Category: Business News

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Reuters

The UK will need a transition period to help businesses adjust after Brexit, the chancellor and the international trade secretary have said.

In a joint Sunday Telegraph article, Philip Hammond and Liam Fox stressed any deal would not be indefinite or a “back door” to staying in the EU.

Their comments are being seen as an attempt to show unity between rival sides in Theresa May’s cabinet.

It comes as ministers start to set out their detailed aims for Brexit.

A series of papers are being published, including one this week covering what will happen to the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic after the UK has left the EU.

Writing in the Sunday Telegraph, Mr Hammond and Mr Fox said the UK definitely will leave both the customs union and the single market when it exits the EU in March 2019.

They said a “time-limited” transition period would “further our national interest and give business greater certainty” – but warned it would not stop Brexit.

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Reuters

“We are both clear that during this period the UK will be outside the single market and outside the customs union and will be a ‘third-country’ not party to EU treaties,” they said.

They said the UK’s borders “must continue to operate smoothly”, that goods bought on the internet “must still cross borders”, and “businesses must still be able to supply their customers across the EU” in the weeks and months after Brexit.

The two leading politicians said the government wanted to ensure “there will not be a cliff-edge when we leave the EU”.

Cabinet unity

BBC political correspondent Ben Wright said Mr Hammond – who is seen to favour a “softer” approach to Brexit – and Mr Fox, one of the most prominent pro-Brexit ministers, had “previously appeared at loggerheads” over the government’s strategy on leaving the EU.

Mr Hammond has raised the prospect of a Brexit deal that saw little immediate change on issues such as immigration – something Brexiteers have rejected.

But our correspondent said their article was an attempt to “prove cabinet unity on Brexit”.

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Getty Images

Meanwhile, former Labour Foreign Secretary David Miliband has called for politicians on all sides to unite to fight back against the “worst consequences” of Brexit.

He described the outcome of last year’s referendum as an “unparalleled act of economic self-harm”.

Writing in the Observer, he said: “People say we must respect the referendum. We should. But democracy did not end on June 23, 2016.

“The referendum will be no excuse if the country is driven off a cliff.”

Negotiations between Brexit Secretary David Davis and EU officials are set to resume at the end of this month.

Mr Davis said the publication of the papers outlining the government’s aims for Brexit would mark “an important next step” towards delivering the referendum vote to leave the EU.

Getting your brand noticed and building credibility as a thought leader in your industry takes more than having a blog and social media profiles. It’s important to combine these online strategies with offline tactics that provide a personalized approach. Creating your own conference also offers a way to meet and interact with your audience, building further credibility and engagement that can stimulate company growth.

However, for many organizations, event marketing and live speaking engagements can prove to be a huge waste of money if not done correctly. Planning events is not only time consuming, but it also requires an enormous amount of resources and planning for the effort to pay off.

The best way to make a lasting impact with company events of all kinds are to keep it local so more attendees have the opportunity to try your product or service. You also want to ensure that your strategies move attendees through the sales funnel before, during, and after the event. Here are tips on how to deliver a successful conference this fall:

Start with the goal.

Establishing the ultimate end goal of your event before you even start is the key to a successful event. Your goal might be to increase leads or grow your overall revenue. It might be to further enhance your thought leadership position.

Choose the type of event that will work with that exact goal in mind. For example, an industry conference might be more ideal for finding talent, investors, and strategic partners while a product launch event will be the best approach for more leads. Offer a seminar or training session for your customers to raise the bar on your thought leadership status.

Related: 4 Tips for Hosting an Unforgettable Marketing Event

Create an engaging sales cycle.

According to LiveMarketing, 83 percent of brands say that increasing sales is their number one reason for event participation. To leverage the opportunities for leads from your event, it’s important to think how the entire sales cycle can support your efforts.

Event and sales experts Mike Vega and Joe Gnapp of Unfair Advantage Events specialize in logistics and maximizing sales at events. With a combined 25 years of sales and events experience, they know what works when deploying effective sales funnels for multiple events. “Anyone can create the atmosphere to make a sale, but if you can’t deliver, it means nothing,” Mike explains.

Creating that atmosphere involves positioning your product mix so that it is the most attractive to your target audience. You can push them through the sales funnel by using multiple channels of marketing. Each channel shares a consistent message about the event and how it will address a specific pain point or issue the audience is having.

