Staff Sgt. Shilo Harris, a heroic squad leader was a wounded warrior during Operation Iraqi Freedom. He lost three fingers, both of his ears and suffered severe burns over 35 percent of his body doing his job to protect America,

I attended a webinar a few weeks ago called "Best Practices in Buying and Selling a Business with a Focus on Financing." It explored the availability of transactional financing to buy or sell a small business. BoeFly.com, an online matchmaking site that pairs borrowers with lenders presented the...

In May, my HuffPost piece said that Kiki Karpus donates small amounts of money to start-up and emerging businesses that she admires. You may recall that the art director and graphic designer is one of many well-educated, young professionals are part of a burgeoning phenomenon called "crowd funding."...

I financed several start-up restaurants when I was in the commercial mortgage banking business. All of the non-franchised restaurants failed within the first two years. So I studied the restaurant failures to better understand what it takes to underwrite them successfully.

One restaurant failed after four months because

"SBA puts the kibosh on an important small business lending program," was the headline on my December 14, 2010 piece in The Huffington Post. That was when the U.S. Small Business Administration announced it was ending its Community Express program and hundreds of thousands of small-business...

Kiki Karpus invests in start-ups and emerging businesses -- well, sort of. Instead of choosing the companies based upon the likelihood of their success, Karpus' investment is not for financial compensation. Rather, she and other young professionals are part of a growing...

How do you get three of the Obama administration's top appointed officials to speak at a day-long seminar? The answer is to tell them it is about job creation, small business and unlocking the availability of credit for businesses to form and expand -- all hot election year topics.

As...

Once upon a time, the U.S. Small Business Administration made direct loans to socially and economically disadvantaged small-business people. The SBA's direct lending programs also targeted disabled veterans and others that politicians said deserved preferential treatment.

What's more, the agency required applicants to get turned down...

Lenders are concerned that President Barack Obama's proposed 2013 budget and the political scuffling in Congress may leave the U.S. Small Business Administration and U.S. Department of Agriculture with inadequate loan-guarantee authority to satisfy...

Rental apartments are back in demand, financing for hotels and motels is loosening up a bit and investors are stepping off the sidelines with wads of cash to do deals. In order hone their skills, an estimated 20,000 mortgage bankers, commercial real estate investors, banks and a potpourri of income-producing...

And the winner is -- Cornell University by a nose. But Stanford University was not far behind after bolting out of the gates along with seven others universities competing for the same prize. The prize is a 99-year lease and monetary incentives from New York City...

Suppose you are sitting in your backyard on a lazy summer afternoon watching baseball. You open a cold beer, press a button and a section of the wall of your house spins around turning your backyard into an amphitheater with a large-screen TV. In fact, the entire entertainment module that...

Eighty-three Huffington Post readers responded and took me to task about "It's Homebuilding Stupid," an article that I wrote in September. I said that our economic recovery would be rocky until the construction and homebuilding industries substantially improve. Accordingly the government should stimulate those two sectors.

But...

Line of Credit (LOC) financing is more difficult for small-business owners to get than term loans. Small community banks often lack the expertise and staff to service them and large banks that make LOCs, eliminate all but their most creditworthy...

"Our troops in Iraq will definitely be home for the holidays," President Barack Obama said on Friday. But what he did not tell us is whether they will find jobs or be added to the millions of unemployed, underemployed or part-timers seeking full-time jobs.

According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, "military and civilian purchases" total more than $425 billion a year of federal government spending. Of that amount, Congress mandates that 23 percent be set aside for small businesses. SBA is charged with overseeing this "goaling" program and does...

In Thursday's address to Congress, I want President Barack Obama to emphasize that fixing the home-building and construction industries is necessary to jump-start our lame economy. That is because, in my recollection, home building and construction have led us out of every recession since the 1960s, when I financed land...

The U.S. Small Business Administration's inspector general has berated Banco Popular about its alleged indifference to the agency's rules and standard operating procedures. According to its July 13 audit report, "Banco Popular did not adequately assess each borrower's repayment ability when originating Huntington Learning...

Boyd Wright spends lots of time at home in Grand Forks, North Dakota. So much so that the U.S. Small Business Administration named him the 2010 "National Home-Based Business Champion of the Year" during the Small Business Week ceremony in Washington, D.C. last year.

Wright's success is...

Quick response codes have the potential to boost your sales, enhance your brand and turn your plain vanilla print advertisement into an interactive, multi-media marketing machine. "QR, which stands for quick response, is a free format that businesses can use to embed their contact information, website addresses,