Equipment Finance Industry Confidence Improves in February
The Equipment Leasing & Finance Foundation has released its February 2023 Monthly Confidence Index for the Equipment Finance Industry, which shows an increase in confidence in the equipment finance market to 51.8, up from 48.5 in January. The report indicates that pent-up demand in the light and medium-duty transportation segment is expected to decline by the third or fourth quarter of this year. Survey results show that 16.1% of executives expect business conditions to improve over the next four months, while 9.7% believe demand for leases and loans to fund capital expenditures will increase. 38.7% of respondents expect to hire more employees over the next four months, and 51.6% believe their companies will increase spending on business development activities over the next six months.
NFIB Jobs Report: Small Business Job Openings Back Up in January
According to NFIB’s monthly jobs report, 57 percent of owners reported hiring or trying to hire in January, up two points. Of those hiring or trying to hire, 91 percent of owners reported few or no qualified applicants for the positions they were trying to fill. Twenty-seven percent of owners reported few qualified applicants for their open positions and 25 percent reported none.
“The labor shortage continues to be a major concern for small businesses in the New Year as nearly all owners trying to hire are reporting no or few qualified applicants,” said NFIB Chief Economist Bill Dunkelberg. “Small businesses’ sales opportunities are limited because of the staffing shortage but owners continue to make changes in business operations to compensate.”
Forty-five percent (seasonally adjusted) of all owners reported job openings they could not fill in the current period, up four points from December.
Small business owners’ plans to fill open positions remain elevated, with a seasonally adjusted net 19 percent planning to create new jobs in the next three months, up two points from December but 13 points below its record-high reading of 32 reached in August 2021.
The percent of owners reporting labor quality as their top business operating problem remains elevated at 24 percent. Labor costs reported as the single most important problem to business owners increased two points to 10 percent, historically among the highest readings in over 49 years.
Seasonally adjusted, a net 46 percent of owners reported raising compensation, up two points from December and just four points below the 49-year average record high set in January last year. A net 22 percent of owners plan to raise compensation in the next three months, down five points from December. This is a major concern of the Federal Reserve, as these increased costs are likely to be passed on in higher selling prices.
Thirty-six percent of owners have job openings for skilled workers and 17 percent have openings for unskilled labor.
Click here to view the full report.
Check These Steps to Make Sure Your Small Business is Ready to Grow
You may be ready to take your small business to the next level, but is your small business ready to grow? Expanding a small business can take many forms, like hiring more employees, adding products or services, opening a new location, purchasing your commercial space, entering a new geographic market, or buying another business out.
Before you take any of these leaps for your small business, check off the items below to make sure you’re growing on a stable foundation.
Financial Readiness
Growing small businesses need capital. Whether you are looking for investors, applying for a small business loan or SBA loan, or applying for a business grant or SSBCI opportunity in your state, you will need to know your financials inside and out and have them in a presentable, dynamic form.
Are your financial documents up-to-date? You must be able to show your business’s financial health, and to do that you need these documents on-hand. If you are not able to prepare them internally, consider investing in a certified public accountant (CPA).
Personal and Business Tax Returns
Income Statement (or “Profit & Loss”)
Balance Sheet
Personal and Business Credit Reports
Business Bank Statements
Is your business plan pitch-ready? If you present a possible lender or investor with a business plan that you’ve invested time and care into preparing, you will be more likely to succeed. Financial statements are part of your business plan, but it also shows your history, your plans, and the data your plans are based on.
Are your expenses under control? It’s important to know what your expenses are and eliminate any unnecessary bills. This is essential because, as we have learned in recent years, disruptions can come from nowhere. If your expenses are kept under scrutiny, you’ll increase your profits and be ahead of the game if circumstances outside your control affect your revenue.
Operational Readiness
Growing small businesses rely on quality employees to get the job done. Whether you’re a sole proprietor, or a team of ten or fewer employees, you must be ready to be a responsible, attractive employer before your team increases.
Do your current and future employees have the tools they need to succeed? Even small teams need to be able to communicate with each other and complete their tasks efficiently. These days, this means investing in technology to support their tasks, and provide you with the reporting you need to optimize their roles. Take the time to review the tools you use to process payments from customers, respond to their needs, organize data, and perform internal tasks.