Also, ensure that you have an actual sales team whose sole purpose is to touch, follow-up with, and sell to prospective customers or clients.  Telemarketing can be a critical tool to use during an event. For example, sales staff can contact those that appeared to be interested in your event because they visited the site to learn more about it but have yet to buy a ticket. Following up with a call, text, or email can help to convince them why it’s worth coming to the event.

“Before and during the event, our team is selling tickets for that event. This is key to selling a service down the line even if it’s far after the event is over,” Joe adds. “You want to check in after the event to see if they have any questions or if you can provide them with more information. It’s not unusual to close numerous more sales after an event ends if you follow through with contacting each attendee.”

Related: 4 Ways Technology Is Changing the Events Industry

Keep it local.

Another key to success is focusing on sourcing local businesses and resources to help make your event impactful.  Not only will you be helping the local community and supporting businesses in your market, but this will also keep costs down and simplify the planning process. This is a great opportunity to reach out to others in your local area to create mutually beneficial partnerships for future events and projects.

“One of the big advantages of keeping your event local is that you are able to meet face to face with your vendors and everyone involved. That human touch is still so critical to business today despite how much is done online,” notes Mike.

Related: 4 Tips for Marketing Events That Will Transform Your Online Business

Have a budget and metrics.

Create a set budget on what you plan on spending for the conference so you can track and manage the costs associated with it. When you do not make a budget, you tend to spend more than you intended and you cannot assess the real return you got from hosting an event.

Using metrics like how many people attended against planned, how many leads resulted, or how your other goals were met by the event can be compared to the budget you set to see how the resources were spent and what they achieved for you. While it may take you one or two events to really start understanding this process, it will pay off because it will shape future events, helping you to create more memorable and targeted events that garner better returns and that validate the budget you set.

Related: How Data Can Help You to Personalize Marketing Events and Boost ROI

Leverage sponsors to build greater brand awareness.

Depending on the type of event you are hosting, you may be able to maximize the money you spend, build more brand awareness, and generate greater interest among your target audience when you include brands to participate as sponsors or to co-host your conference, seminar, or presentation.

You will have more people offering something of value to the event. Plus, as part of their participation, they will be publicizing the conference on their channels for more buzz and interest. Overall, this can really push your event to reach more of the people you seek in order to scale your business.

Related: 7 Reasons to Stop Writing Cold Emails and Throw an Event Instead

Get started now!

Don’t hesitate in your planning process. Put this marketing tactic to work now that you have these tips for creating a successful event. You will soon find that these actions will help you achieve those goals you set.

We are a society tearing through the digital landscape, and there’s no hint of us slowing down anytime soon. New stars are born every day in the digital world. Some stay burning bright, while others quickly burnout.

Take for example, the Pokémon Go craze that took the world by storm in 2016. The augmented reality game exploded onto the global app scene early last summer. And while a series of technical and safety-related missteps led to its slowdown, it quickly clued marketers into the possibility of augmented reality.

Related: 5 Content Ideas for Making Money With Facebook Live

On the flipside, mobile app Snapchat has held strong in the social media realm since its release in 2012. This social media starlet has clued marketers into the power of expiring content, so much so that it was offered (and rejected) a $3 billion buy-out from Facebook.

But, what the rise and fall of these digital stars tell us is that new technologies are rapidly evolving, right alongside the wants and needs of consumers. And in order for your business to keep growing in the digital marketplace, you’ve got to develop a marketing strategy that keeps up with the technology. Here, we take a look at five of the biggest digital marketing trends for 2017 to help you get started.

1. Visual content

In today’s world of information overload, users are increasingly becoming all about the visuals. People need clear, concise dissemination of information, and visuals do just that. The brain processes visual information 60,000 times faster than text, and 90 percent of the information transmitted to the brain is visual. Ergo, visuals speed up comprehension and retention. What’s more, the right visuals have the ability to enhance emotions and feelings. Enter: the importance of visuals to establish your brand’s identity in the digital marketplace. Effective logos, infographics, photographs, animations and website design are all laying new foundations for enhancing brand identity, and they aren’t likely to disappear anytime soon.

This visual infographic by NatGeo allows users to make sense of Manhattan’s quickly changing skyline in a matter of seconds.

