Transcript:

I’m Debbie Finney. I’m the Area Director for the University of Georgia Small Business Development Center. Our office is located in Albany, Georgia on Pine Avenue, and we are here to serve Southwest Georgia businesses in surrounding 27 counties. Some of the challenges that we see small business owners face that we work on on a daily basis are—there are actually several. One is financial. We work with business owners on business plans, planning for the future, getting those financial projections together when a business may need to expand or get a new loan from the bank. And we are a great resource to use to put those plans together and get the financial numbers together. 

But another financial issue that we work on a lot as well is when a business has grown a great deal and might have some cash flow issues. And we actually do a financial analysis to see where expenses can be cut or where sales might be able to be expanded. And that’s key sometimes because often times a loan is not the key to growing a business. Sometimes as businesses grow throughout the years, expenses grow as well, and one way to manage cash flow is to look at those expenses. And we sit down and help a business owner analyze where expenses can be cut and where they’ve grown to be outside the industry standard. So we have some great software tools to use to actually see how the business measures up in the industry.

Another area to look at might be accounts receivable. Are those collections being made in a timely fashion and is there a way to turn around that cash faster for the business? So we work on a lot of different financial areas for business owners. A second issue small businesses face is how to develop a marketing plan, and often times we get that question well, I know I need a marketing plan, I know I need to work on marketing. And often times what we prefer to do is do a marketing assessment on the business before they actually develop a new marketing plan. We get a lot of calls about well I know I must need to be on Facebook, because everybody’s on Facebook and I don’t know what to do.

And so before planning something like that, whether it’s a new website, whether it’s a new website message, whether it’s a new Facebook message, how does one include or learn about interest, before doing any of those new kind of tactics we like to sit down and analyze with the business owner and key employees how the business is actually marketing in the present. And even if a business owner is not using a lot of marketing techniques, we can first analyze how employees and key people see the business, how they feel like. There are a lot of questions we can ask through surveys of the employees and staff to get some really good feedback on what those—how each employee views the business and what the basic marketing message is for that business before a plan is ever set in place.

For more information on how the Georgia SBDC network can help, call us at 229-420-1144, or go to our website, georgiasbdc.org.