THE FIFTH THIRD BANK Business Banking Leadership Team: David Lamb, affiliate executive; Joanne Rau, Sharon Ciaramitaro, Lori Mazurek, Dolores Sturdivant and Scott McCurdy, regional team leaders.
Business bankers at Fifth Third Bank have the best job in the world. Every day, we get to see our customers making their dreams a reality. The diversity of people we help is amazing — from home-based businesses with the owner as the only employee to companies that are looking to make that next big step with non-family professional managers or buying another business.

At Fifth Third Bank, we partner with our customers to help make their business dreams come true. In fact, the first step we take is often to help a customer recognize that their hobby is, in fact, big enough to be considered a business. That recognition usually takes place when we are conducting a financial needs analysis for a customer because they are finding it hard to keep track of income received from what they once considered a hobby and now looks more and more like a business.

The first thing we do for a new business customer is to help them open business accounts to deposit money received from their business activity and to pay business expenses. Next, we add a credit card in the name of the business. Of course, we always encourage our customers to check with their professional advisors on legal structure or tax questions. If they don’t have an appropriate advisor, we are happy to refer them to qualified professionals.

Another important consulting service our business bankers can provide is to help owners keep an eye to the future. Probably the single most important issue to a growing business is access to capital. Capital, in this case, refers to bank loans as well as investment from equity sources like “angels” (wealthy individual investors) or funds that focus on small- and mid-size businesses. No matter how you might fund future growth, at some point you probably are going to need “other people’s money” and likely your first source will be a bank.

To obtain credit from a bank or any senior lender, the focus will be on your ability to pay back the loan, which is largely demonstrated by your financial statements, tax returns, reports of generating income and cash flow. Unfortunately, many businesses fail to consider their future needs and consequently pay limited attention to what their financial statements look like until it is too late. The “bottom line” here is if you don’t report net income, it is extremely difficult to borrow money.

Along these same lines, business owners need to be aware of the differences in funding sources. Senior lenders like banks work on a slim margin. Great ideas that rely on projections and a lack of capital are best financed via equity style investors where they are paid to take the risk. People don’t like to sell parts of their company or pay the high returns required by equity investors, but there are few successful large businesses that have not had outside investors at some point in their growth. Although the cost of equity can be very high, it has a key advantage over debt in that you don’t have the requirement of monthly payments and many times you are provided an advisor who can help drive growth.

Another financing tip for small business people is to keep your personal credit rating as high as possible. In small- and mid-size businesses, we are lending money to you even if it is in the name of your business, so your personal credit rating is a very important guidepost in a lending decision. Along those lines, buying new luxury cars or a bigger house just as you want to undertake loans to grow the business will be a deterrent to obtaining credit.

In addition to help for small and mid-size businesses, Fifth Third business bankers also have a wide variety of services for larger companies. In fact, we help companies hedge their fuel costs or interest rates, protect exports through insurance, and even introduce potential investors among other things. The great thing for us is almost any product we develop for our larger clients is also useful to our smaller clients. A perfect example is our Electronic Deposit product, which was originally introduced for larger companies and now is widely used by all of our business customers. Electronic Deposit basically allows you to deposit your business checks at your office rather than go to a bank branch. This saves time, money and increases safety.

Whatever your business needs, you owe it to yourself to check out what Fifth Bank can do to help you reach your business goals. Stop in and see us and we will show you “the things we do for dreams.”