How to Get Start-Up Business Financing

Video Transcript

"Hello my name is Emily Gasner and I'm with Working Solutions and I'm here to talk about how to obtain start up financing for your business. Often times banks require that you've had a few years of track record of being in business before they will lend to you. So as a start up you'll need to possibly go to alternate resources to finance your business. You might go to friends, family members you should personally have, or save some of your own money to invest in the business. There are, banks are more eager to lend to start ups if they have what's called a guarantee from the Small Business Administration which makes them more likely to make a high risk loan to a start up. There's also non profit organizations throughout the country that do small business lending and they are much more flexible about lending to start ups. So knowing the right place to go to ask for the funding is the first step. Before you actually ask for the funding, you're going to need to do some planning, so one of the things you'll need to do is to put in writing a business plan. The business plan is one of the most important things that you can do as a potential business owner. To really set the stage for what you're going to be doing with your business and really to have a road map of what you need to do and what your goals are. Typical things included in a business plan include competition, your target customer, who is that. What is your product or service that you're going to be offering. Those kinds of things are included in the business plan, they need to be in writing so you need to do that as well. Also at the step before actually approaching the lender or the family member if someone is going to be running your credit which usually a non profit organization or bank or financial institution would do, you need to make sure credit is as clean as possible. So if you go to annual credit report .com you can obtain your credit report from each of the three credit bureaus and you need to make sure that there's no errors on the report and that you are current as possible on everything that you have in terms of credit card, bills, car loans, anything out there. Then you're ready to go to the, to the financial institutions or the funder and ask for financing. And you need to know how much money you need and what exactly you'd be using it for and find out the terms and conditions and requirements for each particular lender. They will guide you through the process and then the next step will involve you filling out all the applications and forms. And then hopefully they will be able to fund your business."