November 29, 2017 By Suzanne Robertson

SmartBiz Advisor is a new online tool offered by SmartBiz Loans that can help you evaluate your business and recommend ways to strengthen it so you can avoid costly mistakes and get the lowest cost funding.

Small business owners have it hard. They are expected to act like a large business but don’t have the resources needed to avoid making costly mistakes. Nowhere is this risk more glaring than when small businesses apply for a loan.

A small business owner will determine they need funding, and then embark on a process where they often do not secure the best loan for their business. This is because they have:

  • Never or rarely obtained business financing in the past
  • Limited time to understand their options
  • Never or rarely been told how to improve their business to secure the lowest cost financing
  • Limited time to improve and build-up the key loan criteria required to secure the best loans

Large businesses, on the other hand, likely have a Chief Financial Officer (CFO) who can analyze when and what type of loan the business should secure and will negotiate for the best rates based on the credit quality of the business. The impact of a CFO’s work can be the difference between success and failure for a business. For example, take a look at the following small business loan products that are offered to small business but have radically different terms.

Loan Payment Table There is a better solution to helping a small business get bank loan ready and it’s called an Intelligent CFO. The big take-away is that most small businesses would like to get a bank loan, but with decline rates of 67%, owners are often left with no option but to turn to Alternative Lenders (Peer-to-Peer and Cash Advance providers) where the cost differences can be significant.

SmartBiz Advisor is the first small business Intelligent CFO solution that leverages the latest in artificial intelligence and machine learning to bring CFO-like insights on the small business path to getting a bank loan

Intelligent CFO

With the technology advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning, SmartBiz Advisor brings the knowledge of thousands of many companies and CFOs into one tool. How is this possible? Well, Advisor leverages data from over thousands of successful low cost SBA loan applications to understand what it takes to get SBA Loan Ready. And instead of just giving a yes or no answer it provides actionable insights and a plan on how to get SBA Loan Ready. However, while Advisor is an incredibly complex and sophisticated tool, Advisor can help you simplify the lending process... just like a great CFO would do.

Imagine an Intelligent CFO that can help you evaluate your business and assess the likelihood of bank funding BEFORE applying for a bank loan

Small business owners can spend months figuring out if they are the right fit for some types of bank loans (i.e. SBA loans). An Intelligent CFO could help a business quickly evaluate whether their business fit certain lending criteria. This could save a business from wasting months chasing a lender and instead focus energy on improving their business to get the right loan.

[bctt tweet="An Intelligent CFO, like SmartBiz Advisor, leverages the latest in artificial intelligence and machine learning to bring CFO-like insights on the small business path to getting a bank loan. #smartbizloans" username="smartbizloans"]

Take a look at some of the metrics small business owners are forced to understand and track in their path to an SBA bank loan:

  • Business debt service coverage
  • Personal debt service coverage
  • Business credit
  • Personal credit
  • Business debt utilization
  • Business trends

An Intelligent CFO could help to reduce this complexity by helping a business owner understand factors a bank would use to evaluate their business and how their business rates against these factors in a personalized way.

Imagine an Intelligent CFO that can provide you with actionable insights on how to become bank loan ready

In addition to helping you assess loan factors, an Intelligent CFO could also provide actionable insights on the areas in need of improvement. In essence, it helps businesses build a business’ Credit and Financial Profile so they can get loan ready. This is revolutionary and should save business owners from the headaches and black box treatment they currently get from many lenders.

If a business isn’t ready for an SBA loan yet, business owners could get a personalized plan that outlines areas that the business needs to work on to get SBA loan ready.

You don’t have to Imagine, the first Intelligent CFO has arrived

The time for an Intelligent CFO for helping small businesses assess loans has come. There is now a tool in small business financing that helps businesses avoid getting taken advantage of and better understand how to access the lowest cost capital.

SmartBiz Loans is excited to be the first to launch a small business Intelligent CFO called SmartBiz Advisor.

It’s our mission to make SBA and bank loans easy for small businesses and SmartBiz Advisor is our latest innovation in achieving this goal.

What you need to know: The information provided through SmartBiz Advisor, including the Loan Ready Score, is for educational purposes only. SmartBiz Advisor is not a financial or legal advisor as defined under federal or state law. Use of this information is not a replacement for personal, professional advice or assistance regarding your finances or credit history.

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About the Author: Sean O’Malley is the President and Co-founder of SmartBiz Loans. Sean has extensive start-up experience and was at Venrock venture capital, where he managed the firm’s tech incubator. Sean joined Venrock from Yahoo!, where he held product and international strategy roles focused on driving consumer growth in international markets. Sean earned a B.A. and MBA from Stanford University.