September/October always brings a sense of “return to business” as we move from the summer holiday months into “back to school” and the last quarter of the year. The fall traditionally shows a powerful business and growth mindset for small business owners as they prepare for the upcoming holiday busy season and the new year to follow. This year is remarkably different for obvious reasons, and it is extremely hard to forecast and hard to budget. We’ve had to make choices ourselves about how to remain successful in our own business, while continuing to provide as much capital as we can to business across the country. While others in our space have closed up or withdrawn significantly from the marketplace – Merchant Growth has continued to underwrite for our customers. Maybe it’s a sense of compassion, maybe it’s a sense of optimism – or maybe it’s both. What we know for sure is there’s a strong sense of wanting to build a business that keeps us going – a feeling I am sure is shared by so many of you.
Our governments, whether municipal, provincial, or federal, are feeling challenged to send more capital into the marketplace from a budget perspective. They just can’t afford it. While federally there may yet be further capital to come into the marketplace, it will not be as it was before. Trailing wage subsidies will continue for a while – let’s hope thought that overall, there continues to be support for our businesses.
Prudent borrowing seems to be picking up and we are doing what we can to fund small business needs for hiring, inventory build, and other “re-generative” capital needs to assist in business restoration, or perhaps for firms to “pivot” in some way to generate opportunities for stability and/or growth.
We look forward to sharing more real life examples of how we are helping customers grow, and some of the changes in our thinking about risk in upcoming editions of the Merchant Growth Newsletters!
