Entries from BizBox Blog on Slate tagged with 'Financing'
New Goodwill Decision Earns SBA Our, Well, Good Will
Via You're The Boss, we see that the Small Business Administration has decided to revise its earlier proposal to cap the amount of "goodwill" that it was willing to guarantee when backing the financing of business acquisitions. Basically, earlier this...
Get In On A Credit Line
Credit lines--in which you can incur and pay back debt from a bank with astonishing flexibility up to a certain level, being charged interest only for the amount actually outstanding--is one of the most advantageous forms of credit for small...
What You Should Be Reading
Mid-August. You should be outside. But for once it gets dark out... Seth Godin speaks. A helpful, catch-all interview with Mr. Small Is The New Big. [OPEN Forum (which is published by our sponsor, American Express OPEN)] Healthiness is next...
Outside-the-Box Financing
We bring word today of two innovative ways to secure financing for your business outside the normal lending avenues of banks and the like. From whom can you get money from your business? From yourself and from your customers. But...
The Six Methods of Financing
In my first column, I noted that in my law practice representing business owners and my experience running businesses, it seems that entrepreneurs tend to lament, or feel sorrow or regret for, the following: o Focus. Pursuing new ideas...
In Which The Gov't Listens To Its Critics
That didn't take long! On Thursday, we wrote a post about a new Small Business Administration rule concerning a cap on a certain type of loan it offers to those wishing to buy small businesses, and the poor reception it...
Determining Your Buy-In Price
Earlier this week, we offered some pointers on how to recognize whether you're being offered unfavorable terms for a loan. We didn't advise you to reject, blanketly, all loans made under such terms; we merely urged you to exercise due...
Loan-Getting Tips
Courtesy Fortune (it's a few months old, but all its advice still applies). For all we write about alternative ways to secure financing--community banks, credit unions, seller-financing, Small Business Administration-backed loans, and God knows what else--the banks are still in...
Borrowing Money Without Getting Played
Among the things we discuss most is how to secure financing for your business, which most of the time means: how to get someone--usually a bank or some other sort of financial institution--to lend you money. If you read the...
I've Found A Bank That Actually Lends!
Well, there’s a been a whole lot of discussion here about whether banks are lending to small businesses in this environment. For BizBox posts alone, see here and here. Oh, and here, too. So I thought I’d share my...
Be the Bank!
I’ve noted in past postings that small business owners should approach the credit crunch as if banks do not exist. One of the ways to do that, as The Wall Street Journal pointed out yesterday is to offer seller-financing...
More Credit Alternatives
Since big banks tend to be short on cash right now, we've been trying to show you new and exciting ways to get cash these days. Today we'll look at a very typical way of securing money--credit cards--and a...
The SBA Makes A Polite Suggestion
Sharon McLoone at our washingtonpost.com sister site reports that the Small Business Administration is urging banks who are qualified lenders of so-called 7(a) loans--the basic SBA program, under which loans to qualified small businesses who apply under the strictures...
Managing Your Bank Payments
Just because it's harder to obtain credit now--and, by the way, the bailout bill passed the House and was signed into law today--doesn't mean you won't still owe your pre-existing lenders for your pre-existing loans. (This dynamic is sort...
How The Bailout Would Help Small Business
Just yesterday we asked, of the proposed bailout, "What's In It For The Small Businesses?" The answer, among other things (firming up the credit markets, as the $700 billion asset-purchase program is intended to do, would most definitely be...
How To Secure Credit, Even Now
As we said in our previous post, we're going to withhold too much comment on any financial industry bailout until such a bailout appears to have a chance of actually being, you know, enacted. (It's worth quickly mentioning that...
More Bad News on the Credit Front...
Though there has been much debate over just how badly the credit crunch will harm small businesses--in fact, our own Michael Taylor argued that the lending dearth will provide a comparative advantage to small businesses over overleveraged big ones--there...
A New Model For Investing in Start-Ups
While we're gushing about too-good-to-be-true programs for linking venture capital with start-ups or generous credit lines for small businesses, we thought we'd also praise Union Square Ventures, a VC firm profiled today in the New York Times. Hip, helpful...
UPS's New Credit Program
Who says there's no credit available for small businesses right now? (Well, the Wall Street Journal did, and they had a point, but bear with us--there's good news up ahead, brought to you, as so many pleasant packages every...
