Biz Funding

Lease Financing
Leasing is a super financing alternative if you are seeking funding to obtain business equipment. Finance companies, banks, and many firms that sell high-priced equipment will lease to you.
When you lease an item, the lessor retains ownership of it. You use the equipment by virtue of the monthly payments you will be required to make. You can often purchase the equipment at the end of the lease term for its market value or less.
A great advantage to leasing is that it may be allowed to be "off the balance sheet." This means that leases can be disclosed as balance sheet footnotes. They do not appear as debt even though they represent an ongoing company liability. This may sound like financial doublespeak, but it's not. Let's say a supplier is considering whether or not to extend credit to you, or a bank is weighing a loan proposal you have submitted. The lease commitment will play a relatively minor role in evaluating your debt burden.
Banks also tend to consider their total exposure when lending to small businesses. If you have obtained lease financing through a third party, they are more likely to lend you funds than if all of your borrowing needs have been met through them. This is very important if you have a relatively small business, because most banks expect you to use them exclusively for traditional lending but may not care if you use a nonbank source for lease financing. In any case, though, do keep your bank informed regarding any significant lease commitments you are considering prior to actually signing any agreements.

Venture Capital
Despite all of the attention venture capital firms get in the business press, they actually finance very few businesses. The better venture capital firms are deluged with proposals from budding entrepreneurs. But most of these entrepreneurial proposals are inappropriate to the goals of venture capitalists.
Most venture capitalists concentrate their financing efforts on later-stage business funding. Some venture capital firms will, however, consider financing a start-up. What they want to see from any entrepreneur seeking funding is a history of start-up successes under the applicant's belt. They are best known for financing high-tech firms, but they do finance other types of businesses over 50 percent non-high-tech businesses for some venture capitalists.
Venture capital firms prefer to cut deals that provide an exit path within five years. They view the probability, or not, that a firm will be successful enough to go public or be purchased by a larger company. They also expect very high returns for their investment risk that only the fast pace of highly profitable growth will bring. They want to see a management team in place that can handle rapid growth. And they want that management team to be well balanced with all types of experience and skill represented creative, engineering, financial, marketing, and management.

Going Public
Going public, that is, selling stock or debt to the general public, is an extremely complex and massive undertaking. You should not consider going public unless your business is earning high after-tax profits, has steady profitability, excellent growth prospects, and a tremendous thirst for funding that other sources can not provide.
Entrepreneurs who have taken their firms public are generally shocked by the amount of energy and anxiety that goes into the initial public offering. And, later, they are frustrated by the added demands placed on them as a CEO of a public as opposed to a private firm.

Personal Loans
Personal loans are a great back-door alternative when seeking financing for a small business venture.
One of the most common means for attaining funds for use in operating a small business is through a home equity loan. If you have been paying your mortgage for a few years, you have probably built up some sizable equity in your property. Banks loans taken against a person's primary residence are low-risk no matter what the funds are going to be used for. You can take the proceeds garnered from a home equity loan and use them to operate your business. Then, technically, you are financing your business, not the bank.
If you use the proceeds from a personal loan to finance your business you do, however, need to make this clear on your loan application. If you lie on a loan application you have committed fraud a serious criminal offense.