Kenmore Capital Corporation provides custom-tailored financing programs for small and mid-sized businesses throughout the United States.

Your business starts with two kinds of seed. The first seed is your idea, of course. You have a unique product or service to offer, a way to differentiate what you do from the competition in the marketplace. From your initial idea, you build a business plan, identify what you need to open your doors, look for investors, and outline a marketing strategy to let people know who you are and what you will do for them.

The second seed is funding. Every one of these steps requires money. Unless you are starting with a lot of money in the bank, there is a good chance you’ll need to borrow to get off the ground. You will need to pay for any physical space you will occupy, equipment you will use, and marketing you’ll need to alert and attract your customer base. You pay to obtain your business license and to build up inventory. Your start-up funding will need to cover all of this, and more, before you can do much else other than dream about your business idea.

If you get investors, they can help get you off the ground. Any gap, though, will come from lenders. You will present your business case and your credit profile, and look for the lender or lenders who can give you the best terms while delivering the funds you need to start. Kenmore Capital will work with you to fully understand who you are, what you do, and what you need. From there, we can match you with the best financing program to get your business up and running.

As a business owner, you know that even after you get your business started, you need to have money before you can make money. Your company needs equipment, inventory, and staff, all of which require funds that you have to spend before you to get to the point of earning revenue and turning a profit. However great your ideas may be, you first need the financial structure in place to bring them to fruition.

The money you have to manage your operational needs is called working capital. Working capital is the money you need to consistently have in place to manage your business and give yourself a chance to grow. It provides a cushion for you to maintain operations while you build, and a way to pay your staff and your outstanding obligations even if you do not bring in revenue right away.

Without sufficient working capital you are, to put it bluntly, sunk. As important as optimism is for business owners, it’s a recipe for disaster to try and run a business on the hope that receivables and paying customers will come in before you have to pay your bills. Imagine, for example, you are running a restaurant. You have to pay your staff for their time, and you have to pay your lease and your bills on inventory and any equipment you are financing. If you have investors in your business, you need to be able to show some value you are creating for them. Even if you are not generating enough revenue to cover all your costs, you must still be able to show your ability to work with the funding you have until enough customers come in to cover your costs and help you turn a profit.

This is not always an easy road. Your business plan might have been overly optimistic in predicting your revenue stream. Marketing or design costs might go beyond your expectations. You might have difficulty paying on the loans you have in place. Or, you may simply run into more competition than you expected. Any of these can throw your planning into chaos and make you struggle to turn the corner with your business performance.

Fortunately, there are ways to overcome these working capital challenges, and Kenmore Capital can help. We can help you look at the options available, including refinancing expensive loans or injecting your business with fresh cash through a new loan or merchant cash advance. We will analyze your current financial position and help you find the best solution for your working capital crunch. Instead of struggling with an untenable working capital situation, we will build a solution that not only relieves your stress, but lifts your business up.

If working capital focuses on your everyday needs in the present, strategic funding focuses on what you can expect to need in the future. This makes sense for any business looking to grow or move into new markets. You may be working well in your current position, but not be ready to open a new location or expand your current space. Strategic funding looks to give you the injection of new capital to help you meet your future goals.

Whether you need strategic funding depends on long term plans and timing. If you want to expand but are having trouble building enough interest among your potential customer base, strategic funding might focus on developing a better marketing message. If your challenge lies more in meeting your current obligations, you should consider whether a new funding round would help with that as opposed to just eliminating certain expenditures and engaging in a period of old fashioned belt tightening.

One difficulty you can expect to encounter, of course, is lenders worrying whether you are ready to take on the obligations of a larger operation. If you are struggling with your business finances currently, it may be unrealistic to expect strategic funding options to make things easier. On the other hand, if you can make a solid business case for expansion, strategic funding with the right partner can give you just the push you need to move forward.

It’s our job to help make these assessments and come up with the right solution for your particular situation. At Kenmore Capital, we pride ourselves on working with our clients as individuals, rather than as categories. You aren’t a “type”, and your business is not a “category”. You are a person, whose business is unique for all the reasons you started it in the first place. While other funding operations might try to push you into a particular option or lender, we will help you reach your own goals with the approach that best suits your specific needs.

Where strategic funding focuses on your business growth and development, emergency funding comes into play when you have immediate, and often unexpected, needs. Your working capital should allow for some unexpected circumstances that arise. You will need to maintain equipment, weather a small downturn, or push through employee turnover. You know you need to manage lean times so you can prosper in the good ones. A change that remains within your financial means does not constitute a true emergency, and your funding options should reflect this.

Emergency funding is something bigger, or more urgent. If you lose a major piece of equipment, or need to rebuild a store after a fire or natural disaster, or have to build inventory quickly to manage a critical order, these go beyond your expected day to day fluctuations. More importantly for your purposes, they do not represent optional funding opportunities. They demand action. They demand funds.

When you are faced with an emergency, your challenges are both money and time. You don’t have the time you would like to deliberately weigh your options and compare terms from several offers. You need to quickly develop a plan and implement it. Still, you cannot just act without consideration. Your dilemma is the need to form cogent decisions within an inconvenient and urgent time frame.

Here again, Kenmore Capital can step in. When you need emergency funding, you immediately get our top and undivided attention. Our trusted lending partners will not take advantage of you when you are down. Instead, they will offer fair and reasonable solutions you can live with, and give you palatable options for growing in the long term, without hurting your business in the short term. Whether through a merchant cash advance or a pre-qualified loan, we will present you with an immediate solution to meet your challenges head on.

