Banks love businesses but there are times when finding money for your business needs can be tough. Our business had no way to access short term loans or find Unsecured Credit Lines to provide the capital for expansion in 2004 when we moved to new premises.
We had to fund the entire move, which cost almost double the initial investment, from the business’ own cash flow, and our own pockets. And we were an ongoing business with a clientele and even a profit margin! We also had been in business for more than three years, so we had established ourselves. We were lucky though, as our business was 100% cash up front, and we were able to use that money wisely to fund the move, while we continued to run the business at the old premises. We did however, close for an extra two weeks, but when we reopened things were fine. You might not be so lucky, so you will need extra planning in financing your move, perhaps through affordable and appropriate levels of borrowings.
Of course, availability of loans is no use unless they are backed up with a suitable process that allows the business owner to keep running his or her business. Paperwork is too often the bane of most small business owners’ lives. It detracts from core tasks, but doesn’t always add to productivity or sales success. So, it’s essential that the process be as easy, as fast and as convenient as possible. If your business is looking for financing, you might be wise to look at the services provided by EzUnsecured.com.
You may find that you can consolidate existing business loans and cut your interest payments, a nice saving that would go to the bottom line. You may need extra funding for capital investments, help with invoice factoring or even just creating an emergency line of credit for times of need.
Of course, such loans will require interest payments, and documentation before they are approved. You’ll need to make sure that borrrowing such money does not place extra stress on your business financials.
So, get out your pencils, calculators and spreadsheets. Then decide on what kind of financing, the level need, and the timescale of borrowing and repayment. If you’re not sure, do your calculatiosn again! And talk it over with your partners! They may need to know this kind of information.
We achieved an amazing 80% on that scale, once I tell you the story, you’ll understand. Perhaps then you’ll see what we did wrong… and why things are better now…
o explain, The Language School Business in Taiwan is a fiercely competitive business with numerous chains and independents. Of course, we are the latter category. There are also a lot of crossover businesses, schools who provide other services that also provide language teaching. This can be done in a number of ways: after-school classes with English, kindergarten with English, English and other subjects, and general cram schools. Schools can also be categorized by the age of students, e.g. children and adults, kindergarten and children, children and teenagers. So there are a number of ways to look at the market. There are of course language schools that teach a number of languages, including Chinese, Japanese, and so on.
Our school has focused on solely teaching English to children aged 6 to 16. We don’t mix our products with anything else. This has been both good and bad, but it makes us different from almost all of the schools in the immediate area who teach English, and from most of the schools in the surrounding area. We have achieved a good reputation for that subject teaching alone, BUT we sometimes lose students because we don’t offer after school care, or kindergarten, or whatever. Some parents really need the convenience of multi-service schools. However, we excel at preparing students for standard examinations in EFL (which are not compulsory), and we teach students to USE the language (you have no idea how rare that is in Taiwan!).
Challenges
A good example to illustrate: if a book has 100 pages, then it’s upper price tends to be restricted to about NT$200 or thereabouts (because that’s how much it costs to photocopy a page). Additional value can be extracted by adding color for the children, and CDs and so on. But in general, it can be very difficult to get purchasers to appreciate why a 50-page book costs more than a reasonable amount, almost regardless of what’s in the book.
In addition, from being a largely homegrown market with staples, like Hess Kindergartens, Joy Schools, Kojen, and a few others, increasingly foreign competitors are entering the marketplace, such as Shane Schools (from Japan), Geos (from Japan), PopularKids (from Singapore), etc.. Suffice to say, the international chains have few advantages in the local market, except perhaps deeper pockets than local companies. Local chains also operate in the same environment. All of them face the same typical problems. Therefore, in many areas of Taipei City and County, and around the island, local independent (or boutique) schools do well because they can compete very effectively on Quality of Service.