Middle-Market Survey: Business Looking Up, Business Leaders Looking Outward

Atlanta — Lower middle-market business owners are feeling significantly better about the economy and their businesses than a year ago, says Tom Kuntz, SunTrust Bank’s commercial and business banking executive, who discussed with Middle-Market Executive some of the recent findings of a SunTrust survey of leaders from small and medium-size businesses.

According to SunTrust, 65 percent of leaders at companies with annual revenues between $10 million and $100 million indicate that they feel better about their company’s financial well-being than they did last year. This is in contrast with SunTrust’s findings in 2012, when only 38 percent felt that their companies were in a better financial state than in the previous year. Below is a short abstract from our discussion with Kuntz.

MME: Is the change in outlook from last year to this year that discernable?

Kuntz: The difference is quite remarkable as far as how business owners feel this year vs. last year goes. If we look at some of economic indicators … unemployment numbers alone indicate some strong improvement over last year. In the state of Florida, they have seen the highest decrease in the unemployment rate of any state, and there’s little question that this has been a factor when it comes to influencing the optimism of business owners.

MME: Would you say that upcoming action items planned by the surveyed executives help to codify the optimism?

Kuntz: The one that jumped out at me is “expanding in to new markets.” They ranked this as one of the three highest actions they will likely take to achieve business goals, and this is just something that you would not even consider if you were not optimistic. With 49 percent of companies saying that they are looking to expand into new markets, this underscores the optimism. … I was visiting with our bankers in Nashville earlier today … and there is a strong sense of optimism not only among our clients, but with our bankers as well, who sense new opportunities coming forward. … Investment in technology is another area that we believe reveals a lot about a company’s optimism and the need to be on the cutting edge.

MME: How do business owners feel about the lending environment?

Kuntz: Well, unrelated to this specific survey, we have surveyed our clients, and what they have told us is that they believe that the willingness to lend is high, and they now perceive that we are very willing to lend. What we’re all about now is trying to meet their needs and understand better what those needs are and then match them up.