How To Fund Entrepreneurial Growth

I came across a company recently that sparked my attention: Kabbage.

“Kabbage is upending small business lending – and building a very big business,” Forbes Magazine.

What sparked my interest was their focus on entrepreneurs, and with 50,000 new businesses starting in New York alone each year, it’s no wonder Kabbage has found a way in which they can relate to small businesses who need to finance growth without ‘giving away the farm’ so to speak.

When companies come to Marketing Eye they are inherently focused on business growth. ‘How do we bring in new leads?’ is the number one question. The second question is ‘how to we extend our brand into new markets?’

There number one issue from that point is funding. How do they fund growth when they have a sustainable business, when in order to continue to grow and expand they need short-term funding and assistance? 

“Online lending shouldn’t be the place you go after others turn you down. It should be the first place you look when you’re looking to grow,” Inc Magazine. 

As business owners and entrepreneurs our dreams are big, yet the first place we tend to go is to our bank manager to find out if we can increase our line of credit. The flexibility and acceptance of small business issues of big banks is not always in line with the needs of a small or medium sized business for that matter.

What Kabbage offers is an ability to address short-term, or gap needs for a small business or their goals. A line of credit that establishes a maximum loan the lender will allow to the borrower, to be used in a similar manner as a credit card, as and when you need it. It quite simply increases working capital and bridges the gap between the tasks an entrepreneur needs to do and the cash flow needed to get them done.

My interest in Kabbage relates heavily to the sectors that we work in and the ones that are a good fit for the Kabbage brand. We need an ethical company to lend money to our clients, and not a company that will screw them and take the focus on them growing their businesses. 

They work primarily in retail, restaurants, construction, auto repair, trucking, beauty salons, medical and dental, wholesale businesses and other more tangible industry sectors.

“Entrepreneurs are the market, and they’re also the ones solving the problems,” New York Times.

As entrepreneurs, we are all in the same boat. It’s the chicken and the egg, and with finance it is harder and harder for small businesses to access fast and efficiently at the right rate. 

I know companies using Kabbage and they have found them to be great, and their customer service phenomenal. I understand why the need to go outside normal banks and look online to credible institutions like this, because there are only so many knock backs a small business can take. Kabbage will change the face of small business growth in the coming years, so watch this space!