Posts Tagged ‘business financing toronto’
Rules For Shopping Commercial Financing Deals
October 6th, 2011
“Here Are Some Basic Rules To Consider When Shopping A Commercial Or Business Financing Deal”
As a business financing consultant my first response to the question of how to best shop around a commercial deal is not to.
There is a saying in the commercial financing world that shopping is death.
While this may be a bit melodramatic, there is a message carried with the expression that should be considered by all business owners and managers seeking business financing.
Unlike a personal credit or residential mortgage application that is evaluated on three to five readily available metrics, a business financing application can take a considerable amount of work to complete.
Each lender only has so much time and resources to invest in reviewing all the applications for financing they receive, so it only stands to reason that they are going to put their efforts into deals they think they can fund with borrowers that are committed to working with them.
The more a deal gets spread around, the more likely the lenders involved are going to become aware of this and when they do, there is a good chance they may automatically decline the deal and move on to the ones they feel they have a better chance at closing.
If you are shopping your own deal around, one of the tell tale tip offs to a lender that you are in full shopping mode is the inquiries on your credit report. Any type of application for business financing will require a credit check and when your credit gets putted and there are ten other lenders listed who have recently made inquiries, then its going to be pretty obvious to any given lender what you’re approach is and they will respond accordingly.
This may be a chance you are prepared to take, but keep in mind that the lender that declines you for shopping (even though they will never say that) could have been the best option available.
The other way shopping can go horribly wrong is through the use of financing brokers. Employing more than one broker plus submitting applications yourself will likely result in lenders receiving applications from more than one source. This again can instantly kill your options with a lender as they wonder how widely this is being shopped and how serious you are about their funding services.
As a business owner or manager, the most important thing for you to do is to manage your own deal. What that means is that you need to keep track of all the places your deal has been and if you have third party agents working for you, they need to tell you where they are planning to send the deal so that there are no instances where the same deal crosses paths.
The second part of managing your deal is not allowing a lender to pull your credit until the end of the application process. One of the ways to get them to move forward without pulling your credit at the outset is to provide a copy of your credit that you have procured yourself for your personal profile and the business profile. This won’t take away the lender’s need to pull your credit before anything is finalized, but it does allow them to make an assessment based on something reasonably current. By doing this, you are eliminating all the inquires to your credit that are dead giveaways to other lenders as to how broad this deal is being circulated.
The most important aspect of searching for business financing is to intimately understand your own financial and credit profile as well as the lending targets that are going to be interested in both at a particular point in time so you can hunt with a rifle instead of a shot gun.
The best way to do this is to work with a business financing specialist who can develop a detailed understanding of your profile and requirements and get you in touch with the most relevant lender or lenders right away so that you’re not wasting valuable time trying to cover the whole market with applications.
Business FinancingWhy Business Financing Strategy Is Important
June 27th, 2010
“A Proper Business Financing Strategy Will Cover A Period of Time Versus a Point in Time”
Assuming that you’re business requires a third party source of financing to provide the capital necessary to operate and drive your strategic plan, then a business financing strategy is definitely something that should be developed and kept up to date.
Most businesses operate on a point in time basis where they look for financing when they need it but don’t have a longer term picture of how the financing they accept today will impact their needs tomorrow.
A business financing strategy is more focused on making sure that any incremental commercial financing you secure will be congruent with what you already have in place and with what you expect to require in the near future.
Most lender models offer no help with this exercise either as lenders tend to work on a very narrow and highly static point of view. The ideal client for any debt lender is one that is very profitable, requires a relatively consistent level of capital to operate, and does not got any wild growth plans or ambitions that could upset the current stability of the business operations.
This is in direct conflict with businesses that are continually trying to grow and take on new opportunities or trying new approaches to gain market share. And when financing decisions are made in this fashion, the business owner or manager is constantly trying to fit round pegs into square holes.
Here’s an example.
A business owner wants to exit the business by selling his interest to a co owner for several million dollars. The business has a strong balance sheet and solid profitability so bank or institutional corporate financing should be able to be secured to accomplish the process.
But the owner wanting to exit has put a time limit on the transaction in terms of the price he’s prepared to sell his interest for. Because no senior lender relationship is in place, the remaining business owner has to start from scratch to secure financing.
Because the time available is not sufficient to get through a bank or institutional application and assessment process, a bridge financing solution will need to be entered into to meet the deadline.
Nothing wrong with bridge financing, other than its very expensive and may not be the best operational fit for the business in the interim with respect to how the financing is structured and monitored.
At the same time bridge financing is secured, the now sole owner will need to try and secure a longer term senior lender facility to pay out the bridge financier in order to save 50- 75% or higher, of the financing costs he’s paying.
Once the senior facility is in place, if the business has any plans for growth that require more capital in the near future, there is no guarantee that the new senior lender will be able to provide incremental funds as new opportunities present themselves, creating a new financing challenge.
An up to date business financing strategy could have not only avoided the whole bridge financing situation, but could have also made sure that future financing facilities were going to be congruent with future business plans.
While some of the leg work and modeling for a business strategy can be outsourced, it is the responsibility of the business owner or manager that a working version is in place and that it properly factors in 1) the present balance sheet; 2) potential future business financing requirements, 3) contingency planning such as management buyouts, shot gun clauses, etc.
A lack of a business financing strategy can destroy significant value in terms of 1) higher financing rates, 2) lost opportunities, 3) opportunity cost of time and the real cost of delays.
Click Here To Speak To Business Financing Specialist Brent Finlay
Business FinancingBusiness Financing Toronto Ontario
June 19th, 2010
“Do You Have a Toronto Based Business That Requires Business Financing?”
One thing about operating a business and having a business financing requirement in Toronto, there are no shortage of commercial financing options available to you.
The Big smoke is the center of the Canadian financing universe with several lenders present in virtually every conceivable business financing classification.
Because of the population concentration within 50 miles of down town Toronto, many sources of business loans, leases, and equity investment don’t even consider deals immediately outside of the Greater Toronto Area and prefer to only work on projects in their own back yard.
As a result, the physical location of the business, especially for anything that is asset intensive, will have significantly more financing options within the GTA area than even a short distance beyond its boundaries.
Because many sources of biz financing come from what we refer to as boutique lenders (niche focused sources of financing with typically one physical location and limited staff), there is a need for the business to be close enough for the lender to do a sight visit in the application stage of the process as well as to be able to easily come out to the location to monitor the account or work through issues that may arise.
Of course all the national lenders are also going to be present in the Toronto area. But the presence of this higher concentration of niche lenders compared to other areas of the country can provide many more short term and long term financing options to a business that would not otherwise be available if they were located even a 100 miles away from the GTA.
These expanded lender options also extend to private mortgage lenders that have a much higher concentration in Toronto than anywhere else in the country. Because of the woes of the stock market over the last decade, there are more and more people becoming private mortgage lenders to gain a more predictable and secure return, especially those in the baby boomer category that are at or near retirement and have a desire to reduce the overall risk level of their investment portfolio.
As a result of all the new entrants into the market, private mortgage financing has gotten more and more competitive, especially for small and medium sized commercial properties where private mortgage lenders can come close to rivaling bank interest rates in some cases.
All of this provides more choices for Toronto based businesses which can allow business owners and managers to consider different business financing strategies to meet their capital needs.
Click Here To Speak With Business Financing Specialist Brent Finlay
Business Financing