Is your operational infrastructure ready to support a growing team? Hiring employees means taking responsibility for their well-being at while at work, and providing competitive compensation that make them glad to stay. Millennials have high expectations from their employers to provide transparent communication from leadership, diversity & inclusion policies, quality benefits, and more money than they could make on their own as Uber drivers.
What is your hiring strategy, and what roles do you need to fill right away? Before you and your current team burn out, identify the tasks that could be built into new roles, including your own, by asking yourself these questions:
What are you bad at?
What tasks do you hate doing?
What tasks are going undone due to time constraints, by you or your team?
What goals do you have for your business?
Market Readiness
Growing businesses need to be easy to find, and easily recognized in their community or industry. Marketing plans help customers discover your business, engage with it in a positive way, and associate it with the need it fulfills.
Is your small business website and social media up to today’s customer expectations? Over 80% of consumers navigate websites on their phones. Millennials and Gen Z, who have lived their whole lives online, expect websites to be easy to read, pleasant to look at, and convenient and quick to navigate. If they’re not (1) interested (2) looking at what they’re looking for in 8 seconds, they’ll close it and go elsewhere. They also expect to engage with you on social media, so consider this when making your staffing plan.
Have you defined your brand? Your brand is an external expression of your business’s core values. Before making any choices about colors, graphics, and voice, you have to be able to express what your core values are, and what tone best serves those values. It’s hard to make big changes once you’ve gained momentum, so be true to your business, and define your brand before you grow.
Do you have a marketing plan? Marketing is more than a website and social media, it answers the questions (1) What you do, and (2) Why others should care. Most importantly, it answers these questions before someone else answers them for you. With a marketing plan you identify your target market, research who else is getting their attention, including your competitors, and strategize how you will get in front of them and get them to care about your business.
Disaster Readiness
Growing businesses must be ready to weather a storm. The whole world learned in 2020 that anything can happen at any time. It won’t always be the scope of a pandemic, but even localized disruptions and disasters can cause setbacks for your business.
Do you have a data security and back-up strategy? In the age of data, customers expect the businesses they share their information with to keep it safe. Internally, you also must consider how you store and back up the data your business relies on.
What’s your Disaster Recovery Plan? Ready.gov provides information and resources to help businesses prepare for disasters that come from technology, weather, and other types of risk.
TD and First Horizon Extend Outside Date of Proposed Merger to May 27
TD Bank Group and First Horizon Corporation have mutually agreed to extend the outside date of their proposed transaction from Feb. 27 to May 27, 2023, in accordance with the terms of the merger agreement.
TD and First Horizon are fully committed to the merger and continue to make significant progress in planning for the closing and the integration of the companies. Shareholders of First Horizon have voted overwhelmingly to approve the transaction, and progress is being made on a Community Benefits Plan in support of local communities across the TD and First Horizon footprints in the U.S.
Customary closing conditions, including approvals from regulatory authorities in the U.S. and Canada, are required to close the transaction.
What is Climate Finance?
What is Climate Finance?
What is climate finance?
Climate finance refers to local, national or transnational financing—drawn from public, private and alternative sources of financing—that seeks to support mitigation and adaptation actions that will address climate change. The Convention, the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement call for financial assistance from Parties with more financial resources to those that are less endowed and more vulnerable. This recognizes that the contribution of countries to climate change and their capacity to prevent it and cope with its consequences vary enormously. Climate finance is needed for mitigation, because large-scale investments are required to significantly reduce emissions. Climate finance is equally important for adaptation, as significant financial resources are needed to adapt to the adverse effects and reduce the impacts of a changing climate.
In accordance with the principle of “common but differentiated responsibility and respective capabilities” set out in the Convention, developed country Parties are to provide financial resources to assist developing country Parties in implementing the objectives of the UNFCCC. The Paris Agreement reaffirms the obligations of developed countries, while for the first time also encouraging voluntary contributions by other Parties. Developed country Parties should also continue to take the lead in mobilizing climate finance from a wide variety of sources, instruments and channels, noting the significant role of public funds, through a variety of actions, including supporting country-driven strategies, and taking into account the needs and priorities of developing country Parties. Such mobilization of climate finance should represent a progression beyond previous efforts.
It is important for all governments and stakeholders to understand and assess the financial needs of developing countries, as well as to understand how these financial resources can be mobilized. Provision of resources should also aim to achieve a balance between adaptation and mitigation.