Related: The Modern Marketing Strategy Every Business Should Start Using Today

2. Interactive content 

The desire for connection and engagement is what’s driving the current demand for visual content. But, this same desire for engagement is now leading marketers to discover a new, monumental need for interactive content. Interactive content requires active participation by the user. In effect, these new forms of content — quizzes and polls, contests, voting, calculators, assessments and animated infographics — are adding a whole new layer of depth to the total user experience. But, more importantly, they are inviting the user in, to be a part of the brand. They are enhancing connectivity and effectively turning one-time visitors into brand loyalists. This growing trend is likely to lead the pack for marketing strategies in 2017.

This BuzzFeed quiz is just one of the many quizzes utilized by the site to increase traffic and enhance user interactivity.

Related: 5 Ways to Get Your ROI With Your Company’s Social Media

3. Live video

As of 2015, online videos accounted for 50 percent of all mobile usage, and video content is still very much on the rise. Another form of visual content, videos have the power to connect with consumers and deliver a truckload of information, feelings, thoughts, and responses all within a matter of seconds.

But, in order to heighten the emotions and excitement for users, brands are now “going live.” This means that businesses are able to promote their content ahead of time and then interact in real-time with their consumers. This live element is adding a humanistic component to brands, helping to increase feelings of trust and honesty amongst consumers.

Take, for example, women’s magazine Grazia UK. Last summer, the magazine was working on launching a major week-long collaborative project, deemed the “community issue.” Throughout the project, the magazine livestreamed multiple behind-the-scenes events — including a live debate among contributors — making users feel like they were really a part of the whole process. Users were invited to submit and contribute to the debate, using a specific hashtag on Facebook. The live event was extremely successful, as it brought the magazine and its community of women to life.

Related: 8 Rookie Marketing Mistakes I Made But You Don’t Have To

4. Expiring content

I alluded to the influence of social platform Snapchat earlier on, but let’s delve a bit deeper into the effects of expiring content for marketers and consumers. Much like the live video element, expiring content is helping to increase excitement for consumers. With expiring content, users are given a limited window of time to view content before it quickly disappears into oblivion, never to be seen or heard from again. In effect, this creates a massive sense of urgency among consumers. And in a world where interconnectivity takes the cake, the thought of not knowing what’s going on is, well, utterly disturbing. Expiring content helps pique user interest, while also working to keep their eyes glued to the screen in anticipation of what’s to come.

Related: 4 Ways Small Businesses Can Master Marketing

5. In-store applications

This whole theme of bringing brands to life runs strong into our final digital marketing trend. Retail brands are now finding ways to interact with their customers, live and in-store — seamlessly blending physical marketing elements of the past with modern digital elements of the present.

Beacon technology is at the forefront of this new marketing strategy. The installation of more than one million beacons is forecasted for U.S. retailers this year. Basically, beacons are physical landmarks that can send signals to mobile devices. These signals are now allowing shoppers to scan in-store products to read reviews and check to see what’s in stock. Likewise, retailers are able to use beacons to send push-notifications to shoppers, allowing them to see what special deals are being offered on items throughout the store. Target is just one of many major retailers now tapping into this technology to drive it’s digital marketing campaign.

The in-store marketing trend is one of many that are now finding ways to blend the physical world with the digital world, all in an effort to enhance user interactivity. Now the dominant mode of connection in the digital world, user interactivity should now be at the core of your business’ marketing strategy.

Ultimately, it’s up to you to utilize technology to establish connections with your consumers. And these five digital marketing trends are a great jumping off point.

Water, as intrinsic to our lives as the air we breathe, is becoming increasingly rare and valuable. We must stop taking it for granted.

The water situation in California is dire, and some experts predict that the state — our largest agricultural producer — is destined to become a desert. As politicians and businesses fight it out in court over aquifer rights, towns are drying up.

The Cadiz Water Project is smack in the middle of the controversy.

At the heart of the controversy is a California law that allows landowners to tap into an aquifer their land sits upon, even if the aquifer extends under property belonging to others. A handful of investors have made fortunes by investing in the state’s most valuable natural resource.

