Your office should be neat and functional, but still impressive, a large desk, comfortable chair and a credenza; perhaps a four-drawer file cabinet also. The image you project is of great importance, and being associated with a big name firm, even if only on the basis of sharing their suite of offices, will definitely be to your advantage in gaining ultimate success.



You should try to cover the walls of your office with your certificates of awards, extra-curricular courses completed, association memberships and seminar courses completed over the years. Documents of affiliation with civic groups or even reproductions of national write-ups should be framed and displayed on your office walls.

Don't forget: when planning and furnishing your office, you should also include at least one, and preferably two, visitor's chairs. A small sofa would be desirable, but really isn't necessary until you've really firmly established. The thing is you want to project the impression of affluence and professionalism to anyone coming into your office.

The ideal situation is to have a two-person team - someone to be on the outside doing the selling, and someone on the inside handling all the processing. If you have the marketing skills, and enjoy selling, you might look for a sharp and impressive appearing person to handle the processing for you. Or if you've got the processing know-how, you might keep you eyes open for a professional appearing person who could be your "outside arm" and do most of the selling for you. Basically, and excepting for the actual preparation and selling of the loan packages, most of the inside work can be handled by clerical personnel. As you grow, however, you'll find it in your best interest to have a full-time secretary. You would train her to field incoming telephone calls, take care of filing, and do your personal typing for you. A typical loan proposal usually requires about eight hours of typing.

Regardless of how you get started, and even after you've moved into a suite of plush offices, you'll have to advertise to keep new business coming in. Besides running regular advertising in your local newspapers, you should also advertise in the local financial publications as often as you can afford it. Once you get your business rolling, you should expand your advertising coverage to include such national publications as the Wall Street Journal and the business opportunity publications.

Regarding the type of advertisement to run in these publications, we recommend that you look at money brokerage ads in these publications. Clip out some of those you especially like and have your local typesetter make one up for you, using those you've clipped as patterns.

Any ad you run should include or list a minimum loan amount you'll handle - that is, a statement such as "$50,000 minimum to $...." This procedure will screen out the people looking for small personal loans. At the same time, it's a good idea to list a maximum amount you're capable of handling - for instance, "$50,000 minimum to $10,000,000." This will attract those who are looking for large business financing.

In addition to your local newspapers, business publications and nationally distributed papers, newsletters and magazines, it will be to your advantage to run an advertisement in the yellow pages of your telephone book and in area business directories.