Financing Your Business Dreams With Other People's Money: How and Where to Find Money for Start-Up and Growing Businesses

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Information on How to Understand the "Money Game"
Review: Finally, a book that provides "inside information" on how to locate and deal with "angel Investors." Mr. Lacy's experience as a banker and as an "angel investor" provides easy to use techniques and strategies that applies to both startups and expanding businesses.

The Resource Guide alone is worth the price of the book. I was very impressed at the number of sources that are liseted for each state. If a person is intimidated with the "money game," this book is invlauable in providing the information that gives one the self-confidence a person needs in order to deal with investors.

Rating:
Summary: A Must Read
Review: I would recommend this book as a "must read" to anybody who is thinking about starting a business or wanting to expand an existing business. What makes this book so unique is that it explains in "easy to understand language" how the Money Game works for the entrepreneur. I found this book helped me to overcome my fear of not having experience in knowing how and where to find money for my business.

The author provides "insider" tips of how and where to locate capital for your business. The Resource Guide is a very comprehensive source of micro lenders, government loans, and free resources for each state. By providing an extensive Resource Guide along with the "how to" information, you have everything you need to start finding money for your business.

The book also lists a number of things to avoid in seeking capital for a business.

Rating:
Summary: Mainly about bank loans, and fairly simplistic.
Review: Of the 187 pages, about half the book is merely a listing of government agencies in each state. The remaining pages focus primarily on getting bank loans. Though there is some attempt to at least describe a number of other money-raising techniques and business assistance programs, there is rarely enough detail to help follow through (for instance, under "Angels", the advice is basically to contact every person you know and ask if they know anybody who's rich and wants to invest).

As to the advice in the book, it ranges from the blindingly obvious ("Don't print your business plan on paper that's wrinkled or stained with coffee") to the bland and fairly obvious ("Shop around for the best bank loan rate") to the downright goofy ("Be sure to take all the free promotional items you can while visiting banks to get their loan rates").

The book is sprinkled throughout with "motivational quotes" and a sort of cheerleader attitude, but not much real information or help. It seems to be aimed more at the person who thinks they have a great idea but is afraid to talk to a bank at all than the person who's in a small business and needs financing. The general writing seems to take the "you can do it if you just have the gumption and use some of these little tricks" approach.

I thought Arkebauer's "Going Public" had more information on small business financing in general than this book did, even though "Going Public" is mainly oriented towards real IPOs.