Find out what your numbers support before you go asking.

What it answers

Four questions, in this order, because the order matters more than any single answer:

• Should you borrow at all right now? Sometimes the honest read is that the timing is wrong and three clean months would change your pricing more than any lender we could introduce you to.
• What can you actually raise? A real range, sized against your deposits, your time in business, your credit profile and your industry. Not a rule of thumb.
• In what structure? The instrument follows the problem. Money you need for six weeks and money you need for six years are different questions with different answers.
• What should it cost? So that when an offer arrives you already know whether it’s a good one, rather than finding out afterward.

How we read a file

Lenders underwrite deposit consistency far more than they underwrite credit score. A 580 with steady deposits regularly beats a 700 with erratic ones, and that single fact surprises most owners who have been told their score is the problem.

So we start with the statements. Average daily balance, deposit count and consistency, negative days and whether they cluster, existing debt service already leaving the account, and seasonality with an explanation attached. Then time in business, entity and state, industry, and what the money is for.

That last one does more work than owners expect. "A second reefer truck for a contracted route" underwrites better than "whatever we can get", and it isn’t close.

What you get

A written summary: the range you can raise, the structures that fit and why, roughly what each should cost, and anything in the file that will cause a problem before it causes one. If the answer is "not yet", you get that in writing too, along with what would change it.