The Small Business Administration Overview

The Small Business Administration or SBA will help small business owners with every aspect of their newly built business or organization. The homepage itself offers the business owner: loans, grants, outsourcing opportunities, explore local areas, and much more. Spend some time checking out how the SBA can help you make your business successful. Maybe you could apply for a loan or even win a grant for your small business or organization.

The SBA can help the business owner understand vital pieces of their idea or business setup for success on a local, state, and federal level. The SBA can teach a business owner simple ideas on how he or she can grow their business, as well as operate it correctly. Only small business owners can benefit from the services that they offer, so start building that dream business now. This way, you can get the help you will need to be successful as a small business or organization owner.

However, if something goes wrong, the SBA offer counseling and classes on how to manage the business they have started. The SBA also offers bonds, financial assistance, contracting opportunities, and E-commerce training. This helps the small business learn effective way to run his or her business online and offline. This organization was built to help the small business owner learn techniques that will help his or her business grow.

Follow the official blog, in order to learn ideas and techniques that will help you business appeal to a wider audience. This will help the business gain exposure and new customers, as it begins advertising in different venues. Each week the blog will offer tips and tools to the small business owner that is interested in learning new techniques. Save the website in your favorites or bookmark it, so you will have it handy when you need it.

Take what you learn for the SBA and teach it to another friend, so they can open his or her own business or organization. Tell everyone about the website and the many things it offers to a new business or organization owner. Be sure to share your experiences with the SBA with those people who you are talking to about the organization’s benefits. Additionally, make sure that each person knows about the ways it can help grow his or her business.

I learned the word “entrepreneur” while in elementary school and since that day have been enamored with how businesses work. I chose accounting as my field of study and pursued Public Accounting as a profession to learn as much as I could about how small and mid-sized business find success.

After years of studying financial statements (both good and bad) and small business owners (both good and bad), I’ve come up with 5 keys for you as you start or improve your small business.

Small businesses fail for two primary reasons. First, a failure to cover all of the bases that you have control over. You have a great idea, dive headfirst, sink some cash into the business, and BAM – something unexpected presents itself and rocks your boat… hard. Obviously there will be things you won’t be able to control that crop up: that’s life.

Patience in the beginning will pay dividends later on. Write it all down and draw it all out, because having it on paper might cause you to see it in a different light. Don’t just dive in with the “wing it” strategy, hoping to figure it out as you go. As much as we want to believe that we’ll rise to the occasion, it’s really just a recipe for unnecessary stress.

Sit down with an accountant and put together realistic projected financial statements. Map out a budget, what your cash flows will look like, what your balance sheet and profit/loss should be at various time checkpoints. Most entrepreneurs hate accounting, but if you don’t plan it all out ahead of time how will you measure your progress?

The second reason small businesses fail early on is lack of adequate start-up capital. Small and/or struggling businesses are forever blaming cash flow. Cash flow problems simply mean either 1) you started with too little cash to do the job or 2) you’re not making enough at the job you’re doing. Cash is king and if you don’t have enough to start, it is mathematically impossible to borrow or spend your way into prosperity.

Don’t quit your day job and leap into this if you’re not ready. If you borrow too much up front (especially from family and friends) it will put so much pressure on you to succeed that it could negatively affect both your business decisions and your sanity. If you have a job and you’re thinking about quitting to start your own business, read Quitter by Jon Acuff first; he will encourage you in all the right ways, for all the right reasons.

Instead of tweaking your business plan for the fifty-seventh time this week, pick up the phone and make three new contacts with potential customers. Go meet with some decision makers and put a sale on the books. If you’re trying to secure capital from an investor or a bank, having sales orders can solve some of the biggest question marks about your business plan.

The goal of the investor/lender is to get their money back plus a return on investment. The first step to that ROI is you making a sale. Instead of touching up the the wording on how you’re going to pay back that seed capital, book a sale and show the lender how it’s done! Who knows, maybe you’ll make enough profit waiting on the lender to decide that you won’t need them anymore.

Employees? Who’s talking about employees? You wouldn’t hire an employee who was just chasing a paycheck and was only going to put in the minimum amount of effort, while sighing heavily every time you gave them work. Interview your bankers, accountants, and attorneys as if you were hiring them to be employees. After all, they really do work for you!

Your professional team must understand your vision and be motivated to help you succeed. Of course they need to be qualified to provide you with the service you’re buying, but remember that not all accountants, not all bankers are created equally. Don’t be afraid to ask tough questions and interview them as much as they interview you to ensure that the relationship is a good use of both parties’ time and resources. Hire a team of professionals that can teach you and add strength to your business.

If you’ve checked off items 1-4, you’ve got yourself a legitimate small business. You’re working a plan, with a checking account balance that lets you sleep at night. You’re making sales and you have a team of professionals making you better.

Take a deep breath and start the list over from the start, and this time sing with confidence. Review your plan, review your financials, get advice from your team, make adjustments as needed. Build up cash so you can grow your business without debt. Ask for feedback from everyone; ask your mentors, professional team, employees, and your best customers for tips on how to improve.