Creative Financing Insights for Commercial Bankers
I spent the first decade of my career on the bank side of the desk. Commercial lending, small business, construction lines — the whole spectrum. And like every lender, I had a stack of files I genuinely wanted to approve but couldn’t.
One of them still sits in the back of my mind. A staffing company owner — I’ll call her Maria. Solid business, good clients, clean personal credit. She’d been in business four years, was growing fast, and needed a $400,000 working capital line to fund payroll while she waited on her clients to pay. Her biggest customer was a Fortune 500 company. Net 60 terms.
We declined her. Debt service coverage was too thin on the trailing twelve months, and our policy required two years of profitability trends before we’d look at a line that size. The math was the math.
Maria walked out of that meeting with a polite decline letter and, I assumed, would find another bank. What I didn’t know then — and what I wish I could have told her — is that her business was a textbook candidate for invoice factoring. Her Fortune 500 customer was creditworthy. Her invoices were real and verifiable. She didn’t need a loan. She needed her own money faster.
Three years later, I was on the other side of that conversation, building what would become Asset Commercial Credit™. I found out Maria’s business had made it — but not easily. She’d struggled through two near-misses before someone finally pointed her to a factor.
I think about Maria a lot when I talk to banking colleagues about referrals. Not every declined client is a credit problem. Some of them are a timing problem. A cash cycle problem. An invoice problem. And those businesses — the ones with creditworthy customers and real receivables — can often be funded within days through factoring, stabilized, and eventually ready to come back to you as a bankable borrower.
What This Newsletter Is About
The Bridge exists because after 39 years in lending, I believe commercial bankers and invoice factors are natural allies — not competitors. Every month I’ll share a story, a lesson, or a perspective from the field that I hope makes your work with small business clients a little more complete.
If you’ve ever had a client like Maria — good business, wrong timing, no good options to hand them — I’d love to talk. A referral to Asset Commercial Credit™ costs you nothing, and it might be the thing that keeps a good business alive long enough to become your best borrower. Contact us to refer a client.
Warm regards,
Shaun Rovai
CEO, Asset Commercial Credit™ | 39 Years in Commercial Lending
(916) 614-1850 | www.assetcc.com | srovai@assetcc.com
CA Finance Lender/Broker License #607-1896
