A new survey of 1,000 small business owners lands on a number that should stop most SME and FMCG owners mid-scroll: 67% are funding their growth mainly out of personal savings. 38% are leaning on credit cards. Only 22% have used a bank loan. Just 11% an SBA loan. The same survey found 78% of owners are worried about the current economy — and 68% still expect their business to grow this year regardless. Put those two findings side by side and it stops looking like a contradiction. It looks like a plan: growth funded on nerve, personal savings, and whatever credit is sitting closest to hand.

> 67% of small business owners are funding growth mainly from personal savings. 38% are using credit cards. Only 22% have used a bank loan, and just 11% an SBA loan.

Hometap surveyed 1,000 small business owners — businesses with fewer than 100 employees — in April 2026. Alongside the funding breakdown, rising costs of goods and materials came out as the single most-cited barrier to growth, named by 20% of owners, ahead of every other constraint in the survey. That combination matters: the businesses most exposed to cost pressure are also the ones with the thinnest, least structured funding sitting behind them. When both hit at once — a cost spike and a growth opportunity landing in the same quarter — there's no plan to fall back on. There's only whatever's left in the account.

Personal savings and a credit card feel safe because they're familiar, and because nobody has to approve the decision. That's exactly the problem. A bank loan comes with underwriting — someone outside the business has to test whether the growth plan can actually service the debt before the money moves. Personal funding skips that test entirely. There's no independent check on whether the opportunity is worth the exposure, no repayment schedule forcing discipline, and no clean line between what the business owes and what the owner personally owes. If the growth doesn't land on schedule, the business doesn't absorb the loss. The owner does — on their own account, their own credit file, their own kitchen-table conversation.

And it rarely stays a one-off. The first time it works, it becomes the default. Six months later, funding growth off personal resources isn't the emergency measure anymore — it's the system. Except it was never actually designed to be one.

For FMCG owners, this shows up in a specific and entirely avoidable place: the cash conversion gap. Stock has to be manufactured or bought and shelved before a single dollar comes back from the retailer, and payment terms of 30, 60, even 90 days are standard, not the exception. Win a bigger listing, land a new retailer, or get asked to build stock ahead of a seasonal range, and the gap between paying for that stock and getting paid for it can run into real money — arriving at exactly the moment the owner is most excited about the opportunity and least inclined to slow down and plan for it properly. That's precisely when a personal credit card gets tapped "just to cover this one order," and precisely when it shouldn't be.

A capital plan isn't a bank loan for its own sake, and it isn't about proving you don't need help. It's three decisions made in advance, while you can still think clearly, instead of mid-scramble:

Owners who do this expand on their own terms. Owners who don't are still growing — the survey confirms that — but they're growing on a foundation that was never built to hold the weight, and they usually don't find out until the one month everything lands at once.

Every owner currently funding growth out of savings and credit is paying a quiet tax on it, every single month the plan stays informal: sleepless weeks, personal exposure that never shows up on the company's books, and decisions about the business's future being made under the pressure of a personal account balance instead of a clear-eyed forecast. It doesn't show up as a line item. It shows up as a slightly worse year than the business should have had, and a founder more tired than the results explain.

If your last growth spurt was funded because the numbers told you it was safe to move, you have a plan. If it happened because the order was too good to pass up and you'd figure the money out afterwards, you don't — and that gap is exactly what the Simple-Growth System™ is built to close. I work with SME and FMCG owners on the cash forecasting, funding structure, and trigger points that turn growth from a personal gamble into a routine, well-funded decision. If your next big order is going to test your personal accounts again, let's build the capital plan behind it before it lands — get in touch with Simple-Growth to start.