50,000 a month, and one line of credit.”

With those measures, plus a loan from small-business specialists at the Metropolitan Consortium of Community Developers and a little help from Kickstarter, Butter was able to expand into its new digs and hire on additional help from Nicollet Square's residents.

Swenson-Klatt's story, the Star Tribune reports, is pretty similar to many small businesses across the country—hobbled in part by poor access to credit from banks still scarred by the 2008 financial collapse.

Read how Swenson-Klatt is working around the problem—and how community groups are trying to step into the credit void—at the Star Tribune.