In our last blog post, your Atlanta small business lenders here at The Commercial Finance Group extensively covered how to combat seasonal depression and successfully navigate your business through the “winter blues.” Perhaps the tides of deep winter are finally getting to our heads, but we will admit that post was a little on the melancholic side, albeit being realistic. Our point was that the post-holiday winter season can take a toll on your small business, including the wellbeing of you and your employees. Fortunately, however, if we keep our heads up and look toward the horizon, we see that spring and Daylight Savings Time is just around the corner. Indeed, there are literally brighter horizons ahead in the near future!
Optimal Working Capital and Small Business Funding In Atlanta
Again, it’s easy to get caught up in the cold and dark woes of winter. Seasonal Affective Disorder, aptly named as “SAD”, is a very real thing, and after a long winter and time spent recovering from the flurry of the holiday season, your financial situation might also be facing a “SAD” situation. That’s why it’s important to use past business experiences and apply them to the future in order to grow and expand your business into something of your dreams.
Below, the invoice factoring and receivables financing experts at The Commercial Finance Group are going to touch on some useful ways to “spring clean” your small business this upcoming spring. Again, it might still be pretty frigid and snowy out around your business (our Atlanta and Burbank offices notwithstanding), but it never hurts to be prepared and look to the future. If you have any questions about a small business line of credit, invoice factoring, or any of our other small business lending services, we’d love to hear from you! Contact The Commercial Finance Group today to see what kind of customized small business lending solutions we can provide your business.
Now, let’s (mentally) move past the winter melancholy and spring forward into a stronger, healthier business.
Take Another Look At Your Business Plan
Chances are (we hope), before you launched your small business and grew it to this point, you originally started by drafting a business plan. Now, whether you’ve just survived the wintery aftermath of the holiday season for the first time or this is your tenth year running, it never hurts to take a look at what your current business plan looks like. Who knows what can change in a matter of years, or even in a matter of months or weeks. After all, rapidly-growing small businesses are inherently dynamic, and you’ll want to reflect on the past to better account and plan for the future.
Like we said, every small business should have a formally-written business plan in place to help with various business decisions and strategic, long-term planning. Financial spring cleaning is a great opportunity to audit your business plan, strengthening what needs to be focused on in the coming weeks and months and cutting any unnecessary fat in the process. If you’ve been sitting on some changes for your business model, any and all changes should be reflected and documented in your business plan.
Obtaining Small Business Financing
Did you know that a well-put-together business plan – especially one that accounts for any changes over time – is a great tool to leverage when getting a small business line of credit or another type of loan? It’s true; some lenders might even require a proper business plan before considering lending any capital. From your start-up to eventual succession planning, a comprehensive and thorough business plan provides prospective lenders like The Commercial Finance Group with a guide that covers the entire lifecycle of your business.
Instead of lenders asking you what your business goals are, or how you’re planning on spending your time and money, they can read it in print, saving them time in the process. A quality, laid-out business plan also helps identify any risks as well as any current or future obstacles that you’re anticipating, acting as a “road map” on an unfamiliar highway, if you will. All things considered, a good business plan will help you land that much-needed SBA loan or even a larger small business line of credit down the road, and it will help keep all relevant parties on the same page.
Update Your Digital Presence
If you have one or multiple social media pages along with a website, you’ll want to take some time to make sure that your information is accurate and up-to-date. All too often, companies leave their website untouched for a matter of months to years, changing important company information without actually updating it. As you can imagine, this is beyond frustrating to your potential customers or would-be clients. So, whether it’s just a simple landing page or you’re doing an all-out social media overhaul, make sure that your information is correct, ad copy is thoroughly proofread, all relevant links work properly, and that your branding is completely consistent across all platforms.
Additionally, if there’s something that could be re-written to sound better or more accurately reflect slight shifts in your target market, take this time to make any necessary changes to your content. Remember that your website and your social media presence act as your “24-hour-salesman”, so to speak, and that this is often the first point of contact or exposure that someone has with your business. It’s cliché, but put yourself in your customers’ shoes and imagine what they’d think about your digital presence. Better yet, go and collect this valuable feedback from real people, if possible.
Organize Your Emails, But Don’t Obsess Over Them
Emails have, no doubt, revolutionized and streamlined the way people communicate, especially in a professional sense. Here’s the issue with emails: We tend to get a lot of them. We get so many emails that, according to 2015 data from Radicati Group, it was estimated that some 2.4 million emails were sent every second, with a total of 204 billion emails being sent every day. That’s around 74 trillion emails sent per year! Of course, we’d wager that these numbers are even higher given that this data is about three years old.
So, our point is that there’s a fine line between too much time spent organizing, drafting and replying to emails and outright ignoring your inbox. Organize and prioritize your important emails into one folder, and create other folders for promotional deals, marketing emails, and other items that aren’t as urgent or don’t warrant a reply. Unless your job or business itself relies on you primarily communicating via email, you shouldn’t spend more than half an hour to an hour or two at most on your emails.
Take Control Of Your Company’s Growth With Our Atlanta Small Business Lenders
With the exception of physically deep-cleaning your immediate workspace, the above tips should be a good place to start when it comes to transitioning from the post-holiday wintertime to the warmer days of spring. While the success of your business ultimately lies in your own hands, take comfort in the fact that The Commercial Finance Group offers working capital solutions to accelerate the growth of your company.
Whether you’re financing expansions, acquiring more equipment or hiring more staff, a lack of working capital shouldn’t hold you back from growing your small business. Take the next step to growing your company by contacting our invoice factoring company.
