Seed financing, small business loans, tax incentives, recoverable grants. What do these terms mean to a small business owner or investor? They are the financial tools necessary to grow a business and move it forward in today’s challenging economic climate. Where do businesses go to find alternative types of financing, information and advice? Now there is NewEquityDaily.com
My name is Chinwe Onyeagoro and I am the editor of New Equity Daily. Five years ago I started a small business called O-H Community Partners in Chicago and one of the lessons I’ve learned is it’s not enough to simply concentrate on producing a good product or providing quality service or offer the best price. There’s an extra component that is crucial to the survival and growth of our businesses: funding and financing whether we are starting up or trying to maintain our operations or planning to grow. Without adequate funding, small businesses like ours run the risk of stagnating, or even closing. Financing is out there. It’s available. It’s just harder to find.
I created NewEquityDaily.com to provide a simple, straightforward way to help other small businesses and investors understand and take advantage of available government, foundation, community development financial institutions, and alternative financing solutions. All without having to spend precious time and resources trying to find, and then make sense of the confusing and sometimes seemingly contradictory information that is available.
My Background
NewEquityDaily.com and the idea of sharing knowledge and information for the benefit of others is a personal passion for me. So much of my life has been influenced by the generosity of others who were willing to share what they had and provide me with opportunity. I don’t intend to ever forget that I am a child of immigrants from Nigeria, the youngest of seven. I am proud of and grateful for all the sacrifices my family has made for me. A scholarship to a boarding school called Concord Academy allowed me to mix with low-income kids from the Bronx as well as the offspring of the corporate elite. It was eye opening to say the least. It caused me to start trying to understand the huge economic disparities in people’s lives – in the US and around the world – and to acknowledge the role that race and gender play. That’s when I made the commitment to help communities create wealth, whether they were in Somerville, Massachusetts or the South Side of Chicago, or back in Nigeria.
After Concord Academy, I attended Harvard University on a scholarship, where I earned a degree in economics. After graduation I worked for McKinsey & Co., one of the world’s leading strategy consulting firms. There, I worked for both public and private clients and helped them think through strategies for selling to global consumers. I assisted businesses with conducting valuations and came to recognize that until a business can put a number on its worth, it won’t be able to access capital.
From McKinsey, I moved on to join the Pritzker Realty Group in Chicago. I was responsible for a wide variety of real estate assets – industrial, retail, residential, and multi-family. Also, I valued and financed real estate projects and disposed of them as well.
It was exciting and I enjoyed it but I wanted to build something myself, something that would allow me to use my passion for helping inner city communities build wealth. So, I launched Obi Realty Group, a real estate consulting firm. I helped community organizations in urban markets plan larger-scale real estate developments, attract and retain business investments, and raise financing.
O-H Community Partners
A few years later, I merged my firm with another business that focused on transportation and infrastructure consulting and we became O-H Community Partners. In this new capacity, I began doing work across the country focusing on economic development and finance. It wasn’t long before I recognized there was a huge information gap in urban markets that limits, and even restricts, small business activity and real estate development. I realized that one way in which I can give back is to close the information gap by sharing what I’ve learned so that it’s easier for other small businesses and real estate investors to access the funding we all need to survive, thrive and grow. And with that, NewEquityDaily.com came into being.
NewEquityDaily.com
With NewEquityDaily.com, I want to provide an online tool that makes government and public funding information easily accessible. I want small businesses to be able to focus on their actual business and not spend frustrating hours trying to sift through all the information that is out there, only to find they’ll need even more time just to try to make sense of it all.
Through NewEquityDaily.com, I plan to share information and strategies so that other businesses and investors can benefit, too.
So please use our search engine and subscribe to this blog. I will be posting regularly and citing items on other sites and in the mainstream press that bear on small business and real estate development financing topics. Let me know what you think and questions that you’d like to see addressed. Let’s grow our community of successful small businesses and investors together! Stay tuned!
Comments or suggestion please email me at chinwe@newequitydaily.com
My name is Chinwe Onyeagoro and I am the editor of New Equity Daily. Five years ago I started a small business called O-H Community Partners in Chicago and one of the lessons I’ve learned is it’s not enough to simply concentrate on producing a good product or providing quality service or offer the best price. There’s an extra component that is crucial to the survival and growth of our businesses: funding and financing whether we are starting up or trying to maintain our operations or planning to grow. Without adequate funding, small businesses like ours run the risk of stagnating, or even closing. Financing is out there. It’s available. It’s just harder to find.