Making It Easy for Lenders
Everyone in the room wants to approve the finance.
It is worth starting there, because most people arrive at a lender expecting a tough discussion. They brace for scrutiny, and treat the whole thing as an exam they might fail. It rarely is. The lender wants to lend. That is the business. The broker wants the deal to close. The borrower wants the money. Three parties, one direction of travel.
So if everyone wants the same outcome, what actually goes wrong?
Deals rarely die of merit.
In my experience, they die of delay.
An LOI has a clock on it. Credit committees meet on their own schedule, not yours. Every question a lender has to ask is a day, sometimes 3, and days are the one thing a timed process cannot spare. The deal that falls over is usually not the weak one. It is the one that ran out of road while somebody went back to look for a number.
That is the part people underestimate. They imagine the decision as a verdict delivered at the end. It is closer to a series of small permissions, each granted or withheld depending on whether the person reading has what they need in front of them.
What a question really costs.
A lender reading your material is building an internal case. At some point they have to present it to someone else, and that person will ask questions they cannot answer by guessing.
So when your materials leave a gap, it does not sit there quietly. It becomes an email. The email becomes a wait. The wait becomes a follow-up call, a revised figure, a version 4 of the model, and by then the momentum you had in week 1 has quietly gone.
None of this is hostile. It is just process. But process has a cost, and the cost is measured in the only currency that matters when an LOI is ticking.
The questions are always the same.
This is the part that surprises people. After a couple of hundred projects, you stop seeing infinite variety and start seeing a short list.
The sources and uses don’t tie to the number on the front page. The sponsor's own contribution described in a way that leaves the amount ambiguous. A growth assumption sitting on the page with nothing underneath it. Revenue on slide 9 that disagrees with revenue in the model.
Individually, each one looks minor. Together they are the difference between a lender who can build their case in an afternoon and one who has to come back to you 4 times to do it.
And here is the thing worth sitting with: none of these are problems with the business. They are problems with the paperwork. The business was fine. The materials just made it hard to see.
Answering in advance.
Presenting a business and anticipating a question are 2 different acts, and most materials only do the first.
Presenting is what comes naturally. You know the business, you are proud of it, and you want to show it properly. Anticipating means putting the material down, sitting in the other chair, and asking what this person needs before they can say yes.
It is a less comfortable exercise. It means looking for the soft spot rather than the strong one. But it is the one that saves the weeks, because every question you answer on the page is a question that never becomes an email.
You cannot do it by imagining. You do it by having watched the questions arrive, over and over, until you know which ones are coming.
Impressive and effortless at the same time.
There is a false choice lurking here, and it is worth naming.
People assume you either produce something polished, or you produce something that quietly ticks every box a credit team needs ticked. As though craft and function pull in opposite directions.
They do not. The materials I am proudest of look genuinely impressive and are effortless to read, and they satisfy every requirement the lender has to satisfy, all at once. The design is not decoration. It is what makes a dense case absorbable in one sitting by someone with 4 other files open.
That is the standard I work to. It should look like something. It should read like nothing. And when the lender goes looking for the figure they need, it should already be there.
What that looks like in practice.
The deck and the model agree with each other, everywhere, without exception.
Assumptions are visible and sourced, so a lender can test them rather than trust them.
The ask is stated plainly, early, with the structure attached to it.
The sponsor's position is unambiguous, because that is the first thing a credit team looks for and the last thing people think to spell out.
None of that is complicated. It is just the kind of thing that gets lost when you are close to your own business and everything feels obvious because it is obvious to you.
Closing thoughts.
There is a temptation to treat fundraising materials as advocacy, as though the job is to argue somebody into a decision. I think that gets it backwards.
The lender has already decided they want to lend. What they need from you is the ability to justify it, quickly, to somebody they answer to. Give them that and you are not persuading anyone. You are just making it easy.
Most deals do not need a better story. They need fewer reasons to pause. And when the clock is running, that turns out to be the same thing.
We don’t write to go viral. If you’re reading this, you’ve probably already heard of Decksadu. These short articles are simply a place for us to think out loud - about the art of helping extraordinary people build exceptional businesses.