Borrowing From Friends & Family: 5 Things To Know
SOURCE: Huffington Post (Los Angeles,CA) AUDIENCE: 30,067,627 DATE: 09/30/2011 By: Geoff Williams For a lot of startups, money is tough to come by. So it’s not surprising that many fledgling entrepreneurs think about borrowing from the Bank of Mom and Dad or floating their business plans by college buddies. In fact, borrowing money from friends and family is the most common method for raising startup capital. But getting a business loan from your friends and family can’t help but become personal — and there are countless horror stories out there to prove it. That said, there are also plenty of successful entrepreneurial stories that begin with conversations at the Thanksgiving table or the local bar. How can you approach this tricky topic and ensure that your personal relationships do not suffer? Here are five things you need to know. 1. Money will impact your relationships. Not that you haven’t considered that. But it’s worth really thinking this through. If you can’t pay back the money your friends or family loan you, or if you take it and then don’t communicate with them, you could lose your relationship. And while you may be right if you’re thinking, “Mom would never disown me,” or, “Chuck and I have been friends since third grade,” the respect they have for you could take a hit. “Make sure that this loan doesn’t put the family member or friend in a hardship,” urges Lisa Baskfield, a member of the American Institute of Certified Public Accounts’ National CPA Financial Literary Commission. “It’s similar to investing in the market. The person loaning the money should be okay...
B2B CFO® Ranks Among Fastest Growing Arizona Companies
B2BCF0 RANK: No. 23 on the fast-growth list FOUNDER AND CEO: Jerry Mills HQ: Phoenix FOUNDED: 1987 EMPLOYEES: 197 partners across 39 states and four full-time employees in Mesa REVENUE INCREASE, 2009-10: 46.5 percent Q&A with founder Jerry L. Mills How do you maintain fast growth through the years? Maintaining steady, fast growth has been a matter of setting goals and then working diligently to build an infrastructure that supports our team and allows us to achieve our goals. It is also a matter of constant evaluation and making periodic adjustments to the process of the goal achievement. For example, when new technologies become available or when a process can be improved, we need to always adjust our course — first direction, then velocity. How does growth become a part of your business culture? I review my goals weekly. I also leverage the expertise and help from a personal coach who goes over my goals with me and helps me augment and expand them, causing me to stretch and grow at all times. I go over our goal achievements each month with the staff so the team will constantly have our progress in front of them. Making sure everyone knows the direction and the goals is crucial to our success. Looking out 12 months, what is your greatest obstacle to continued growth? I see absolutely no obstacles that will impede our ability to achieve and meet our...
Firms prove even the corner office can be outsourced
SOURCE: LONG ISLAND BUSINESS NEWS Firms prove even the corner office can be outsourced CFOs-for-hire fill gaps created by downsizing DATE: 09/12/2011 By: CLAUDE SOLNIK Marc Palker has been the CFO at Mr. Bar-B-Q for a year, but it hasn’t been a fulltime job. Palker, who has worked full time as a CFO for more than a half-dozen firms, is a director of CFO Consulting Partners, which provides interim and part-time chief financial officers who help with financial reporting and Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, among other duties. He spends one to 1 Vi days a week at Mr. Bar-B-Q and works at other companies on other days. In what may be outsourcing’s newest trend, CFOs increasingly are working part time or an interim basis for small and midsized companies. “It works well for us because we don’t have the need for a full-time person,” said a spokesman for Mr. Bar-B-Q, an Old Bethpage distributor of barbecue tools. “He does reports, consulting, gives opinions.” While some firms bring in former CFOs to do work accounting firms – as much as traditional CFOs – might do, CFO outsourcers argue they typically provide a different perspective. CFOs typically help with strategy, deals and sometimes with compliance as well as leading financial operations. “Everybody in our firm is a former CFO,” said Alan Tepper, senior managing director at CFO Consulting Partners. “People at accounting firms never in the shoes of CFOs would provably approach the assignment differently.” Downsizing has both fueled demand for interim CFOs and placed many talented CFOs on the market. “A lot of people left the traditional work force by choice or...
Sommer Brings Corporate Experience To FinCom Job
Chatham resident Ken Sommer is putting more than 30 years of experience in finance to work for the town as well as for small businesses on Cape Cod. Sommer, newly named chair of the finance committee, was chief financial officer for Visa International before moving rull-time to Chatham in 2007. A native of Boston, Sommer’s family moved to northern New Jersey when he was a child. Sports were his passion and baseball in particular was his love. He played third base and pitched until he realized that he wouldn’t be a major leaguer. “I knew I better go to school,” he says now with a smile. At Michigan State University he studied accounting, graduating in 1980. It was also at Michigan that he met his wife, Betsy. He was offered a position in GE’s training program but before he could even start, the economy took a nosedive and the program was cut in half, leaving Sommer back at home in New Jersey without a job. He found a position at Lever Brothers inNew York and in 1982 he moved to Citibank, where he would rise through the ranks to become regional chief financial officer in both the Asia Pacific and Latin American regions. His years in Singapore were especially formative. Calling that period the “most important both personally and professionally,” he witnessed the rise of Asia as an economic power. He also experienced the cultural diversity of the area and developed a new understanding and appreciation of the people of Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and the entire southeast Asia region. In 2000, Sommer left Citigroup to become the chief financial...B2B CFO® are media experts on, and can speak to the media on:
- - Company Financials
- - Small Business Finance
- - Lending
- - Profit/Loss Statements
- - Exit Strategy