Related: These Start-ups are Coming up with Smart Initiatives to Recycle Waste

Cadiz is a private corporation sitting on roughly 70 square miles of property in the Mojave Desert over a deep aquifer. In 2012, the company agreed to sell water to Santa Margarita Water District (SMWD) in Orange County and other local providers. The company proposes to pump enough groundwater from beneath its property to supply 100,000 homes in the heavily drought-impacted Southern California area. California’s eastern Mojave Desert, where the project is located, could see tremendous benefit.

Cadiz CEO Scott Slater told me the project would empower the local community by adding 5,900 new local jobs without harming the environment. “We’ve studied this issue from every angle, and what we propose will not drain the aquifer or significantly impact the local ecology,” he said. “What it will do is generate approximately $1 billion in economic growth and provide much needed water to an area parched by the long drought.”

Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), strongly opposes the project, citing environmental concerns and long-term sustainability. On June 6, she sent a letter to David Bernhardt, President Trump’s nominee for Deputy Secretary of the Interior, asking him to recuse himself from overseeing the Cadiz water extraction project. Sen. Feinstein cites conflict of interest since his law firm, though not Bernhardt, is paid to lobby for the company.

Related: Business Leaders Slam Trump’s Decision to Withdraw From Paris Climate Agreement

Winston Hickox, former California Environmental Protection Agency secretary, disagrees with the Senator. In an op-ed for the Sacramento Bee, Hickox writes, “The project will conserve enough water for 400,000 Californians each year for 50 years without causing a single adverse environmental impact. The best scientists and engineers assured that sustainability and protection of the environment were paramount. The project was approved in accordance with the toughest environmental law in America, the California Environmental Quality Act. It was challenged in court, but judges in 12 separate opinions affirmed the project and its protections and rejected the flawed positions represented by the senator’s op-ed. The desert will not be destroyed, nor will the bighorn sheep, desert tortoises, springs or wildflowers.”

What’s at stake?

Why does a company fight the government for 15 years? Could water, a resource most of us take for granted, be that valuable?

Water is big business. The global water industry is predicted to reach $1 trillion by 2020. As massive as the bottled water industry is, its volume pales in comparison to tap water. U.S. public water systems supply more than 1 billion gallons of tap water an hour, every hour of the day. Twelve percent of municipal water is provided by private water systems, and they serve 36 million people in the U.S.

The average American uses 176 gallons of water per day, and municipal water prices have increased 27 percent over the past five years. Advocacy group Food & Water Watch says private companies charge 59 percent more than public utilities, or $185 more per year, per household.

Crisis like the one in Flint, Mich.,, demonstrate that public water sources are not always the best option.

Conservatives like to claim that over-regulation stifles business. Liberals — including me — are primarily concerned with environmental impact over profiteering. In the end, this story comes down to evaluating the greater good.

Related: There’s a New Threat to Small Business: Water Scarcity

For the first time in a long time, I’m coming down on the conservative side. Water is still pretty cheap, and most households will pay just $15 more per month from a private source. Given a choice between shortage and rationing that comes with it, and shelling out less than the cost of a cup of Starbucks every week, most people are unlikely to object.

Generally speaking, most municipal water comes from aquifers. What environmental difference does it make if a private or public company pumps it? I’m simply not sure the objections hold water (pardon the pun).

Photo Credit: katkaZV

Businesses are incredibly difficult ventures to start. More than half of all businesses fail within five years of starting, according to statistics gathered in 2016. While this is far better than the traditional belief that half fail within a single year of starting, it is still clearly a challenge to start and continue running a small business.

Related: 10 Unique Ways to Get Your Name Out There

The reasons for this consistent failure can be difficult to pinpoint, especially because there are so many different factors that can affect it. However, one consistent failure of small businesses is a lack of capital, and by extension, a lack of investment. If you don’t have enough money to spend, then your business is likely to fail in the near future.

Here are six things you need to invest enough money into if you want your small business to be a success.

1. Design

Investment in design across your business is really necessary if you want to succeed. Most small businesses under invest in their design, especially graphic design for their products, because they believe that it is not important. This just isn’t true. In fact, a customer will pay the most attention to your logo, according to research completed by Missouri University of Science and Technology.

You can do this by investing in the services of a reputable and well-known design company, not just asking your Uncle John to whip something up in Microsoft Paint.

This involves your logo, business cards, cellphone application and the general branding of your company. All these things require solid investment if you want your small business to be successful and have a good reputation with your clients and other businesses as a stand-out professional organization.

