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>> IAN: The landscape for businesses seeking finances has changed quite dramatically since
the start of the financial crisis back in 2008. Before then, most businesses could walk
through the door of their high-street banks, speak to the manager and get the finances
they needed to fund their businesses.
Clearly, things have changed quite dramatically from there. The high-street banks have reduced
very significantly the level of funding they provide to small businesses and I think as
a result of that, its now necessary for businesses to think far more carefully about the type
of finance they need for their business but also where they access that finance from.
I think the days where they can rely on a single provider of finance for their business
has gone and businesses need to think outside the box in terms of sourcing that finance.
It is really important now a days that businesses to prepare themselves before they go to the
market to access finance. I think that preparation is in two core areas. First of all, is identifying
exactly what they need that finance for, any funder out there will want to understand that
and its also really important that they have a clear view of what the money's needed for
because that will dictate in many ways the type of finance they use to fund the business.
It's also really important that they've got a very strong and well-informed picture to
paint, story to tell to any potential funders in terms of an up to date business plan, in
terms of an up to date manage account because its really important to anybody lending money
to businesses that they have a shared confidence with the business owner that this is a valuable
business, that's got a future and can make good use of the finance that they are seeking
of in the market.
The way that businesses access finance I think is probably the biggest change we've seen
over the last five or six years.
Historically, a business would go and speak to the manager, maybe to their own accountant
and quite frankly if they were told that the finance wasn't available from that particular
bank, they'd stop looking. And the reality is as the landscape has changed, people need
to be far more creative and far more imaginative in terms of how they seek finance for their
business.
So yeah, by all means speak to your bank manager, speak to your accountant but go beyond that,
look for more information on the web in terms of types of finances that are available. Speak
to specialist finance advisers whose job it is to access finance for small businesses
out there. I think the really important thing is if you hit a couple of hurdles early in
the process don't give up. Because for the vast-majority of well-run businesses out there,
finance is available to fund the growth, to fund the future success of the business.
At Aldermore, there have been lots of examples of us helping businesses that have found it
difficult to seek finance or to re-finance their business. There are lots of examples
of that, a very recent one was a very successful business, a family run business that had been
trading for over fifty years and had baked with the same bank for the majority of that
time and they had a very straight forward loan and over-draft agreement with that bank.
When it came to the time to re-new that, then the bank quite frankly weren't happy to do
that. There wasn't anything wrong with the financial performance with that business just
that the lending criteria for that particular business had changed.
One of our financial specialists with experience in the particular sector that this particular
business operated in, spent a lot of time with the business, understanding their business.
And by combining a number of the specialist products that Aldermore, in terms of commercial
mortgage, that was secured on the property that the business owned, in terms of asset
finance that was used to fund fixed assets used within the business at the present time
and future purchase of assets in the business, as well as an invoice finance facility to
fund the cash-flow of the business. We were able to put together a package that gave additional
funding to the business, gave increased flexibility and also a complete utter confidence to the
manager of that business that they had a funding structure in place that could take the business
going forward.
At Aldermore, we really are easy to do business with. We have an excellent website which contains
detailed information on products and services that we offer to our SME customers and to
our future SME customers. It's very easy for people to contact the experts within Aldermore
to talk about their finance requirements. And full details of our application process
are avaliable on the Aldermore website.