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There are five main types of business loans that are relevant for startups: SBA small business loans, business credit lines, short term loans, invoice financing, and merchant cash advances. Let’s take a closer look at each one.

SBA Small Business Loans

A SBA small business loan is a loan that is backed by the Small Business Administration (SBA). Founded in 1953, the SBA is a federal government program that provides support to small business owners in the form of mentorship, workshops, counseling, and small business loans.

While the loans are backed by the SBA, they don’t come directly from the SBA. You’ll have to find a local lender who provides SBA loans in order to access the funding.

Who qualifies?

There are three main types of SBA small...

Think about the last time you had to contact a call center. After being forced to take time out of your busy schedule to solve an external problem, suffering an annoying automated phone menu, sitting on the line listening to crackly elevator music and being passed through multiple hands before you finally reach the person you require, would you describe yourself as A) Cool, calm and collected B) Mildly irritated, but polite and courteous C) Ready to explode?

Now put yourself in the person on the other end of the line’s shoes. From the second they walk in the door to when they go home, call center representatives deal with clients in the same state of exasperation. They are the defensive linebackers who get thumped day after day by people w...

Today we’re announcing the launch of Bizplan– a modern business planning software platform that we think you’re going to love.

We’ve learned a lot in the last few years about how startup Founders do their early planning, or in lots of cases, avoid it altogether. Everyone seemed to want a plan, but the tools that helped them digest the process were just painful.

So we came up with a better way to help startups think through business planning efficiently, and by way of that, put together a platform they can rally behind.

SOLVING THE BUSINESS PLAN PROBLEM

Most founders associate business planning with some long-form academic exercise that feels like a college term paper assignment. We wanted nothing to do with that.

What we wanted, was to ...

We’ve all been to networking events where we’re bored to tears by the same mindless conversations. You swap credentials (and probably a few not-so-humblebrags), but the connection never goes beyond skimming the surface.

Networking is the first step of building a professional community, but you need to develop meaningful relationships to actually make an impact. In their book, “Superconnector: Stop Networking and Start Building Business Relationships That Matter,” Young Entrepreneur Council co-founders Scott Gerber and Ryan Paugh advocate for a move beyond the typical boring, dead-end interactions.

In the chaos and noise of the social media age, the demand for authentic, credible voices — otherwise known as superconnectors — is at an all-tim...

How do business loans work?

A business loan is an amount of money a business borrowers from a financial institution, with set requirements for the amount of time it will take to pay back, as well as interest rates. Businesses get loans in order to help them start or to fund expansion. They’re one of a range of funding options for startups.

Here’s a look at how business loans work, starting with the types of business loans that are available to startups and right through to how to apply for a business loan.

Types of business loans for startups

There are five main types of business loans that are relevant for startups: SBA small business loans, business credit lines, short term loans, invoice financing, and merchant cash advances. Let’s take...

Great business mentors are one of the most valuable assets a startup Founder can have. They can shave years off of your startup journey simply by avoiding costly newbie mistakes. They can make life changing introductions to investors, customers and key executives. They can accelerate your ability to grow your startup by orders of magnitude.

But they can’t do any of that unless you know exactly how to use them.

On it’s surface, it sounds easy enough – find someone who seems to be an expert and ask them lots of questions. Yet if you’ve ever sat in the business mentor seat as I and thousands of others have done, you know that the value you get is directly tied to exactly how you manage the mentor relationship.

If you have a business mentor, o...

In a world of billion dollar exits and absurd funding rounds, startup Founders have lost sight of what financial success really is.

Don’t get me wrong… Having billions of dollars is amazing. But, you know what else is cool? Making a million flipping dollars. Especially when you don’t have a million flipping dollars!

Let’s take the time to recalibrate how we think about startup success — and more specifically — Founder success. When we get to the point where we can only think of “success” as some astronomical, arbitrary outcome, we’re headed down a very dangerous path that affects our startup, our finances and — if we’re being honest — our health.

“But a $1 million business isn’t very big.”

No, a million dollar business isn’t very big. ...

All entrepreneurs launch with the hope that their businesses will live forever – or at least survive the next hundred years. They develop long-term business plans, chart growth paths, and seek advice from veteran business owners. Those words of wisdom likely don’t advise them to find a way to “cannibalize” their own companies.

But even if your company hits the hundred-year mark, you should always be looking for ways to revolutionize your initial idea before someone else does. No cautionary tale better illustrates this point than Kodak.

Most people would be surprised to discover that Kodak invented the digital camera, but it didn’t commercialize it for fear of jeopardizing its film business. By the time Kodak realized its digital camera prot...

We built our company, Sidebench, without funding because we wanted to and because we could. Our focus from day one was on building a fundamentally sound, multimillion-dollar business.

Giving ourselves a pile of unearned cash and putting ourselves in a hole up front seemed like a bad way to do that. We knew that, for a technology services company, all you truly need when starting a business is a client, a computer, and internet access.

We saw a market opportunity that aligned with our skill set, obtained paying clients on day one, and spent time understanding and refining our business model to ensure that it was indeed viable.

Instead of looking for funding and spending time worrying about investors, we spent all of our time on growing a pro...

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