Connect: Helping San Diego Stay Classy
Here's a remarkable venture: Connect, a San Diego-based nonprofit that has served as a catalyst that links start-up capital with the many burgeoning entrepreneurs in San Diego, which has increasingly been known worldwide as a hub of innovative telecom...
WSJ: No Credit For Small Businesses
The latest entry in the great debate over how the quickening credit crunch will affect small businesses comes from the Wall Street Journal, which sounds a bearish note, arguing that particularly small businesses with anything other than wonderful credit...
Cash Is King: Why, Right Now, Small Is Better
Note: see BizBox's previous post for a discussion of whether the economy's dire straits are a particular advantage or disadvantage for small businesses. The financial headlines this week threaten to turn small business owners into Chicken Littles. In fairness,...
The Rise of the Small Business Credit Card
Alan L. Carsrud, who runs Florida International University's Global Entrepreneurship Center, says it all to the New York Times: “Small-business cards have fundamentally replaced lines of credit." The big story of the U.S. economy for the past several months...
Venture Capitalist Tensions
It seems a bit of drama took place at the TechCrunch50 Conference, which took place this past Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday in San Francisco. VentureWire reports that when two venture capitalists spoke at an otherwise "lighthearted" panel about their...
Dun and Bradstreet Deserves No Credit
A few months ago I blogged about trying Dun & Bradstreet’s credit building service for my small business, Cedarcrest Capital, as an experiment. Now, three months later, my score for them: Low. In at least three different ways they’ve...
Europe Feels The Venture Capital Chill
The New York Times reported this morning that in the 2008 second quarter, European venture capital firms invested 35% less money in 42% fewer companies than in 2007's second quarter. This is an even more dramatic decrease than the...
The iPhone's Platform For Small Businesses
The New York Times has a report today on the so-called iFund, a $100 million venture capital project whose goal is to invest in start-ups that make applications for Apple's immensely popular iPhone. The idea is to invest somewhere...
Baruah on Small Businesses in the 21st Century
In our previous post, we discussed the increasing importance of partnership between governments, especially the federal government, and small businesses--a relationship as vital to the governments as to the businesses. So it seems heartening to find the new acting...
Partnering With Uncle Sam
Forbes's Andrew T. Gillies has a nice profile of Frank van Mierlo and his small (they've raised $12.4 million in a first funding) solar power start-up 1366 Technologies. The company's planned trajectory is a case study in what may...
Paying Back The Bank
We talked last week about how times are hard, and how there is no type of business on which they are harder than small ones. But enough with the pessimism--how can you ride out this situation? Yesterday we gave...
The Credit Crunch Hits Home (And Your Business)
A new survey conducted by none other than the Federal Reserve Board of Governors--you know, the group down in Washington that our very own Michael Taylor is so cozy with--reveals that while banks and other lending institutions continued what...
The New Law That Could Hold Back Your Revenue Stream
Sharon McLoone of our sister site, Washingtonpost.com, brings news of a provision in the new housing bill, which was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Bush last month, that many small-business lobbyists say is a major...
Where's My Bailout?? (Part I)
Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson called me yesterday to ask what he could do to provide unlimited financial security to my small business. “Michael,” he said solemnly, “Cedarcrest Capital is too important to fail. How about we open up the Federal...
How Small Tech Start-Ups (And You!) Can Get Even Smaller
There was a fascinating article published yesterday on our partner site, Slate, about the new world of tech start-ups. Takeaway: innovations in open-source software, cloud computing, and other things that may be broadly grouped under the "Web 2.0" rubric...
It’s all about OPM
The dream of owning your own business should not be out of reach of anyone with some savings and decent credit. The key to your acquisition success is the concept of OPM – Other People’s Money. In particular, you want...
Online Money? For My Business? Really? - Part III: Prosper.com
The problem: You need a small amount of capital such as $25,000 at a reasonably low interest rate, to be paid back over a period of time such as three years. A complication: You do not feel right about asking...
Online Money? For My Business? Really? - Part II: CircleLending, aka Virginmoney.com
CircleLending satisfies the entrepreneurial dilemma about borrowing money by assuming, at the outset, that you’re going to have to get some funding from friends and family. Which, I have to admit, is a pretty good assumption when it comes to...
Online Money? For My Business? Really?
The basic problem of getting flexible, cheap, dependable financing is one of the never-ending issues for entrepreneurs. In the next few posts I’ll review my experience with some of the fast, cheap, on-line methods of finding small business funding. I’ve...
Feed Subscription
If you use an RSS reader, you can subscribe to a feed of all future entries tagged 'Financing'. [What is this?]
