Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Small Business Micro Funding. Where is the site?

Funding seems to be an issue for many small business owners. Whenever funding is mentioned it immediately conjures pictures of us presenting our business plan in front of a board of investors, the fate of our business in the balance. However the concept of micro seems to be lost in the literature out there. I just read a good blog by Michael Bowers regarding the importance of doing proper market research and having a solid business plan before attempting to ask investors for funds (http://networkedblogs.com/p0HLT). I completely agree, however when I think of this I think of REAL funds, as a loan with investors requiring a stake and usually some control over company operations, but what about a small amount? A micro amount? Let me give you an example.

Say you are starting your business, you are just doing the basic steps, just got your website going and you are looking to start a marketing campaign. You look at Facebook and its "pages" for businesses. Since you have 10,000 friends on Facebook you figure placing an advertisement here is a good way to start (needless to say I don’t have that many friends in Facebook but I am sure some of you do). Now you don’t need $1 million from investors to get your marketing campaign going, your business is not there just yet. You don’t even need a $20,000 loan from a bank to get going. All you need is $200 to test your 2 month marketing campaign on Facebook ads. Where do you go?

Now artists can go to Kickstarter (http://www.kickstarter.com/) and there they can get people to fund their projects. If you are a nonprofit, or a small business owner, in the third world you can go to Kiva (http://www.kiva.org/) and you can get generous souls to fund your operations. But what if you are a small business owner in Miami? A regular business owner, trying to make your business grow. Where do you turn? Surprisingly I have not found any places where you can go. Now I might be wrong and maybe missed it but I spend most of my day doing research, so if there is an organization out there doing this I honestly don’t know. But if there are sites for artists to get donations to do movies and paintings, if entrepreneurs in the third world have a venue, why can’t small business owners here have one? I am not talking about massive funding; let’s fund an Ad campaign for $100 or lend $200 to a small business owner to help him with those brochures.

The key here is the SCOPE of the funding. There are sites out there, like Angelsoft (www.angelsoft.net), who can provide an outlet for large investments. What we need is an outlet where, let say, I want to help a local business in the area with $200 dollars for whatever purpose they wish to use it. I should be able to go to a website and find a business to "donate" my money too.

I know that in these times lending, or giving, money to business does not seem like a popular or wise idea. However remember that these are SMALL businesses. It might be your unemployed neighbor, who just needs a little bit of extra cash to get the word about his business out. Or it might be your local ‘mom and pop’ store who wants to reach new clientele but times are tough and it needs a little bit of extra cash to put together an outreach campaign. Being Micro, we are not helping big business; we are encouraging the "little guys" to get their businesses going.

Where is the Micro lending site for Small Business Owners? If you have found it let me know.

Look forward to your comments,

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