Summarizing your finance package can help to prioritize how your banker reviews your financing request.
We recently submitted a client’s financing request to one of the Lenders on our lending matrix. Our Lender Rep. said, “Holy cow, you guys are on top of it with your summary. Not many brokers make it this easy to review the package.”
We made it easy because the client provided us with their financials. The financials were comprehensive. It’s a multi-million dollar corporation and we’re at the early stage of presenting to the lender. We want to show something that’s easily digestible. We want to ease the process for the lender to give us a prompt review and tell us their interest in offering the financing.
Summarizing your financials is easy to do. When you have a lot of line items that lead up to one type of deduction or one type of income source, simply summarize it. Drop it down to as few lines as possible so the lender can do a quick review and say, “Okay, I see the picture here.”
The Lender doesn’t need to know the granular line-by-line details at this early stage; you want the Lender to give a fast review to gauge their interest. If the Lender expresses interest and offers a Letter of Intent for the financing, you can present the more detailed financials with your full loan application package.
For each client financing request, we write a summary statement. We present a one or two page statement describing some background on the business, the reason for their financing request, and, in bold, large font, the amount of our financing request.
Our presentation package for the initial Lender review is compact, yet complete. The “first glimpse” by a Lender is sufficient to tell us if that particular Lender is the right fit for our client’s request, or if we need to locate a different Lender.
Watch our Financing Fodder YouTube playlist to understand what you’re up against when applying for a business loan.