Make Banks Compete To Lend You Money: The Complete Guide to Business Loans Paperback – July 1, 2010

All good!

As the owner of a small business, I recently needed to find a new bank. Our current bank wouldn't give us the flexibility we needed to continue to grow the business. Using the wisdom in this book, we contacted ten banks to compete for our business. Some were small community banks while others were large, national banks. We took the authors' advice and scheduled the meetings over two days at our offices so the banks could see our business in action. In addition, we scheduled the meetings close together so the banks would realize they were competing. Each meeting was 90 minutes. We asked for a $3 million A/R loan with an 80% advance rate and a $150,000 term loan over three years. We also asked for flexibility with some of our customers who can take up to 120 days to pay but are reliable payers. As the book suggested, we also put together a large binder that organized all of the information well and provided 95%+ of what the bankers would want. The result? Nine of the ten banks agreed to meet with us. All were impressed with our level of preparation and our presentation. The questions we received after the presentation have been minimal given how prepared we were and how much information we gave them when we met. Two banks have already given us strong proposals - better than we expected in terms of interest rate, flexibility and covenants. Yesterday, we contacted the other seven banks to give them a deadline to submit a proposal. Once we have all the proposals next week, we're going to compare all of them to identify ways we can negotiate with the bank who has given us the most favorable proposal. We are very optimistic that we will have a new bank in place in the next few weeks and the flexibility we need to grow our business. Thanks Rich and Mary!