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Published:
April 11, 2016

Business Funding For Dummies

Overview

Get the business funding you need to secure your success

The issue of funding is one of the biggest pain points for small- and medium-sized businesses—and one that comes up on a daily basis. Whether you're unsure about how to go about getting a loan, unfamiliar with the different options available to you or confused as to which would be the right solution for your particular business, Business Funding For Dummies provides plain-English, down-to-earth guidance on everything you need to successfully fund your business venture.

Friendly, authoritative, and with a dash of humor thrown in for fun, this hands-on guide takes the fear out of funding and walks you step-by-step through the process of ensuring

your business is financially viable. From crowd funding and angels to grants and friends, families, and fools, it covers every form of funding available—and helps you hone in on and secure the ones that are right for your unique needs.

  • Includes mini case studies, quotes, and plenty of examples
  • Offers excerpts from interviews with financiers and entrepreneurs
  • Topics covered include all forms of funding
  • Covers angels in the UK and abroad

If you're the owner or director of a small-to-medium-sized business looking to start an SME, but have been barking up the wrong tree, Business Funding For Dummies is the fast and easy way to get the funds you need.

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About The Author

Helene Panzarino is an entrepreneur, educator, mentor and advisor with nearly twenty years of experience helping  thousands of SMEs understand, prepare for, and access traditional and alternative funding options at all stages in their business growth.  A frequent round table participant, media guest, and event speaker, Helene combines hands-on experience with theoretical know-how, and a passion to share this with the wider community.

Sample Chapters

business funding for dummies

CHEAT SHEET

Funding for your business can come from a bank in the form of a loan or from a variety of other sources. You may draw on support from friends and family, strangers connected through the Internet, or investors, including business angels and venture capitalists. You can also create a revenue stream through your invoices or sell shares.

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Articles from
the book

You may not be able to obtain a bank loan for your business or a loan at terms that are acceptable depending on the stage your business is at and the risk profile of you and the sector your business is in, so casting into fresh waters may be required. However, other forms of business debt finance are out there, whether your need is for working capital, expansion or physical growth.
Funding for your business can come from a bank in the form of a loan or from a variety of other sources. You may draw on support from friends and family, strangers connected through the Internet, or investors, including business angels and venture capitalists. You can also create a revenue stream through your invoices or sell shares.
Luckily for entrepreneurs looking to raise funding for their businesses, the UK enjoys very attractive tax incentive schemes for equity investors, making it that much easier for investors to see some of the practical benefits to getting on board. It's obvious to most that investing in a smaller company carries more financial risk than investing in a larger business, and correspondingly, an investment in a small business carries great potential rewards.
To yet a 'yes' for your own loan application, it helps if you can think more like a banker when preparing and presenting the information in your business loan application. By nature, banks are risk averse doing everything possible to ensure they lend only to businesses able to repay the debt and interest. After all, lending funds one of the ways in which banks make money, and they use other people's money in the form of deposited funds to make business loans.
Funding for your business comes in all shapes and sizes, and finding the right source of funding at the right time can sometimes be a very confusing exercise and take a lot of work, time and effort. You just have to accept that as part of the process. It can also be made a little less overwhelming by knowing whether you need to look beyond your own resources and to external sources of funding, and if so, what type and where you might find some useful contacts and information.
When the time is right for you to exit your business, you have a number of options, including selling your business to a third-party trade buyer in a trade sale or via a business auction arrangement. You can sell either part of your business or the whole concern. A trade sale, or selling your business to a trade buyer, usually includes the shares and assets and sometimes the liabilities.
For many businesses, crowdfunding can be an extremely effective method for raising funds and expanding your customer database, as it acts like a marketing tool as well. What you may not realise is that there's more to a crowdfunding campaign than just putting a video up on a website. You need to prepare your proposition well, use words as well as images and be very active in spreading the word about what and how much you are doing and raising.
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Frequently Asked Questions

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