Need Money? How to Look for a Small Business Loan

Finding a loan to finance a new or fledgling business is especially difficult in today’s economic environment. But lenders are providing funds to many small business owners.

The best place to start

When deciding which lenders to approach, business owners should first go to financial institutions where they already have a business relationship (for example, a home mortgage, auto loan, or savings account) and institutions that make loans guaranteed by the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA).

If you don’t need the money right away, take the time to build your relationship with your bank’s management.

There are several places to look

The most common types of lending institutions are commercial banks, local community banks, and speciality lenders for small loans.

Commercial banks (for example,  Synovus and SunTrust) typically operate on a national or regional scale, focus on larger loans, and have the most stringent lending criteria.

Community banks (such as Cornerstone Bank or Community Bank of Manatee) confine their lending to a local market such as the Tampa Bay area. They are more likely than national and regional banks to be receptive to small enterprises looking for small and mid-size loans.

Specialty lenders (including Superior Financial Group, ACCION, and TBBBIC) concentrate on small loans, typically up to about $35,000. They often have more relaxed lending criteria and some even process loan applications on line.

What are they looking for?

Every institution has its own lending criteria, but they normally expect several things from a borrower:

1. Have experience in the intended business. Opening a franchise that gives the new business owner training and ongoing support can be a substitute for direct
experience.

2. Have a sound business plan.

3. Have a personal credit score of 700 or more; for small loans, a score in the 600s
might be sufficient. (You can obtain a free credit score at www.creditkarma.com).

4. Contribute 25-35% of the total funds required in the form of an equity investment.
Specialty lenders sometimes require less for small loans.

5. Offer all personal assets (like your home, vehicle, stocks and bonds) as collateral to secure the loan.

6. Sign a personal loan guarantee.

Owners must also expect to furnish personal information including copies of recent income tax returns, a statement of net worth showing all assets and liabilities, proof of citizenship or legal residency in the U.S., and an affirmation that the owner has no prior criminal conviction and is not on parole, probation, or under indictment.

Need more info?

A SCORE counselor can help you determine if your business might qualify for a loan, identify potential lenders, and help you with the loan application process. Call the Pinellas County SCORE chapter at (727) 532-6800 or email score@scorepinellas.org.

This post was written by Don Wheeler, a counselor at Pinellas County SCORE.

Marian the Librarian: finding business prospects in a library data base

Ya Got Trouble. You need to find more business prospects in your  target market. Where are you going to look? More important, where are you going to look for free?

And that rhymes with P and that stands for PPLC: The Pinellas Public
Library Cooperative, Pinellas County libraries that have banded together save costs and share revenues. The PPLC gives you free access to a very useful data base from its web site. All you need is a PPLC library card. That’s free, too.

If you live in a different county, your library probably has access to this data base or one like it.

Following the process is a little bit like following the plot of The Music Man, but your effort will be rewarded.

Go to the Pinellas Public Library Cooperative web site (www.pplc.us) and click on ‘Databases’ at the top left of the page. You’ll see there are several choices.

Click on ReferenceUSA. Now comes the first hurdle … enter your PPLC library card number. If you don’t have one, go to your local Pinellas County library. Within ReferenceUSA, there are two data bases, one for businesses and one for individuals. Go to the business data base. Then select custom search. (As a side note, there is no listing in the individual data base for Harold Hill in River City, Iowa.)

Now you have a bunch of choices that can be useful in different phases of your search. The choice you will probably want to start with is ‘business type’. Click on that. Then you get to choose key words, or SIC (Standard Industrial Classification) codes, or the newer NAICS (North American Industry Classification System) codes. Since most people have no idea what these codes are, we’ll start with key words. (For more information and a list of the SIC and NAICS codes, see www.census.gov/eos/www/naics).

Key Words. Let’s say your target customers are colleges. Choose NAICS codes, and enter the key word ‘college’. You will see that the first six digits of the NAICS code are 611310. Enter that in the space at the bottom. Other key words may display more than one code. You can enter several codes in the spaces provided.

Geography. Next, choose the geography your business covers. You have lots of choices here, too: State, City, Metro Area, ZIP code, County, Street Address, or Neighborhood. This gives you the flexibility you need to choose your business’s specific target area.

Gary, Indiana. Searching for the metro area Gary, Indiana is actually a bad example because it’s included in another metropolitan area. So let’s select the metro area of Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater, FL. Select that and click on ‘View Results’. Reference USA will tell you there are 120 business listings for colleges in this metro area, 78 with email addresses.

