Female entrepreneurs favour family funding

A survey of would-be entrepreneurs has revealed that the UK’s aspiring Anita Roddicks are often deterred from starting their own businesses by a perception that they won’t be able to get the right kind of funding.

A large number of female would-be entrepreneurs feel that men get an unfair advantage when looking for start-up funds.

The Factors and Discounters Association (FDA) questioned women about starting a new business and discovered that a third of women felt it was harder for them to get funding to start a business than it was for their male counterparts.

Nearly half of the women surveyed by the Factors and Discounters Association (FDA) said that a lack of funding had actually prevented them from starting their own business sooner.

Kate Sharp, chief executive officer of the FDA, said "It's astonishing to think that in the 21st century women still feel they don't have the same access to funding as men."

Ms Sharp said that the banks and other financial service providers needed to work harder to raise women’s awareness of the range of products available for initial start-up and ongoing business growth.

Grow your business out of the money you’ve already earned.
If you’re starting a business the amount you may need to borrow upfront could be a lot smaller than you think. If you run the type of business where you invoice people you can use an invoice finance provider to free up the cash you’ve already earned. Invoice finance is a service which allows you to release cash from an invoice within 24 hours of it being issued.

How this works
I f you raise an invoice today for £10,000, on average, you will wait around 60 days for this to be paid. Using invoice finance you can receive up to 90% of the value of the invoice within 24 hours of it being issued, and get most of the remainder once the invoice does get paid.

This means you can grow your business out of the money you've already earned. Research has shown that most female entrepreneurs tend to shy away from getting credit, loans and overdrafts. So for the next generation of Anita Roddicks, solution like invoice finance can be a godsend.