Business Service Center

A Small Business Loan to Get You Started

Posted on December 6, 2011

When you decide to open a small business loan, sometimes you will not have to pay that much money and you can afford to do it out of your pocket. But, there will be many instances when you need some additional funding to open your business. This is when you will have to apply for a small business loan in order to get your business going.

There are many instances when you would have to try to get a small business loan to start yourself off. There are many businesses that require equipment and even stores to start out. This can be pretty common. For example, if you start a hair salon or a small store, you will have to take out small a business loan to get started.

Usually, if a person is opening a small business, the amount that is initially needed will be affordable enough to come out of pocket or a savings. But, some people need more than that or don't want to cut into their savings to start their business. If this is the case, you can get the money you need in the form of a loan.

Small business loans are a lot more in amount than a regular loan. They can run anywhere from about $1,000 of additional funding to about one hundred times that amount. It may be even more if you have the means of obtaining that kind of loan from a bank or a financial establishment.

Applying for a small business loan is a little different than applying for a personal loan or an auto loan. Instead of operating on solely your credit score, you will have to provide collateral in order to be able to get the loan. You may get lucky on occasion and not have to provide collateral to get the loan. For example, if you have very good standing with a particular bank or an exceptional credit score, this may help you to get a loan without collateral. Today, a need for collateral may be more common because of the economy. Read More...

Make Your Business More Appealing to Lenders

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...