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Unlike many entrepreneurs, Mark Fasciano, 34, and Ari Kahn, 33, didn't feel the slightest pressure to find an investor when they started their software company, FatWire Corporation, in Mineola, N.Y., in 1996. Although many of their peers were making lucrative deals with venture capitalists at the time, they believed that running a lean, self-financed operation was the way to go, at least for starters.

So, when they started doing business from a spare bedroom in Fasciano's parents' home in Oyster Bay, N.Y., it was with $20,000 from each man's credit cards to pay for the equipment and services the company needed. They did whatever they could to stretch that cash. For instance, when they needed to run T-1 lines into their office, Fasciano, the CEO, and Kahn, the chief technology officer, picked up a pair of shovels and dug their own trenches, rather than hiring an outside contractor to do the job. "It wasn't something we expected in the job description," Fasciano says, "but in the early days we did whatever it took because we didn't have the luxury of a big bank account." And though they rented traditional office space about nine months after the company's birth, Fasciano and Kahn maintained their frugal ways, spending an entire weekend wiring the office's phone and T-1 lines themselves. The end result wasn't pretty, but their system worked. "Our conference room had wires stapled across it and going in every direction," Fasciano recalls. "It looked like spaghetti on every wall."

Their cost-cutting efforts didn't stop there. By asking for help from his father, a graphic designer, Fasciano managed to secure a logo for FatWire at no cost. And in 1997, when Fatwire was staffing up, he saved even more money by finding an employee handbook from another company and downloading it for use at his business. "We really needed to communicate things to our staff, which was up to about 16 people at the time," he says, laughing. All told, Fasciano estimates that measures like these saved FatWire about $1 million over its initial three-year start-up period.

Please read the complete article at:

http://www.fortune.com/fortune/smallbusiness/creative/0,15704,398830,00.html