Small business loans or SMB loans as the experts like to call it, is a good start to a future mega company. However, too many such companies have their founding CEOsdethroned or worse forced out of the entire system as such owners were unable to properly maintain their loans and/or sold out too much equity.
While it may be inappropriate to mention specifics, we’d take a quick scan across the causes of such situations and see how to remedy them.
It’s common for small businesses to take a low-value loan and assume it would be easy to offset once the business starts returning. Since the title ‘small business’ is used to describe a startup, not the entire scope of the business, a plot twist may happen as juicy opportunities may appear, and an enterprising individual won’t be able to look away from such.
The downside to this is that: as erupting opportunities keep demanding trial funds, it may be unable give instant returns to offset the loan and thereby prompt your funding institution to take financially disadvantageous actions against you. This could easily circle down into a cascade that leads to you losing your business.
On the other hand, ownership can also be lost by carelessly selling company shares and equity in a desperate effort to financially accommodate the coming growth.
To make sure you and your business are safe from such dire situations, here are key steps to follow.
Know the Legal Expanse Your Financier Is Allowed to Go and Work with That in Mind
Thankfully we are past the time when civil debts like that from an SMB loancan hand you a jail term, however, there are still drastic measures a financial institution can take against its debtors but then again there are ways to maneuver it.
So first off; know how your lender handles situations like this, so you’d have equivalent countermeasures to keep yourself from losing your business.
For instance, you can modify your loan or negotiate your credit card interest rates with your bank.
Avoid Self-Funding
So your SMB loans had gotten you halfway there and you feel your income should do the rest?
Well,
You might be right, or wrong, and if you are wrong, you might have accidentally drowned yourself, as your business might have lost its remarkable prospects, therefore, putting you at a disadvantage on the negotiating tables with your financial institution.
Instead of walking through this myriad of risks, why not just walk around it?
Try a convertible bond instead, it has a feature of delaying the valuation of your business until a prominent investing group buys into it, or better still a try a flexible line of credit Loan
Don’t Give Out Too Much Equity
Agreeably so, self-funding is not the best for a startup business, as the startup may actually drown in its own insufficiency before it can rise at all. However, giving out too much ownership by equity could totally do the same thing, but at a later time.
Your ideal investor may approach you with a plain intent of taking a chunk of ownership and leaving, but seeing you open so much to acquisition could send such investor a message of possibly owning the business by himself in the future, and gradually working towards that.
Final Thoughts
Starting a business is not as easy as the popular planning and executing theory had suggested, there are lots of risks, and uncertainty involved. Therefore, there has to be a critical calculation of how the business would run, starting from its inception, location, funding choices and how to pay back.
In fact, to express its consequentiality, some financial experts would advise you have a single source of fund for your business and peripheral requirements. This is to make sure all efforts are put into only one possibility because paying attention to several alternatives may result in not really following any to the end.
However, this theory is under constant debate with adherents of the regular ‘several choices’ theory, because there’s no way to be entirely certain that the lone standing choice will pull through, and if that fails, the business ultimately fails as well.
The simple and most logical advice for a small business loan is a flexible line of credit loan. This is because you’d have cash flow as needed and you cease to pay interests while your credit card is not under use, besides there are several other alternatives if your credit score isn’t so sound.
Thanks for reading.
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