There are a number of reasons. Basically, initially, you're not starting with a large corporation with a capital base. If we're talking about buying a significant enterprise from the beginning, that's who buys them. If you're on the financial end of things, you suddenly have a group of a hundred employees in a sawmill in front of you who want to take over the business. Their personal assets are probably relatively limited, and certainly in terms of the scale of what the alternative would be. And so they have to be able to find some of their own resources and there's not a pool of capital backing them up.
From a risk profile from a conventional financing point of view, that really becomes a problem. When we're talking about creating a national co-op development fund, the point of the fund is not to provide 100% financing for any enterprise. The point of that particular fund in the kind of proposal that we've talked about is that we would basically create subdebt, basically meaning quasi-equity capital for those kinds of employees.
The employees would come up with, say, 15% or 20%, and the fund would be able to come up with another 20% to 30%. Then you'd be able to get the rest of the financing in a conventional way because there would be enough assets to actually mitigate the risks so that whether it's a credit union, or the Royal Bank, or whoever it happens to be, they would come to the table.
That would address the gap in those kinds of situations, as well as start-ups, by really helping people have enough equity or patient capital at the beginning of the development process so that they can get over that obstacle, and have positive cash flow and get their business rolling.