Kelly Foster is a small business lender for Mountain BizWorks which is located in Asheville, NC. Mountain BizWorks is a nonprofit organization that is U.S. Treasury certified CDFI (Community Development Financial Institution). ” For 25 years, Mountain BizWorks has been making business loans ranging from $1,000 to $150,000 to small businesses in Western North Carolina who may find it difficult to secure funding from banks and other traditional sources.” (http://www.mountainbizworks.org/)
- Tell me a little about yourself
I have been in the lending business for about 20 years. I’ve been with Mountain BizWorks just under a year. I’ve done anything from consumer lending to mortgage lending to retail lending, and business loans. My primary role here is to do business loans for small businesses in Western North Carolina.
- What does a typical work day involve for you?
It can vary. It depends on the time of the month and what we have going on. Primarily it’s the loan application process which starts with meeting with the small business clients who are interested in opening up a business, or meeting with businesses that are already established and are coming back to us for additional funding. We also do a lot of outreach in the community of small businesses.
- What do you do or Mountain BizWorks?
A little bit of everything. My main role is working with small businesses with what they need to do to get a loan and the actual loan process. It’s a different ball game when you are looking at a consumer loan, it’s more integrated and communication driven throughout the process. If you’re looking at the consumer side it’s based on XYZ; you look at the credit. With the businesses there’s so much extra it entails; they don’t have historical data with their tax returns that we could base it on, so we look closely at the business projections, and a lot of that is interactive.
- What are some common traits you have seen in successful entrepreneurial start-ups?
The biggest thing is that they know their business and they keep up with their finances. Small businesses aren’t usually profitable for the first six months of operation so it takes time to be cash flow positive. The ones that you see that are cash flow positive quicker, they have done more research into the market to see what their cost are and if they are on target. Those end up being the strongest. Not to say that others won’t be, but they’ve done the research versus getting 6 months into it with no research.
- When an entrepreneur comes to you for funding, what are the items you require from them before considering them as a potential loan recipient?
We have a loan application package that we sent out, 99% of the time by email. I give them an instruction sheet that gives them the process of how the loan will start. In a nutshell the loan application, which we get the basic information from the client, we also need a household cash flow analysis because we need to know what their personal income looks like, personal financial statements, which is a snapshot of that point in time, and we do require a business plan. Which is really the most lengthy and most important part because that’s where the cash flow comes in.
- Do you have any advice to an entrepreneur who is just starting out?
My advice would be keep really accurate records even if your really technically haven’t started the business; start folders or files or whatever so you can go back and see that you were spending a lot of funds on one area and you may have not realized. As soon as you get the idea that you may want to start a business start the record keeping right then and there. Keep a journal of anyone you have outreached to so you can go back and talk to them later to get more information. Record keeping is really the biggest thing.