More than 76 Trombones ? If the list is too large to handle efficiently, you can go back to the ‘custom search’ page and change the geography, or add new limits based on business size. Business size covers number of employees and sales volume. Use one, or both.

Print or Download. Use the buttons above the listings either to print the data, or download it to an Excel spreadsheet or comma-delimited file. Whatever you choose, this system prints or downloads 25 records (one page) at a time.

Want more detail ? Armed with this information, you can go back to the ‘custom search’ and look up more information about the business. Click on ‘company name’ and enter a business name. This will help you to pick out the most qualified prospects.

Then back to LinkedIn. Do a people search for the executives of your target companies, or a company search for the company names. See who in your LinkedIn connections works, or has worked, at the company. Read their profiles and their posts to learn more about them and their needs.

Next – It’s all on the street where you live: creating a local listing for your business with Google Maps.

Want to know more? Call the Pinellas County SCORE chapter at (727) 532-6800 or email score@scorepinellas.org

Practice safe on-line networking: how to secure your Facebook account

Facebook has again made a change in privacy settings. Without much warning and more often none at all we are faced (no pun intended) with a dilemma. How do I secure my settings once and for all? Haven’t we all heard the saying “set it and forget it,” from Ron Popeil? I think we can all agree that privacy is paramount. More importantly with today’s ever changing environment we need to put a system in place that is not affected by what facebook does with today’s or tomorrow’s flavor of privacy. Some say get a life. I say set a list. With that in mind I think we can all agree on the following.

Today privacy has never been more relevant regarding personal facebook accounts and the people that peek. Today’s people are recruiters as recent studies show that 75% of them are required to query a potential applicants social standing online.  So what does that mean to you? Further analysis shows that 70% of potential applicants are being rejected due to online profiles. This sounds rather dire but the good news is that 85% of potential applicants are being hired. What is a profilee (sic) to do? Quite frankly, it seems the odds are better if you have one than if you don’t, so let’s look at how to project the best image without compromising engagement.

First things first let’s lock down facebook. What fun is it if you have to pretend that every potential viewer is either your Mom or your boss? No worries here boss, as you need to create lists to protect who sees what. Easy to do and fun to navigate. Can anyone here say restricted family, work related or students? These are lists I have within facebook. None of them see my friends, my posts, my pictures or my videos. They might as well not even be friends as they see no more than those that aren’t.  So why would I friend them? Voyeur that I am (and you are too) I am curious as to what they let me see. More than likely they have friended me and I have no reason to say no and hurt their feelings. It also allows me to connect broadly and send personal messages to the list. “Students, don’t forget to look your best for the graduation photos this week,” is an example of how I use the list for mutual benefit.  Lists are easy and lists are fun. Find them under accounts settings and then the subheading edit friends.

Tag you’re it and find me through search engines needs to go too. Easy to do and found under privacy settings. Facial recognition is tricky to find but one can navigate to it by asking our friend Google. Simply type, “How do I remove facial recognition in facebook?” in the search engine bar. Be careful of third party applications and change your passwords regularly. Please don’t use the same ones for work and banking that you use for social profiles. If I know where you work (because you told me in your profile settings and I didn’t need to friend you to see it) I might be able to hack your account. So be smart and get a policy regarding social media and how to protect yourself. This can apply at home as well as at work. I can help. To quote a bankruptcy attorney that appeared regularly on TV, “This is all I do and I do it well.” I am here to help you set policy that matches your culture. I teach employees and students how to do just that.

 

Pat Huston is the Director of Education at Geek Speak LLC. She can be found at pathuston.com

Somewhere over the rainbow bluebirds fly: Use Twitter to attract followers and get your message out

Now that you’ve chosen a target market, you want to more about what they want, and tell them about what you do. If your customers use Twitter, it can be a great listening post. Plus a tool to tell your story. If they don’t, move on to a more useful tool.

Follow you: One of your main goals is to create a community around your business or brand, and Twitter can help you build a group of followers.

Buy, buy, buy? Think about the people you have decided to follow. Why did you follow them? Did all of their tweets say, “buy my stuff, buy my stuff, buy my stuff”? Probably not. You followed people who are up to date on your industry or your customers’ industry. You chose people who are influential with your customers. They share useful information. They answer questions. Other people will follow you for the same reasons.

Smart gal/ smart guy! Your goal is to establish yourself as a knowledgeable expert in your field, someone whose opinion is worth listening to. Spend time looking online for unique and interesting information about your customers’ industry. Talk to people at meetings and trade shows. Don’t just repeat the news, use your expertise to add value. If your tweets are interesting to your target market, the number of people who follow you will increase. You should send 80 to 90 percent informative tweets, and 10 to 20 percent relevant promotions for your product, service, or event.

