Chamber of Commerce

Your city or town’s local chamber of commerce is a bastion of information about everything to do with commerce in your area. Here you can find research, demographics, future city building plans, contacts for accredited financial institutions, and much more than I can mention.

Your local chamber of commerce has a website and you’d be likely to find articles containing helpful information as well as local groups of business owners that meet up and network. Part of your research should be meeting other people in similar circumstances and taking on mentors. It’s helpful to create a dialogue with someone in a similar field to you, even competition. This will undoubtedly give you insights into other people’s experience and will ultimately assist your research.

US Small Business Administration (SBA)

While also providing funding to small business. The SBA is dedicated to educating and supporting the American small business community through face to face and online consulting services as well as training small business owners and entrepreneurs. SBA also has founded more than 900 “Small Business Development Centers” where you can train and be counseled as a business owner. Each SBDS is unique to its locations evolving needs and trends.

SCORE

SCORE is another entity sponsored by SBA. SCORE provides free counseling, training, and advice for interested business owners and entrepreneurs. Score offers in-person services at any one of their 13,000 locations, as well as online support. Take advantage of their endless webinars and workshops from topic ranging from starting your small business to expanding the business that you have already established.

Brokers?

Contrary to what you might have heard, a good broker is in a very unique position. The position they are in enables them to catalog and collect information about the small business lending space and use it for their client’s benefit. These companies see a wide spectrum of situations and interact with business owners on a personal level daily. They always are up to date with the latest programs and will be able to tell you what is possible with your current standing. A lot of people are hung up on the fee or the extra cost that might be involved in working with a broker, but we have to also understand something very crucial; Nobody works for free, even companies claiming that the lender is paying the fee for you. As much as we’d like to get around the system, getting yourself discounts and savings, we can’t always got that route and expect quality results. If you pay attention, that tendancy to get around the system is being exploited by large clothing stores or supermarkets by offering you coupons and deals in order to create the illusion you are getting one over on them. When in reality, they got you in the store spending money, when your intention was to save it.

A good broker does hard work staying up to date with everything that happens within the small business lending industry. Brokers have unique relationships with lenders and are usually able to negotiate on your behalf even when the lenders automated underwriting system had auto declined your file. These relationships extend to offering preferred rates to the broker’s clients, due to the high volume of deals the lender is being sent by them. In some cases, this results in a client of the broker paying less than they actually would be going straight to the lender. A broker is also able to offer you more products and give you comparisons between the options you are approved for, as well as offer their unique perspective on your situation. No online check out is able to actually talk and hear out the nuances of your situation, and be able to shape and negotiate multiple eligible options that your business would benefit from. A good broker will be honest with you about where you are and what you can get. There is educational value, as well as the quantifiable value of growing your business when you are working with a good broker.

NO, if the broker is not able to be transparent about your options. There are a handful of loan brokers out there, working from the basement of their grandparent’s house calling numbers out of a phone book. They make a job of selling expensive loans with high commission rates and creating a shell that makes their potential clients perceive them to be something they are not.

If you are working with a broker and they fit into these guidelines, I would start looking other places.

-They aren’t easily reachable all throughout the work day

-They seem to be talking around a real answer when you ask them “how do you get paid?”

-Their address on google street view doesn’t seem to be in an office space.

**Proceed with caution always when working with any financial institution. Make sure you are working with a business registered with the Better Business Bureau, and always check references. This should be part of your research.

Even if you end up having to pay a few points higher on a business loan, it is well worth the expense of being matched with the correct program as opposed to being pigeonholed into the limited variety of options one lender is able to provide you.

However, there are some lenders who maintain healthy partnerships with other lenders that have a different set of underwriting parameters and industry preferences, so that they may diversify their skill set and be able to provide you, the borrower, with even more options, at even more preferred rates.

There are countless blogs, websites, administrations and forums dedicated to “educating” the small business economy. You should pull from all over to form what you think would be the best move to make when obtaining funds. However, you can spend hours online watching some small business guru on youtube, but when it comes down to it, the people who are going to be able to educate you the most, are the people actually working to fund small businesses.

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