615 - Small Business Advice - How to Start and Scale your Business

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

Welcome to Modern Mindset, the show that picks the brains of the world's leading minds to help you unlock yours. Decoding the beliefs and strategies of global experts to give you an updated mindset to make the most of modern life.

Daniel Clewlow (0:20)

This is Modern Mindset, the show that picks the brains of the world's leading minds to help you unlock yours. My name is Daniel Clewlow, and today I'm joined by Matt Wilde from SWIG Finance. Welcome to the show, Matt.

Matt Wilde (0:32)

Hi Dan, great to be here.

Daniel Clewlow (0:34)

Now it's Small Business Advice Week, which presents us a bit of an opportunity to kind of celebrate the thousands of local businesses and SMEs that are kind of really the backbone of the UK economy.

But we also hear a lot about the struggles they face and the challenges and barriers there are to people starting their own businesses. So I want to ask you a bit about that and dig into kind of the support that's out there, particularly from your guys' perspective at SWIG Finance. So I suppose the first question really to dig into is what the kind of most common obstacles are that people face when they're kind of trying to start a new business, get something up and running.

Matt Wilde (1:14)

Yeah, so look, SWIG Finance is a responsible finance provider. We've owned the first years of experience supporting startups, small and medium businesses, and sort of strengthening local economies.

We work support of loans all the way from 500 pounds up to 250 grams. So we see a real spectrum of things.

To your question around what do businesses struggle with when they're starting a business, I think part of it's confidence. Knowing where to start is a really big challenge for a lot of these businesses. It's a complex world out there of different information solutions, it can be information overload really. So I think it's having the confidence to start. What I would say to those businesses is, focus back on the basics. What is it you want to do? How do you make money? How much is it going to cost you? And really build up from that pace, and take advice from other people, listen to podcasts like this, talk to organizations like us as well.

Daniel Clewlow (2:08)

And yeah, so you mentioned just before that we started about the different loans and stuff like that that you provide. So what are the most common reasons I suppose that people struggle to secure a loan? Are you an alternative route to most businesses? You know, perhaps different from, you know, I would typically need to go into a bank and securing a loan, or something, putting your house up for collateral, or whatever, you know, you see in the films.

So yeah, are there kind of reasons why people might struggle to get a loan and then have to look at alternative loans?

Matt Wilde (2:40)

Yeah, and Dan, you highlight a really interesting issue here. And we are what's known as a CDFI, a Community Development Finance Institution. That's a really fancy way of saying a responsible lender who aims to lend in sort of underrepresented areas that the mainstream lenders don't reach. And yeah, if you are looking to start a business, you probably think, well, I'm going to go to my bank, that I've done my personal banking with for years. And you know, they're algorithmic based, whereas we're not, we're real people making, you know, the real decisions. We take the time to understand the people behind the business, you know, and that can be true for startups who, or established businesses, you know, maybe they don't fit nicely in a box of a mainstream lender. We take the time to understand behind the business and look for more of a storybook approach than a tech book approach. And you know, why do some people struggle to raise finance or loans? I think part of it comes back to the confidence piece. You know, where do you go? It's confusing, it's overwhelming, which is why I say engaging with an organization such as ourselves early on, we will work with you through that process, you know, really to support you in sort of understanding your business more than anything. You know, that's the main thing. Businesses that are successful in raising finance are the ones that can understand their business. They can communicate to a lender, you know, they know their numbers, they know what the money is for, and they're able to explain how the business is going to be able to repay that money.

You know, the British business bank say half of small businesses use external finance, but only around 62% know where to go to get options about finance, which actually, you know, 62% sounds large, but if I flip that and say almost 40% of businesses don't know where to go to get information about different types of finance, that's quite a large figure.