Recently, there was an article on Entrepreneur.com that said banks were going to step up lending to small business. We have seen some movement in Phoenix by Meridian Bank, b ut the Entrepreneur article was rather vague about which banks might be lending and whether the terms had eased at all.
In the past, the only banks doing small business lending were the smaller banks, such as Meridian and MidFirst. These two seem to be relatively accomdative, but you still have to have a plan for the money (product introductions, capacity expansions, etc) and give a lot of documentation (usually three years tax returns). And, we don’t know what worldwide conditions might be like for our worldwide readership. We’re sure they vary from country to country….we’d be delighted to get any input on this subject from other countries. We do know that crowdfunding over the internet is much more prevalent in other countries than it is in the U.S., although the Securities and Exchange Commission recently announced plans to get into the crowdfunding business.
The other interesting development came from the US Small Business Administration (SBA), which announced plans to match $1-4million in funds for qualifying Early Stage Innovation companies and funds that invest in such companies. For more information, go to www.sba.gov/inv/earlystage.
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