Relevant promotions: use your tweets to move people to your web site. Tweet about white papers or ebooks they can get. Release a new blog post or podcast. Link to a video demonstrating a new product. Invite followers to an event. Point them to a landing page with sale prices. Announce a contest.

Read all about it! Twitter is an important tool for public relations. Listen to, comment and build relationships with media writers before you need to promote a new product or tell your side of a story.

Use Twitter Search. Go to search.twitter.com and enter terms like ‘St. Petersburg Times’, ‘Tampa Tribune’, or ‘Tampa Bay Business Journal’. Look for listings of writers who cover areas that are important to you or your customers. If you see they have a question you can answer, respond quickly, respond only when your information is a good fit for their need, and include contact information in your response.

Time savers: Twitter can take up a lot of your time, but it shouldn’t. Organize your contacts and manage your tweets with tools like TweetDeck. TweetDeck (tweetdeck.com) lets you connect with contacts in Twitter, along with Facebook and LinkedIn. The most important advantage is that you can organize your followers and tweets into groups and keep track of them in separate columns. You can create a column to track tweets that mention you or your company. Set up another column that holds only direct messages (DMs) from followers to you. A column for tweets from industry leaders, and a column for important customers. And you can tweet and reply to tweets from the tool. Go to their site and see it for yourself.

Security! Security!Security! Be sure to activate the secure connection option, which encrypts your communication with Twitter. This gives you more protection from hackers in a Wi-Fi environment. Make the change in your account settings. Do it now!

Next – Marian the Librarian: finding business prospects in a library data base

Want to know more? Call the Pinellas County SCORE chapter at (727) 532-6800, email score@scorepinellas.org, or visit our web site at www.scorepinellas.org.

Somewhere over the rainbow, bluebirds fly: Find important Tweeters in your target market

Now that you’ve chosen a target market, you want to know more about what they want. If your customers use Twitter, it can be a great listening post. Plus a tool to get your message out. If they don’t, move on to a more useful tool.

Follow them: Before you can listen to and interact with target customers and industry leaders, you have to follow them. You’ll be most productive if you focus on the best contacts. How do you find the best contacts?

Follow leading industry bloggers. Google blogs: followed by the industry you want to find. For example, if your business offers computer system installation, upgrades, and maintenance, you might follow tech radio broadcaster and podcaster Leo Laporte (@leolaporte), New York Times tech columnist David Pogue (@pogue), or Wall Street Journal tech  columnist Walt Mossberg (@waltmossberg). If your main customers are  restaurants, you could follow the National Restaurant Association  (@WeRRestaurants) or The Back Burner (@thebackburner). You get the idea.

Use Twitter Search. Go to search.twitter.com and click on ‘advanced search’. If your main customers are restaurants, enter keywords associated with restaurants in the ‘words’ section. In ‘places’, choose a city where you do business, and choose a distance around the city. So if you enter ‘restaurants’ in ‘all of these words’, and choose a radius of 50 miles around Tampa, you will get a listing of 20 most recent tweets from that area. Look through the list for people with lots of followers, or with interesting tweets. Follow them. Repeat the search every few days to find different tweets.

Try Geochirp. www.geochirp.com lets you choose a location, a radius up to 50 miles, and a search term. It returns a list of tweets that meet your conditions. Check them out.

Listen: Use the search tools listed above to follow comments about your company and product (probably without the geographic limits.) If you see comments frequently, someone should be responsible for checking these comments every day or every few days, because some situations require a quick response.

Respond to complaints quickly and professionally. Move conversations about complaints to your email or other private communications if possible.

Ask questions about possible new products or services. Ask what could be improved. Don’t forget to thank people who make positive comments
about your company.

Spy vs. Spy: You should also follow comments about your competitors and their products. If your company has a growing market share, there’s a good chance your competitors are watching comments about you.

Security! Security! Security! Be sure to activate the secure connection option, which encrypts your communication with Twitter. Make the change in your account settings. (settings – HTTPS only) This gives you more protection from hackers in a Wi-Fi environment. Do it now!

Next: use Twitter to attract followers and get your message out

Want to know more? Call the Pinellas County SCORE chapter at (727) 532-6800 or email score@scorepinellas.org

Mr. Livingstone, I presume: How to use LinkedIn to search for contacts

Now that you’ve chosen a target market, start looking for contacts. If your target customers are involved with LinkedIn, it’s a great place to look for decision makers, business managers, and information about their companies.