Finally, sometimes the problem isn’t the amount of money you have on hand, but the amount you have going out every month. Existing loans with unfavorable terms remain unwieldly and draining even after you get your business established. If you have stacked loans on top of each other over time, the accumulation can make it hard for you to get ahead. Even when your revenue stream builds, you are playing catch-up.

In these situations, replacing your current loan package can give you an important leg up. Refinancing expensive loans reduces your finance costs. It gives you practical help by saving you money and increasing your cash flow, and psychological help by letting you see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Consolidation loans are similar, but help by wrapping multiple loans together into a single new loan. You feel more control and relaxed because you don’t have to keep track of all the payments, and you end up with a lower total monthly cost with a lower interest payment in place. The result is a more secure foundation for you to turn your monthly revenues into monthly profits.

The most traditional route for lending needs is to secure a loan from a bank. Large financial institutions have tremendous leverage that gives them the ability to loan large amounts of money at relatively low interest rates to their lowest credit risks. If you have an established business with an extremely strong credit profile, taking a loan through a bank’s business lending practice may be your best option.

On the other hand, most small business owners don’t fit that profile. Even if they do, applying for and receiving a traditional bank loan is typically a long, cumbersome process. You have a great deal of paperwork to complete before you can receive the funds you need. If you don’t precisely fit the borrower profile the lender is looking for, you can forget being approved. For an urgent funding need, this will not deliver quickly enough for you.

Similarly, a business just launching, or struggling to gain its footing, will most often struggle to get approved for a traditional bank loan and will have to look at other means to acquire financing. You need money to move away from the situation in which you are stuck, but that same situation keeps you from gaining access to the funds you need. Successful existing businesses looking to grow, or experienced entrepreneurs with a successful track record in starting new companies, can do well with this kind of loan. But for most small business owners, the bank lending process may not be designed to help you.

Commercial real estate funding focuses on helping you secure physical space for your business and real estate lenders can help you with the funds you need to invest in that property.

You need a strong business or personal credit profile to get a commercial real estate loan. Property is a big investment, but you have the advantage of securing the loan with the real estate you procure. Because of this, the lender has some built-in protection against default. That protection allows them to lend more money and hedge their bets.

Be aware, though, secured loans can be a double-edged sword for your business. Unsecured loans typically give you less money to work with, but they also give your lender more incentive to work with you if you have payment struggles. A commercial real estate loan, however, allows your lender to foreclose if you can’t make payments, putting your entire business at risk.

Equipment loans serve as a separate kind of secured loan. You may be leasing your space or not even need a physical location for an online company. Still, you need equipment to make your product or operate your service for your customers. Purchasing that equipment can be a significant hurdle to beginning operations or getting ready to boost your productivity.

For this scenario, you can obtain equipment loans designed specifically to secure your funds with your purchase. You can get favorable payment terms in exchange for the security interest you grant in the purchased equipment. As long as you can maintain the payments, this can be a great tool for start-up or strategic funding purposes.

The Small Business Association can be a great source for businesses looking to start or grow. SBA loans are a bit of a misnomer, since the SBA does not actually loan money. Instead, it guarantees loans through the government, and works with lending partners to help small businesses gain access to funding that might not otherwise be available to them.

Because of this process, SBA loans can help fill a variety of needs. They help connect lenders to businesses for both start-up and strategic growth funding. The U.S. government uses it to help incentivize small business growth, and because the loans are guaranteed, you will get better interest rates and payment terms than you can by working exclusively through the private market.

In addition to these more typical kinds of loans, the SBA guarantees microlending for businesses. These smaller loans provide up to $50,000, which does not provide long-term working capital or get you through a start-up, but can help your business with emergency funding to meet specific needs that arise. While microloans ordinarily come with much higher interest rates, going through the SBA can make those more palatable.

Of course, like any government program, SBA loans can be hard to obtain. And they are not quick. You need to meet the SBA’s specific and demanding requirements. You’ll have to patiently work through the process the agency dictates and you will need to find ways to plan ahead. While this can be a great tool for small business owners, SBA financing will most often not be your best option if you need to be funded quickly.

In some cases, you simply don’t have time to wait for typical lending application and funding processes to play out. Here, a merchant cash advance offers you both flexibility and immediate availability. They are a more expensive lending option, but can give almost any small business owner access to capital as soon as it’s needed.

In a merchant cash advance, you are advanced money at a discount rate against your future revenue. There are many creative ways to structure a merchant cash advance, but the general principle is that instead of repaying the advance with a fixed monthly payment consisting of principal and interest as you would with a traditional loan, you repay based on a percentage of your future sales. The payment itself can either be a fixed amount, determined by your recent bank deposits, that is debited from your business checking account on a weekly or daily basis, or a set percentage of the credit card sales your business batches each day. This latter method of repayment gives you a stable way to pay the lender without worrying whether you are bringing in enough money to do so because your payment amount will rise and fall depending on your exact sales performance.

Again, different circumstances will dictate different financing solutions. If you are established, have plenty of time and have steady revenue and strong personal and business credit, some of the other products discussed above will be less expensive and give you the funds you need for more purpose. However, when time is of the essence or in situations where your credit profile may not be as strong as it once was, a merchant cash advance can be a tremendous solution for your business financing needs.