Overall, efforts under the Paris Agreement are guided by its aim of making finance flows consistent with a pathway towards low greenhouse gas emissions and climate-resilient development. Assessing progress in provision and mobilization of support is also part of the global stocktake under the Agreement. The Paris Agreement also places emphasis on the transparency and enhanced predictability of financial support.
What is the financial mechanism? What are the other funds?
To facilitate the provision of climate finance, the Convention established a financial mechanism to provide financial resources to developing country Parties. The financial mechanism also serves the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement.
The Convention states that the operation of the financial mechanism can be entrusted to one or more existing international entities. The Global Environment Facility(GEF) has served as an operating entity of the financial mechanism since the Convention’s entry into force in 1994. At COP 16, in 2010, Parties established the Green Climate Fund (GCF) and in 2011 also designated it as an operating entity of the financial mechanism. The financial mechanism is accountable to the COP, which decides on its policies, programme priorities and eligibility criteria for funding.
In addition to providing guidance to the GEF and the GCF, Parties have established two special funds—theSpecial Climate Change Fund (SCCF) and the Least Developed Countries Fund (LDCF), both managed by the GEF—and the Adaptation Fund (AF) established under the Kyoto Protocol in 2001.
At the Paris Climate Change Conference in 2015, the Parties agreed that the operating entities of the financial mechanism – GCD and GEF – as well as the SCCF and the LDCF shall serve the Paris Agreement. Regarding the Adaptation Fund serving the Paris Agreement negotiations are underway in the Ad hoc Working Group on the Paris Agreement (APA).
What is the Standing Committee on Finance? What is the long-term finance process?
Standing Committee on Finance
At COP 16 in 2010, Parties decided to establish the Standing Committee on Finance (SCF) to assist the COP in exercising its functions in relation to the financial mechanism of the Convention.
Currently, the SCF has four specific functions: assisting the COP in improving coherence and coordination in the delivery of climate change financing; assisting the COP in rationalization of the financial mechanism of the UNFCCC; supporting the COP in the mobilization of financial resources for climate financing; and supporting the COP in the measurement, reporting and verification of support provided to developing country Parties. The Committee is also tasked to organize an annual forum on climate finance, provide the COP with draft guidance for the operating entities, provide expert input into the conduct of the periodic reviews of the financial mechanism and prepare a biennial assessment and overview of climate finance flows. Furthermore, the SCF is designed to improve the linkages and to promote the coordination with climate finance related actors and initiatives both within and outside of the Convention. At the Paris Conference in 2015, Parties decided that the SCF shall also serve the Paris Agreement.
Long-term climate finance
The long-term finance process is aimed at progressing on the mobilization and scaling up of climate finance of resources originating from a wide variety of sources, public and private, bilateral and multilateral, including alternative sources. The COP decided on the following activities through to 2020: organization, by the secretariat, of annual in-session workshops; developed countries providing, on a biennial basis, information on strategies and approaches for scaling up climate finance; and convening of biennial high-level ministerial dialogue on climate finance.
Through the Cancun Agreements in 2010 developed country Parties committed, in the context of meaningful mitigation actions and transparency on implementation, to a goal of mobilizing jointly USD 100 billion per year by 2020 to address the needs of developing countries. When adopting the Paris Agreement Parties confirmed this goal, called for a concrete road map to achieve the goal by 2020, and agreed that prior to 2025 the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to the Paris Agreement (CMA) shall set a new collective quantified goal from a floor of USD 100 billion per year.
What is the finance portal?
The UNFCCC website includes aclimate finance data portal with helpful explanations, graphics and figures for better understanding the climate finance process and as a gateway to information on activities funded in developing countries to implement climate action. The finance portal comprises three modules, each of which includes information made available by Parties and the operating entities of the financial mechanism.
The first module, the National Communications Module, presents information communicated by contributing countries on the provision of financial resources, in the context of regular reporting to the Convention. The second module, the Fast-start Finance Module, includes information on resources provided by developed countries in the context of their commitment to provide approximately USD 30 billion over the period 2010–2012. The third module, on Funds Managed by the GEF, is a joint effort between the secretariat of the UNFCCC and the GEF and contains information on climate finance flows of the GEF in its role as one of the operating entities of the financial mechanism to the Convention. Additionally, information on projects and programmes of the Adaptation Fund can be found in the finance portal. This fund was established under the Kyoto Protocol to finance concrete adaptation projects and programmes in developing countries that are Parties to the Kyoto Protocol.