Posted on January 13, 2011
Do you want more from your business? Perhaps you want more customers, more revenues, more profits, more fame or just more free time? Whatever it is that you want more of you can have when you apply the following seven keys to getting more to your business. What are they?
1. Grand Vision
All too often entrepreneurs and business owners get caught up in what is going on today, what fires need to be put out and what they are going to do to meet revenue goals for the next month. Working in this way will certainly make it hard for you to achieve your ultimate goals through your business. You need to build your business and systems with your grand vision in mind and always keep your eye on the big prize if you want to obtain it.
2. Resourcefulness
No matter what business your are in, you can see that competition is tougher than it has ever been. However by being resourceful you can do big things, grow your business and get more of what you really want without having to expend huge amounts of valuable resources. How can you leverage your current assets? How can you get more from every contact and how can you do more marketing without spending an obscene amount of money? Read More...
Posted on January 2, 2011
As the recovery limps along, small business owners looking for bank credit and loan officers assessing their applications have their work cut out for them. The main hurdles: well-intentioned but disruptive government policies and tough bank examinations. “Regulators have gotten so afraid [of] bad loans that we leave many good loans on the table,” one institutional banker who interacts with hundreds of lenders across the country told me recently. “No one ever got fired for not making a good loan.”
Despite this difficult environment, finding credit these days is possible. To help entrepreneurs work around common roadblocks, I’ve assembled these tips from experienced individuals within the lending industry:
1. Focus on lenders unaffected by recent regulatory reforms.
Banks with assets greater than $10 billion have their hands tied. Provisions of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law require them to keep up to five times as much cash in reserves as they were previously required to hold. As a result, it’s probably not surprising that they are approving only 10 percent of small business loan applications, according to the August lending index compiled by Biz2Credit, a New York company that matches borrowers to a network of lenders. The index shows 44 percent of small business loan applications received by small lenders were approved. Read More...