Nicholas Young, founder of finance broker Beer & Young, who will give a talk entitled 'Accessing alternative funding and making it work for you' at the conference, said that traditional bank and asset-based routes to finance were still very difficult to access.

"If as an SME you are looking to regenerate your sales post-recession and grow, how do you obtain your working capital? Your three avenues of raising funding are on your assets, through the banks or through private investors," he said.

However, despite government efforts to promote lending to SMEs, such as the Enterprise Finance Guarantee (EFG), which mounting evidence suggests has not been a success, the banks are still not open to lending.

According to Young, the same is true of the asset-based lenders who have historically stuck by the print sector.

"This sector, more than others, has always gone in waves of doing well and then doing poorly and the asset-based lenders have always stuck by it," he said. "But there now seems to be a shortage of good funding for assets and a reluctance from the invoice discounters to over-lend or gear up highly against the ledgers, which again has been very typical of the print industry."

Private investors will need to be convinced by committed and skilled management teams, and be presented with strong evidence that "the business going forward can generate a profit and a return on capital", Young added.

"Beyond that, it depends on whether you have an owner/manager who is prepared to offer equity to an external investor. In today's market they are much more likely to take an active role, bringing added-value as far as management skills are concerned, as well as their money," he said.

"But I think, particularly in print, what you've got is a preference of owner-managers not to offer equity – it's one of those sectors where people are pretty reluctant to offer shares in the company. But if they want to grow and the banks are just going to say 'no', and the asset-based lenders are not going to gear up like they have done for the past 10 years plus, then they are going to have to consider equity."

Other speakers at the BPIF Finance Conference, which is due to take place on Tuesday 2 February at the Ricoh Arena in Coventry, include Ipex 2010 Exhibition Director Trevor Crawford, Evening Standard financial editor Anthony Hilton, InfoTrends senior consultant Kaspar Roos, The Paragon Group chairman Conor Donnelly, Cats Solutions chairman Bill Joss, Robin Welch and Simon Lisser, chief executive and commercial director of GI Solutions respectively, Manroland GB managing director Norman Revill, Print People Group chief executive Roger Lindop, and AJS Labels managing director Andrew Scrimgeour.

There will also be workshops on resolving conflict from mediators Mark Linnell and Amanda Bucklow, of commercial mediator In Place of Strife, and on risk management, from Marc O’Driscoll, sales director at Begbies Traynor Red Flag Alert.