Pictured, Fran Snavely opened a new business in her home, Finish Line.
Earlier this year, lifelong Newark Valley resident Fran Snavely opened a new business in town. Run from Snavely’s Markham Road home in Newark Valley, Finish Line Financial Group specializes in business loans for companies with credit problems.
Snavely explained the basics of her business’s offerings, “It’s all commercial businesses that I work with. I can do equipment leasing, like if a construction company needs to lease a backhoe and say they have a tax lien or something so that their credit isn’t quite up to where it needs to be to go to a bank, I can help them. I have creditors who will lend to people with no credit or bad credit.”
For Snavely, Finish Line is part of her retirement plan. She said, “I just fell in that age group where we’re too young to retire but old enough to want to.” Snavely has a full-time job at Borg Warner in Ithaca and her goal with Finish Line is to be able to retire from Borg Warner and eventually work entirely from home.
For more than two decades, Snavely was a faithful employee at Lockheed Martin. She said, “When I got laid off in 2009 after 25 years of service, it was a big blow to me. It changed my life. I was on track to retire, not wealthy, but would have been able to retire and not have to worry too much financially. But now that’s gone.” In its place is Finish Line.
Although there may have been a number of part-time business options that would have fit what Snavely was looking for, finance seemed both rewarding and practical. She said, “I was looking for a business that I could do from home and I also wanted to be able to help people. I thought that with the economic downturn a lot of small businesses can’t get loans through the bank.” Snavely decided to step in and help.
After picking a business, the next step was finding a name. She said, “A friend and I at work we were bouncing names back and forth and she came up and said, ‘What about Finish Line?’ and I thought that sounded pretty cool. I’ve always been in sports so that kind of geared me toward that name, too.”
To actualize her business vision, Snavely went to New York City for a class on financial training and then in February she officially launched Finish Line.
To learn more about Snavely’s business and her offerings, check her out online at www.finishlinefinancialgroup.com or call her at 642-3434.