2. Marketing

Linked in tightly to design, marketing your business is another aspect you need to properly invest in. Don’t try and do it yourself if you aren’t qualified or skilled. Don’t hire your friend for $20 mates-rates. Marketing is essential to your small business’s success, especially if you are working in a field that is already filled with other businesses offering a similar service to you.

Marketing includes knowing your product’s target audience, ensuring that advertising is relevant and accessible for that target audience, and making sure your product is coherent and consistent in its tone and advertising. These actions will maximize your business’s sales, and give your design team a focus behind what they are achieving.

3. Technology

Technology is another valuable investment you should make in your small business. Everybody knows how important technology is to modern life. However, many people do not know how important technology is to business. You need to spend money on your technology, otherwise your reputation and revenue will be negligible until your business is dead.

Related: 5 Tips for Leaving Your Stress at Work

This includes lots of different things for your business. Programs like instant messaging systems, document organization systems and content management system, are likely to have an instant effect on the productivity of your workforce. However, two other aspects of technology are vitally important to your customers:

1. Cell service/coverage: You will need a long reaching cell coverage that can cover your entire office, ensuring no important phone calls are missed purely because someone was standing in the wrong place.
2. Your website not only needs to be designed to be pleasing to the eye, but it also must contain the most essential information about your company. If your website fails at either of these things, then you will lose customers and reputation.

Simply put, don’t save your money when it comes to technology. You and your business will regret the decision.

4. Legal advice

Many small businesses fail to retain a legal adviser, calling it an unnecessary expense. Well, legal advice is actually pretty necessary to your business’s success. By using a reputable law firm, you can protect yourself from potential legal issues. This includes writing and reviewing legal contracts, ensuring you have not violated any laws in your business and mediation in case of disputes.

In short, you need to get legal advice, or even a retained lawyer if you can afford it, if you want your business to be a success. Without this, you open yourself up to potential legal action being taken against you and even possibly shutting down your business before it has the chance to become successful.

5. Accounting service

Accounting is another thing you need to spend your money on, especially if you are currently lacking in capital. By hiring an accounting firm, you can optimize your business and reduce the wastage and inefficiencies that are limiting your business’s growth.

This includes creating invoices for your employees, decreasing time wastage on duties that an accountant will cover for you and controlling the potentially spiraling costs that often paralyze small businesses. If you fail to make this investment, you are likely to have an inefficient and ineffective business that will waste money you could use for reinvestment in other aspects listed here.

6. Insurance

While this one may seem obvious to you, you need to invest your money in good insurance coverage for your small business. Many people scoff at the suggestion of insurance, arguing that it is not needed unless you are making serious money with your business. Honestly, this may be true for some small businesses. If you are an eBay reseller or small-time product designer, then insurance may not be for you.

Related: 10 Tips for Planning a Successful Company Conference

However, if you want your business to grow, you need to spend money on insurance. Disaster could strike at any time, and if you don’t have insurance, you aren’t really prepared for it. Whether this is a natural disaster like a flash flood, fire or hurricane or a human disaster like theft, injury or illness, you need the support insurance gives.

Without that support, any of these disasters are likely to undermine your reputation as a business and potentially destroy your revenue. Your small business cannot afford either of these consequences, so you need to properly invest in a good insurance coverage with a reputable company.

Overall, you need to make investments if you want your business to be successful. Without the proper investment of money, you will appear unprofessional and lose business through inefficiencies and lack of reputation. If you can’t make these necessary investments, then you probably need to reevaluate your business’s chances of success.

Whenever we create digital content, we reference other web pages, either for further reading or to give a credit. In most cases, we link out in order to create better content and provide the reader with more information on the subject.

But did you know that links can provide further value for your business? If you approach it strategically, linking out can actually bring leads and business contacts. Here are a few ways to achieve more by linking out to external sources:

Related: Why Your Content Marketing Is Failing and How to Fix It

1. If you want those links clicked, phrase them accordingly.

A call to action is an instruction to your audience, guiding them towards your goal conversion. Usually calls to action are designed in the form of a button that stands out on your page in order to trigger some type of an action.

