Indecisiveness is a problem that can stall the growth of your small business start up. Hesitating to act when an opportunity for growth presents itself could cause your small business start up to fail completely. In working with entrepreneurs to raise capital, I often notice that they hesitate to move forward with my funding process although they are in need of funding for their small business start up. While I do understand taking the appropriate time to think about what funding options you want to take advantage of, I am not fond of hesitation due to overthinking.
Many of the entrepreneurs I have worked with tend to overthink things and “think themselves” out of moving forward because of what they perceive may or may not happen. For example, I was recently working with a husband and wife team who are owners of a security company. They needed working capital to cover payroll and since they were experiencing major growth ($500k revenue generated in 2012 and $1.3 million in 2013), I recommended several funding options to them — a traditional unsecured business line of credit, unsecured business loan, and accounts receivables financing.
The husband and wife team were pretty good candidates for each of the types of funding I recommended to them. Both had pretty decent credit. However, the wife had one old charge off that was nearly 7 years old reporting on her credit history. Everything else about her credit and financial situation were ideal for getting approved for bank financing. We decided that we would dispute the old charge off in attempt to get it removed. Getting it removed would enable us to help her apply for a traditional unsecured business line of credit and unsecured business loan. We wrote up the dispute letter, gave it to her and told her to mail it to the credit bureaus.
After several days I asked her if she had mailed the letter and she stated not yet. I asked her why and I couldn’t get a clear answer. She didn’t have a real reason why. In addition to that, I had referred her and her husband to an accounts receivables lender. Their current lender only finances up to 95% on dollar while my lender finances up to 97% on the dollar for receivables. Her and her husband at a great chance of getting approved for the higher amount but decided not to move forward because they said the 97% wasn’t guaranteed. This made no sense to me because all they needed to do was provide the accounts receivables lender with a copy of their client contracts so the lender could determine whether they qualify for the 97%.
Long story short, every time I gave them good advice and direction to obtain funding for their small business start up, they never moved forward to the next step in the process. It was like they were refusing to listen to me. They kept trying to find reasons or excuses to not move forward. Yet they still need capital to this day (and continue to contact me asking about other funding options and stating that they may still want to move forward with my previous recommendations). Their indecisiveness is causing them to remain stagnant. In their current position, they have a good chance of getting the capital they need but they are most likely overthinking the situation instead of simply moving forward.
The moral of the story is this, don’t let indecisiveness stop you from making a decision that will improve the current state of your small business start up. Yes, it is good to think about things before taking a leap, however, don’t think about it so much that you overthink it and let the opportunity of a lifetime pass you by.
