3 quick tips for aspiring entrepreneurs

Black women entrepreneurs are the fastest-growing group of business owners, yet they’ve all the time faced great challenges in raising capital to assist their corporations grow and thrive.

Funding Circle, a peer-to-peer lending platform where investors can lend money on to small and medium-sized businesses, has helped 1000’s of entrepreneurs secure the financing they should grow their businesses, grow their workforces and support their communities. (In fact, BLACK ENTERPRISES featured one entrepreneur who launched her mobile dental enterprise to assist underserved patients in Chicago).

“When we founded Funding Circle, our aspiration was to provide fairly priced, high-quality term loans to entrepreneurs across the country and around the world. Women and minority entrepreneurs are certainly very undervalued,” said Sam Hodges, then managing director and co-founder of the platform.

“Our vision at Funding Circle is to build a virtual platform that makes it very easy and simple for any entrepreneur to use, and with a few simple questions determines whether they qualify for a loan ranging from $25,000 to $500,000. We’ve found that for many of our entrepreneurs, this is exactly what they need – they can reinvest it back into their business. One of the things we’re very proud of when we look around the world of entrepreneurs we’ve helped is that a significant portion of them are minorities and women.”

TO BE spoke with Hodges about tips for aspiring entrepreneurs and the way they will set themselves in the best direction in constructing corporations which might be each solid and attractive for investment.

Keep good financial books and records.

(*3*) says Hodges. “It’s important to make sure your bookkeeping and accounting are in order.”

Scale your expansion and consider available competitive opportunities and financial resources.

“We have seen entrepreneurs get ahead of themselves. They have a great idea, but they burn through too much capital quickly and then they get into difficult situations,” Hodges says. “(Evaluate) lifespan and discipline according to the rate of growth and the opportunities you are striving for.”

Make sure what you are promoting is healthy and has a solid growth plan.

“(The ability to) demonstrate revenue traction where there is some level of revenue stability,” Hodges says. “The difference between equity and debt – obviously you have to make the payments (loans), so if the company doesn’t have cash flow yet, it can be quite difficult.”

Bring great people into what you are promoting. “It’s not really a specific valuation factor, but in our experience, many of the companies we’ve helped that do well are great entrepreneurs that attract great people.”