A text link can be an effective call to action as well, provoking an immediate response from your reader. It’s obvious that if you want your site readers to do something, you’ll get better results if you tell them exactly what to do. Whenever you want your page visitor to read further, it may be a good idea to word your link exactly that way — “Click here to read further.”

2. Keep your links descriptive for usability and accessibility purposes.

While a link that says “click here” can be a good action trigger encouraging your readers to actually click, it’s a poor way to word your links from usability and accessibility standpoint. In order for “click here” links to make sense, your readers will have to read the surrounding text to put the link into context. This process requires more effort, both in terms of eye movements and mental processing.

Related: 6 SEO Strategies That Are Hurting Your Online Business

As for accessibility, visually impaired users of your site who use screen readers to navigate your web page will have even more trouble with “click here” links because they will make no sense to them. That being said, there are lots of ways to accommodate both goals of getting people to click and complying with usability and accessibility standards. Here are a few ways to word your links to achieve both:

• “Click here to read more about …”
• “Click here to download the full guide …”

On top of that, a text link can trigger an opt-in form — which actually makes it a valid lead generating call to action. These types of lead generation opt-ins are referred to as “two step,” and they can be easily built with OptinMonster WordPress plugin.

3. Link out for relationship building purposes.

Linking to a person is one of the best ways to become friends with them. People love being referenced by other writers, and they usually show up to thank, provide more details and share your piece with their community.

There are a few tricks to turn your linking practices into a relationship building tactic:

• Reference niche influencers who are active and responsive on social media. These people are more likely to engage with you after you let them know you linked to their content.
• Use social media tagging to let those influencers know that you referenced them.
• If you link for relationship building purposes, keep your links as descriptive as you can. Include the author’s name, book title, Twitter handle, etc. Many niche influencers use tools to monitor their brand name mentions, so your mention will get noticed. Read about citation tips in a research paper; include “Last Name, First Name. Page Title. Website Title.”

Linking out for relationship building is probably only possible for content focused sites (blogs and online magazines). Ecommerce linking is a bit different. But if you have a blog section on your ecommerce website, the tactic will work for you too.

Related: How Real Marketers Create Backlinks That Matter

While links work great for reinforcing your calls-to-action and building relationships with niche influencers, their primary goal is to add value to your content. Always keep that in mind when linking out from your content.

“Rose doesn’t like that.” “Rose will fix this.” If I were to talk like this, especially to myself, it might seem a little nutty. But there might be a good reason to start — especially if I ever found myself in a stressful situation where I needed to think clearly.  

In a recent study, professors from Michigan State University and the University of Michigan conducted two experiments to find out the effects that self-talk in third person can have on an individual’s mood and emotions. And guess what? Talking to yourself in third person can actually help to regulate your emotions and reduce stress. 

Related: Want Your Team to Collaborate More? The Answer Is Surprisingly Simple.

In the first experiment, participants were presented neutral and disturbing images, and asked to share their feelings in first and third person. By measuring a participant’s neural activity while they shared their reactions, researchers found that people who used their name rather than “I” were less reactive to disturbing images and showed more control over their emotions. In a dramatic example, people who spoke in third person showed less fear when they were presented an image of a man holding a gun to someone’s head.

As an added benefit, third person self talk requires no extra mental effort, compared to other forms of self control. “This bodes well for using third-person self-talk as an on-the-spot strategy for regulating one’s emotions,” explains Jason Moser, MSU associate professor of psychology, “as many other forms of emotion regulation, such as mindfulness and thinking on the bright side, require considerable thought and effort.”

Related: 3 Scientifically-Proven Ways to Spot Liars in Your Emails

The second study also proved this to be true. By measuring the brain activity of participants when they were asked to recall personal painful experiences from their pasts, researchers again found that people who spoke in third person had less negative brain activity and better emotional regulation.

So, how can the simple swap of a name do the trick? Speaking to yourself in third person gets you to think from another standpoint, helping to detach you from a situation. “Essentially, we think referring to yourself in the third person leads people to think about themselves more similar to how they think about others,” says Moser. “That helps people gain a tiny bit of psychological distance from their experiences, which can often be useful for regulating emotions.”

Veteran-owned businesses have long been a key part of the American economic engine. Following World War II, an incredible 49.7 percent of returning veterans went on to start their own business. Today, according to the most recent census data, there are 2.45 million veteran-owned businesses in the United States, contributing $1.22 trillion in sales each year to the national economy.

