The difficulty we sometimes have is in actually making sure banks don't give us their problem. So the uptake is a little bigger than it was a year ago. Having said this, we sometimes just have to say to the financial institution that we cannot help in this particular case.
Most of the time when they contact us, it's not only for financing, it's also for consulting, because we do have a consulting arm. We did $26 million in consulting last year. We're going to end the year with $26 million in revenue. I use revenue because it's the easiest way to measure, but it represents about 2,700 contracts that we did for small businesses.
The average size of a consulting project is $10,000. What we do when we go into a business is help the entrepreneur figure out what the next step is for his or her business. We've seen an uptake on strategic planning, we've seen an uptake on human resources planning, and we've seen an uptake on efficiency planning, in which a company says, “I've got to reduce my costs; how do I do that?” So BDC will step in.
When we get a call from a financial institution, they don't have the consulting arm, so it could be for consulting or it could be for financing. Sometimes actually it can result in both. Most of the time what we try to do is actually look at the company and see if we can help them without additional financing. So we will use the consulting arm to do that.
Of the 15,000 contacts, it's not always a referral; it's sometimes a financial institution calling us to discuss whether or not there are certain things we could do to help them. We don't touch operating facility. That is and has been the realm of financial institutions forever. What we're going to do this year, though, which we've introduced, is the operating line guarantee that I was suggesting earlier. That will start this week. That's new because there was no need for us to do operating facility in the past. They were there, and there were so many players that they were actually tripping over one another. Now there are fewer players, so we're probably going to have to shore up that activity with them.