Where the money is. Why did Willie Sutton rob banks? “Because that’s where the money is.” That’s true for LinkedIn if your target market is businesses. More than 40 percent of North American users are from large companies (10,000 employees or more). Another 30 percent work at companies with 1,000 to 10,000 employees. About 16 percent are C-level, VP or Director. Executives at all of the companies in the Fortune 500 are members. Nearly 2 million companies have LinkedIn company pages.

Join ‘em. Join LinkedIn groups (up to 50) that are relevant to your industry and your target market’s industry. See what questions they are asking. Answer questions to show your expertise. Post informative updates (90%) and focused offers (10%). Follow the top influencers identified by the group. For really important groups, become a top influencer yourself. Being a member of a group also makes it easier to invite group members to be part of your network.

Want to get extra attention and influence? Start your own group. Invite members and start conversations. Ask questions. Promote your events.

Hunt for customers using the LinkedIn Advanced Search feature.

Places to go. Focus on the geography where your customers are, or where you want them to be. Choose entire countries, or look for contacts within a given distance of a postal code.

People to see. Search for contacts by job title, industry, and company name. Or look for individuals by name or key words in their profiles. LinkedIn lets you look for people who worked at companies in the past – they can be a good source of insider information. Armed with this information, you can learn about contacts in advance – no more “cold” calls or mailings. Remember: the more people in your extended network, the more people you can see.

Besides looking for customers, this is a good way to look for new employees.

Things to do. Look for your contacts’ events. Events are good opportunities to meet potential customers off-line … you know, face to face. Help them know, like and trust you. On your home page, go to ‘Search Events’ and enter Tampa, Florida, or another geography. Pick a time frame and an event type and click ‘search’. Sign up for the ones that look good and go!

Extra! Extra! Subscribe to LinkedIn Today to get current news from industry groups that are important to your business. Post links to relevant articles and make insightful comments. Share news with your company colleagues.

Reach out. Save your search, and export results to spreadsheet or contact manager software. Start building your relationships and revenue. Answer group questions. Invite people to join your network. Promote your events. Post updates and comment on other people’s posts. Go out and shake hands. Use the search information for a phone, email or mail campaign. Boldly go where you haven’t gone before.

Next: Practice safe on-line networking: secure your Facebook account with lists

A Target Rich Environment: Pick the Best Target Market to Grow Your Business

As a small business, you may be reluctant to turn away business opportunities, no matter what the source. But trying to be all things to all people will usually lead to failure.

Follow the money. ‘Do what you love’ is a great place to start, but you need to find the best place to sell your product or service. Look for a target group large enough, with enough money to spend, to produce the revenue you need. Avoid markets that need what you offer but can’t afford to pay for it. You and the people around you have limited time, and a limited budget. Focus them on a market that gives the best financial results.

What do they really need ? Once you have chosen a target market, you can focus on their unmet needs. When Federal Express started their express package service, their message was, “when it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight”. They targeted people and companies who had an urgent need for overnight delivery, and were willing to pay extra for it. You can do the same thing in your business.

Stand out. In every market, there is plenty of competition. Successful companies must find a way to be different from and better than their competitors in the eyes of a particular group of customers. What problems need solutions? How can you use your existing skills and abilities to be seen as an expert? What can you offer that competitors will have a hard time matching? Study your ideal customer until you know them as well as you know yourself. When you can answer the question “why should I buy from you instead of your competitors?” from your target customer’s point of view, you are ready to move forward.

Check it out. Is there a way to communicate with the group cost-effectively? How does the group search for a vendor on the internet? What media does your group use to look for product or service information? What conferences and meetings do they attend? What marketing messages will be the most effective on your web page or in your blog? People respond best when they believe you are talking directly to them about their individual needs.

Reach out. Take some time to confirm what you have learned. Go to the meetup groups and LinkedIn events where you expect customers to be. Start some conversations. Search for comments and questions on social media sites. Ask some questions yourself and see who answers. Do they respond to you? Are they interested in what you can do? If not, change your offer, change your message, or look for a different customer group.

Engage ! Deliver your message to your target market using the media they follow and the events they attend. Execute your business flawlessly so your customer has a highly satisfying experience with your company. Ask for referrals and recommendations to other customers. Listen to customer concerns and feedback. Adjust as necessary. Repeat.

Next – Mr. Livingstone, I presume: how to use LinkedIn to find business leads