The South Carolina Small Business Chamber is making steady progress on setting up a donation and investment crowdfunding portal to give small businesses and entrepreneurs another means to access capital. To find out more click here.
Unfortunately, partially because of the way the SBA defines small businesses, traditional small business lending has moved upstream since 2008 and is catering to the bigger businesses on the small business continuum. The average 7(a) loan amount in 2012 was far more than what those Main Street business owners are looking for to grow their businesses and create jobs.
We recently pulled a sampling of about 44,000 borrowers who visited our platform during the first six months of 2013 and 59 percent of those business owners were looking for small business loan amounts of $50,000 or less—39 percent were seeking loan amounts of less than $25,000.
As credit tightened following the financial meltdown and the community banks and other traditional lenders small business owners would have turned to 10 years ago collectively turned them away, access to the inexpensive capital small businesses rely on to grow and hire employees dried up—leaving the nation’s biggest employer [small business] out in the cold.