When you own a small business, you’ll have a variety of obstacles to deal with and needs to meet. The one near-constant, however, is financing.

Like it or not, you need money to make money, and one of the biggest reasons why small businesses fail is their inability to deal with cash flow issues. Even successful businesses that have plenty of revenue sometimes hit a fatal cash crunch at the wrong time. To combat this ongoing issue, business owners sometimes turn to business loans and other financing products, which can make sense if you have a plan in place to pay back your funding plus interest. One overlooked financing product, however, is the microloan.

Most business owners are familiar with the term microloan, even if they’ve never considered one themselves. The concept of microlending has transformed entrepreneurship in countries and markets where the barrier to entry is sometimes as little as a few hundred dollars—though that hardly seems like a useful sum to most U.S.-based businesses.

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