Our mission at Lumenous is to help businesses create a powerful credit profile and share it on their own terms. By now, business owners and executives know how vital it is to tell prospective customers a powerful story about their company and its services or products. All too often, credit reviews–whether a customer’s procurement process to approve a sale or a banker monitoring a major line of credit–are a different matter.
Today we begin a series on a framework used to determine whether a business is worthy of credit and trust. It’s called the 5 C’s and includes character (the team’s track-record, reputation, and even perceived ability to execute), three finance-oriented C’s (capacity, capital and collateral), and conditions (external factors that might impact the company’s ability to survive and succeed).
Rarely used as a literal checklist, the framework still encompasses a set of considerations generally cited by credit analysts or managers as fundamental to how they evaluate a company. As we researched how to embed the framework into our application, it struck us that businesses could use it as their marketing plan for creditors. Viewed in that manner, the odds go up it will be convincing but the business also ends up with a roadmap to real and positive financial results.
The next post will focus on character, a somewhat old-fashioned notion that is gaining new meaning in today’s social media and networking-rich environment.
–LaVonne Reimer, Founder