These numbers show how important veteran entrepreneurs are to the American economy and society.

If you’re a veteran running or planning to start a business, understand that having sufficient capital on hand is crucial to the success of your company. Unfortunately, challenges to obtaining financing have been among the reasons why fewer veterans are starting businesses today than after Word War II.

Fortunately, there are still many resources for veterans to fund their venture:

1. Small Business Administration (SBA)

The SBA has a wealth of resources available to help veterans start and grow a business. The Office of Veterans Business Development supports and empowers existing and aspiring veteran entrepreneurs and military spouses through a variety of training programs, like Boots to Business and financial services.

The SBA also offers financing help to veterans through the following programs and services:

• SBA Veterans Advantage Guaranteed Loans: Along with small business loans, the SBA offers training courses and counseling to ensure military veterans or their spouses have proper support. Loans of $150,000 or less have no guaranty fee, as the SBA hopes to remove some of the stress involved with borrowing to start a business. Larger loans for eligible veterans and spouses usually have low guarantee fees. The business must be 51 percent owned by an eligible active military member, veteran or military spouse.
• SBA Express Loans: As of 2015, there is no upfront borrower fee for eligible veterans and military spouses on loans up to $35,000.
• Leveraging Information and Networks to Access Capital (LINC): Think of LINC as like a matchmaking service for obtaining small business loans. Search on the site, and you’ll be connected with SBA-approved non-profit lenders.

2. U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs

Like the SBA Office of Veterans Business Development, the Department of Veteran Affairs is a comprehensive resource for veteran entrepreneurs. To help streamline the financing process, the department has created the Veteran Entrepreneur Portal (VEP), which can help you quickly identify financing resources for your business and then apply.

In general, the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs is a great starting point for looking for financing. The department keeps updated and relevant information for veterans and can guide you go suitable sources of funding for your small business.

3. International Franchise Association (IFA) — VetFran(R)

The IFA has what’s called the VetFran(R) program, which is designed to help veterans start their own business. To date, more than 600 franchises participate in the program, including famous brands like Liberty Tax Service, Sport Clips, Firehouse Subs and Jiffy Lube.

While these aren’t traditional business loans for veterans, the VetFran(R) program offers financial incentive for veterans to launch a franchise. All the companies listed make it less expensive for veteran entrepreneurs to open up a franchise.

For instance, UPS participates in the program and offers veterans $10,000 off the franchise fee, as well as 50 percent off the initial application fee. 7-Eleven, another participant in the VetFran(R) program, offers up to 20 percent off the initial franchise fee, up to 65 percent financing through 7-Eleven and even special financing offers.

4. Organizations and resources for veteran entrepreneurs

As a veteran, it’s vital to use all the resources available to you to find financing for your business. In addition to lenders, know that there are a lot of support organizations and resource centers out there for you.

The following resource centers and organizations are quite reputable:

5. Lenders who focus on veteran entrepreneurs

Since there are so many lenders operating in the small business space, it can be difficult to know which ones will offer you fair terms and rates. Thankfully, there are a number reputable lenders out there who work specifically to provide small business loans for veterans.

While there still needs to be increased access to funding for veteran-entrepreneurs, veteran-focused lenders popping up more than ever.

6. Specialized small business loans for veterans

Given your situation, you may also qualify for specialized small business loans for veterans.

One of the most common specialized loans for veterans is the Military Reservist Economic Injury Disaster Loan. This loan helps active-duty military personnel and reservists who have to leave a business behind when their country calls. The Military Reservist Economic Injury Disaster Loan is a low-interest loan that can help you run your business smoothly again when you return.

If you’re looking to fund an agricultural operation, research the USDA Veteran and Minority Farmer Grant. Run by the Department of Agriculture, this grant program aims to bring traditionally underserved people into farming through training and technical and financial assistance. Awards for veteran farmers vary by state.

Get the funding you need to succeed

While securing funding a veteran can feel overwhelming, know there are ton of resources out there to help you get started and secure the funding you need.

You’ve made sacrifices for our country, so take advantage of all that’s available to you, especially those resources designed specifically for veterans. Funding challenges shouldn’t prevent you from turning your business idea into a wonderful success.

(By Meredith Wood)

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