Comments on: Job creators face roadblocks
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- Thanks for covering this. It is a very real problem affecting many small business across the country, and adding up to a significant effect on our economy. And yet it has not gotten the attention it deserves. Thanks Kimberly Martinez for sharing your story!
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- It amazes me, everyone is screaming about the banks and never think about why any of this is happening. Look into the Dodd-Frank bill (Financial Regulatory Reform Act) passed recently; another over-regulation by our government which hurts the middle class and the small business people. As usual, our government sets out to "control" something, over-reaches while steamrolling over the "little people" in this country and then blames it on the banks. Jeez, I wish I had a marketing team like our government does - screw some "regular guy" royally and then easily convince the public that the "regular guy" was the one that started it, and while you (the public) are busy raising cain with "regular guy", screws you too. Americans are such easy targets for this stuff and it would be funny if it wasn't so sad. We, the people need to start thinking for ourselves and stop believing everything we see on TV. Read lots of newspapers from all kinds of groups, read the bills themselves (they are all on the internet), heck - go visit your local banker and ask him/her about what the problem is. If we all get better informed and stop believing what we are "told to believe", we might be able to get ourselves out of this mess. If we continue to believe the "poop" we are being spoon fed, one little spoon at a time, we will find ourselves in even worse trouble.
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- We gave trillions of taxpayer dollars to the "job creators" and they failed to create good American jobs. In fact the giant corporations and their Republicon servants never had any intention of helping America and its people. All they care about is the top 1%, that much is clear.
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- The same thing happened to me, even after having been in business for 21 years with good relationships with my bank and vendors. I've inherited Bank of America, the bank that purchased LaSalle Bank. B of A is awful for small business owners (awful in so many ways, but particularly speaking of the credit line and limit lowering problem Ms. Martinez speaks about in this interiew). By the way, I'd love to change from Bank of America, but changing banks requires having a good credit rating, and now mine is not good. It's the most "stuck" business place I've been in. I am set to hire three more full time positions and two part time positions and cannot do it because of the lowered credit.
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- This story is identical to mine and many other small business owners I know. It is disgusting how the banks and credit card companies are holding funds hostage when many of them took federal money to help the economy. I went from three to thirty six people in a year, paid all my bills and now had 40% of my credit yanked for no reason....when I have to lay off people or not hire more because of it, they should have to answer to someone what they are doing with the funds they promised to loan out.
When will someone make them accountable?? If you take federal money and promise to loan it out to solid businesses and don't, there should be consequences and accountability. - Reply to this comment
- I am a small business owner. The article here illustrates poor financial choices by a business owner. Chase Bank isn't focused on business for people who need $50,000 credit lines on a $2,000,000 a year in sales business. Chase is still focused on business for people who have a $50 million a year in sales business and need a million dollar credit line.
Kimberly Martinex probably started banking with Chase because she took advantage of one of those government Small Business Administration loan programs that loans to minority-owned businesses. The fact she is a woman was a double-plus. Only people like that can get those SBA loans and those loans are only administered through large banks like Chase.
Now that Kimberly doesn't need the seed capital from one of those programs she should be banking with a local bank or credit union where she can actually go in and talk to a VP of the bank if she is having credit line needs. And as a double plus if she banks with a local bank more of the money stays in the local community and helps the economy that her own workers are living in.
Yes I get that she probably feels loyalty to Chase for helping her get started with the SBA loan and all of that. But banks like Chase and BoFA are having a very hard time growing customers from small to middle to large, because they still have really screwed up cultures that don't emphasize to their branch managers how important it is to handle the smaller customers like Martinez. They are still focused on the really big businesses probably because they are still using percentage-based bonus systems and stuff like that. That is Chases internal problem to handle, not Martinez's problem. Smaller banks are handling it just fine.
Kimberly needs the services of someone who has years of experience in business. The SBA had all kinds of mentoring programs and if she talked to any retired business exec in one of those he would have told her exactly how to handle the bank and what bank to use. But obviously she figures she knows what she is doing, and so instead of handling this like an experienced businessperson she goes whining to the press. Well that worked this time for her but you cannot have 100 inexperienced business owners in a community pull the same stunt. It would have been a lot better for the lazy newshound who wrote this story to talk to an experienced exec who didn't have an axe to grind, instead of filling most of the article with quotes from an inexperienced business owner and a banker who is trying to play politics. Then maybe they could have provided some information to help out the inexperienced business owners who read this.
The fact is that for most small business owners the biggest impediment to hiring more employees is that there's not enough work - because there's not enough customers because so many people are out of work. The claim "I have clients who have orders in hand," said Landis, "they could hire employees back immediately, if they had the cash to bring them back." is a bunch of bunk
for most small businesses. Yes, there's a few who are lucky. But, customers who make orders of businesses who don't fill them (because of credit shortages) aren't going to wait forever, they are going to go to other competitors of those businesses who DO have the financial acumen to raise cash to hire or whatever. Then those businesses will hire people.
The fact is that in the future, the successful businesses are going to carry more cash on the books, simple as that. A 2-mill a year in sales business should not be regularly charging $50,000 a month on a credit line. They should have at least that in cash in the bank to self-fund those kinds of receivables. All it would take is for one of Kimberlys customers to suddenly declare bankruptcy and her own business would be cash starved, and collapse, over an amount that she could have easily absorbed and written off over the year if she had a bigger cash cushion. - Reply to this comment
- Anyone sick of hearing about the Job Creators.
They got everything they wanted with Bush pretty much in 2001 and then again in 03 and where r the jobs.
Obama continued the cuts....
Where r the jobs.
Thinking things were better during Clinton. - Reply to this comment
- The reason this is happening is to protect investors in the banks' stock. The more money they generate, the higher the stock prices go and the greater the amount their bonuses are. If there are no losses (always a possibility in any loan/investment), or are minimized by draconian and easily manipulated credit standards, then the banks make more in profit, this protecting the investments of the rich and the bonuses of the bank officers.
Instead of generating revenue through interest earnings, banks have discovered that they can do it by cutting interest on paid accounts like savings and CD's to nearly nothing and charging high fees for virtually everything as well as charging high interest on the few loans they do make to small businesses.
Of course, any large, established corporation can get a lot-interest loan whenever they want, but they're not needing them because they've got subsidies and tax credits and tax breaks to help them hire people - but they're using THOSE to pad the accounts of the corporate officers.
For every million dollars in annual bonuses paid to their officers, a company could hire 14 people with the comfortable income and benefits of $70,000 and still have a little left over. And when we talk about one person at one company getting $90 to $120 million dollar bonuses, that adds up to a lot of people who could have been hired without impacting their bottom line AT ALL. - Reply to this comment
- Small business are 99%ers they just don't know it yet. Banks/Wall Street don't care about small business, people, or America.
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- I was so happy to see this article- as a small business owner you rarely see anything that is actually true being covered! I get irate when I hear candidates talk about making it better for small business and supporting the "job creators" (for which I am one- I employe 7 people" but they do nothing to stop the large businesses who are "creating jobs" but OVERSEAS not here in the US - from putting up roadblocks that prevent the small business who actually hire HERE IN THE US from growing and hiring.
I hope to see more perspectives from actual small business owners about the roadblocks that we are faced with- perhaps if the media shone the light on small business a bit more it would help change the discussions in Washington... - Reply to this comment
