12 July 2012

Preparing for Small Business Loans

By John Walters


As a small business owner, you will inevitably need to borrow money at some point or another. When you need one, your ability to get a small business loan will be extremely important to your growth and perhaps even the survival of your business. One thing that can make a huge difference is doing the research now, before you need a small business loan.

Knowing what your options are is step one. There are many different types of business funding, many of which may be available to some but not others. As the economy gets better and better, it will only translate to more borrowing ability for business owners in the US. To understand what your own borrowing ability may actually look like, you need to evaluate your situation.

One major impact will be made by your personal credit score. If you don't know what your credit score is, you should definitely invest in a tool to check your score. You may catch some mistakes on your credit report, which would not be uncommon. That alone is worth the initial cost of reviewing your own score. You'll also want to spend the time to fix your credit score now instead of right when you really need to get a loan. Fixing your credit score, or taking steps to improve it, can save you thousands and thousands of dollars in interest and finance charges.

Next, take a step back from your business and take a look at your cash-flow. Obviously, you know your business better than anyone else, so even if you think that your cash-flow is just fine, you need to take a step back and look at it from the perspective of a potential lender. This is because you know your business very well, and understand that just because your account goes negative it's not the end of the world. An underwriter may see that as an inability to manage your cash-flow, even if it was just a matter of not transferring funds from one account to another in time. These things can be commonly cause by timing issues as far as when you receive payments from your customers.

There are other things you can do to prepare yourself for getting a small business loan. A lot of it can be done by yourself and on your own time. Managing a business is certainly a full time job, but you need to spend some time on these other things. You never know when a big opportunity will present itself, and you need to get a small business loan fast. Taking care of them now compared to later will be well worth it.




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