Workshop replay
Most business owners apply for financing the way you sit a test you did not study for: gather the paperwork, hope it is enough, submit, and wait. This workshop walks through the five numbers a lender reads first, and shows you how to run them yourself at your own desk.
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The workbook
Enter your details and the Business Loan Readiness workbook comes straight back to your inbox. Already have it open? Carry on with the class.
These are the figures a lender tends to review before a business lending decision. The class explains what each one is asking, in plain English, and where founders commonly find a soft spot.
One honest question: for every dollar of loan payment, how many dollars of cash flow does the business have to cover it. Lenders are looking for a cushion rather than a tie, and the class shows how the ratio is built from revenue, operating expenses, and add-backs.
The share of your personal monthly income already committed to debt payments. It matters for a business request because most small business loans are personally guaranteed, so the owner is often the only collateral a young business has.
Lenders do not read you and your business as two separate stories. Business cash flow and personal income go on one side, every debt on the other, and the question becomes whether the whole picture holds together.
A score sorts a file into a tier rather than delivering a verdict, and different lenders read different scoring models. The class covers which model is worth tracking, why the honest answer is usually "it depends on the lender," and how business bureau files differ from personal ones.
How long the business has been operating changes which products are on the table. A newer business is not out of options, and the class walks through the categories that tend to open earlier.
A red flag is not bad news. It is early news, because you found it before the lender did.
From the workshop
The second half of the class is a screen share of the Business Loan Readiness workbook. There are eight tabs, and you only ever type into one of them. Everything else calculates from what you entered.
Tab 01
The only tab you type into. Time in business, annual revenue, operating expenses, add-backs, existing business debt, then personal income and monthly debt payments, then credit and the loan you have in mind.
Tab 02
Builds itself from your inputs. Coverage ratio, personal debt load, the combined picture, and your credit tier, each with a plain status so you can see at a glance which one is soft.
Tab 03
Takes your cash flow, keeps a safe cushion, subtracts what you already owe, and turns the remainder into an estimate you can compare against the amount you had in mind. Your assumptions, not a lender's decision.
Tab 04
Lines up the common categories, from SBA products to bank term loans, lines of credit, and equipment financing, next to the profile you entered so you can see which ones are worth reading about next.
Tab 05
Turns your numbers into a short to-do list. Every factor from the class appears with a plain English status and, where there is work to do, the specific lever that moves it.
Tab 06
A finished file for a small cafe planning an expansion. Poke around a completed one before you touch your own, so you can see what a strong column and a soft one look like side by side.
The one rule: type only into the highlighted cells on the input tab. Go slowly, say each figure out loud as you enter it, and let the calculated cells finish updating before you move on. Every result downstream depends on those entries being right.
Free community. Real strategies. Lasting clarity. We work through business and personal finance structure together, from building business credit to keeping records that read as a business rather than a hobby.
Join the communityFill in the workbook first, then post what you found. Every post gets read.