Transcription
If you're looking to get approved for 50 to $150,000 in business funding in the year 2026, then the most underrated skill that you need is understanding how to analyze your business through the exact lens that the banks are looking at it.
One of the most common questions that I get all the time is, "Marv, how do I analyze a business? What are banks looking for? How do I know what cards I should apply for? How do I know if I am properly positioned in order for my business to get the funding that I know that it truly needs?"
Well, today, I'm breaking all that down because in this video, I'm going to be doing a live business funding analysis using the personal credit profile and business profile of one of our clients from my firm, so you can see step-by-step exactly how the banks are looking at your business and ultimately putting yourself in a better position to go out and get funded. Let's begin.
All right, family, what is going on? Uh, very excited for this video cuz I'm not sure if I've ever done a video like this, right? Um, one of the bigger questions I get all the time is like, "Marv, can you give us a funding sequence? What, you know, what funding sequence, what bank should we go to?"
But the reality is, if you try and blanket approach getting your business funded, meaning going to every bank that you hear people talk about on social media, and you don't understand why you're going to that lender, you'll never understand the true skill, which is being able to see where your business is, where it needs to be, how the bank views it, so that you can ultimately make the difference between you getting a $20,000 approval versus $50,000, $75,000 in approvals for your business.
So, obviously, for privacy reasons, I can't say this person's actual name first. So, for the sake of this video, we're going to be calling him Neji. We're going to be analyzing one of our clients uh over at Takeoff and pretty much breaking down in real time how I went about analyzing his business so that he was ultimately able to get approved for the funding and financing, so you guys can see what the step-by-step of this process actually looks like. So, let's break it down.
First things first, let's break down my guy Neji's personal credit situation. So, when we talk about Neji's personal personal I can't spell. Personal credit situation. In terms of his credit scores on Experian, I got the notes right here actually. On Experian, he sat at about a 710. On TransUnion, he sat at a 708. And on Equifax, he was at a 715.
Now, y'all know me. I am not a credit score merchant. I'm not the person that's going to sit here and tell you like, "Hey, if you as long as you have the 700 or whatever it may be, you're good to go, right?" Nedji could have this credit score, but if he doesn't have the credit profile to match that, we can't help him when it comes to getting him the funding that he's looking for. So, we took a look under the hood beyond the scores to make sure that the credit profile actually followed suit, and this is what we found.
So, Nedji actually had a very strong personal credit situation. So, he had a few different cards, right? So, he had a Chase card that was 4 years old with a 12.5k limit, which is beautiful. He had a Discover card. Okay? With a 8k limit. And it was 3 years old. He had a MX Gold with a 10k limit that was 2 years old. He also had a Wells card with a 75 Wells card with a 7500 7.5k limit. And how old was this card? 3 years old. And he had an Apple card with a $5,000 limit. And it it was 2 years old. Okay? And on top of that, he also had a car loan as well. It was about 50% paid off. About 3 years old. And payment history on this was a 100. So, he never missed payments on any of these accounts. Both his installment and personal lines of credit. In terms of inquiries, no more than two to three across all Excuse me. Bureaus. Okay?
So, when we take a look at Nedji's personal credit breakdown situation here, it looks very, very attractive to lenders. Why? Because from a risk profile standpoint, he looks very low low risk and very high reward in terms of what the banks would be able to get in loaning him money. Why? His scores aren't just great. He has a credit profile to match. He has sizable limits across all four or how many? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 five of his cards, okay? And not only does he have sizable limits, he's also maintained positive payment history on these cards for several years, right? As you can see him showing here with Nedji's situation, he has a 12.5k limit with Chase, 8k with Discover, 10k with Amex, 7.5k with Wells, and then 5k with Apple. And on top of that, he's also showing that he has good credit mix as well. Cuz it's not just credit cards, he also has a car note as well. That's already paid down 50%. So, it's not killing his DTI too much. And he's had it for about 3 years now. And he's never missed a a payment on there. And his inquiry count is really, really low. Well, it's not super low cuz but two cuz two to three is something. But with these two to three inquiries, and I think all of them were 6 months plus old. Right? When it comes to the inquiries.
So, Nedji is Nedji's in the catbird seat, right? Life is looking very, very good for this young man in regards to what he's able to do from his the personal credit side. It's just a matter of once again, which I'll we'll talk a little bit more about what the business situation looks like, but having the right strategy to pair with this so he's not wasting how his personal credit is currently structured on going through with the wrong strategy.
Typically, what we try and do with most of our clients' situation is before we start leveraging their personal credit, you know, when it comes to them going whether it's the traditional route, SBA, alternative, whatever may be, we typically try and make suggestions when it comes to what they're doing with their personal credit. So, for Neji, if there were suggestions I would give him on his credit report, there's really not much. So, for example, I wouldn't tell him to apply for any more new accounts, right? With the accounts that he has on his credit report already, this is more than enough for him to be able to leverage, for him to get approved for funding. And any new accounts he applied for would actually, right? Decrease would actually decrease his uh his credit history, which hurts him that and doesn't help him and increases his risk with the bank, right?
The only thing I would probably tell that we would probably tell Neji to do is like, "Hey, if those inquiries aren't connected to any open accounts, let's see if we go and get some of those inquiries removed, right? If we can't, it's fine, we'll work with it because it's only two to three, but if we can, that just makes you look even more attractive when it comes time for you to go out and start working with these lenders." But outside of that, like, Neji is A+ in terms of where his personal credit situation is to where it's like, "All right, we could go ahead and work with this." So, on the personal side, he's pretty much taken care of.
Now, let's talk about Neji's business situation. Let's talk about Neji's business situation. I don't think we would need too much space to break this down. Let's break down Neji's business situation. His business structure, business situation, if you will.
So, with Neji, okay? He actually owns a mobile detailing business out of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, right? Neji does about $300,000 per year in rev, which comes out to what is that, like, 20 20 to 25? About 25k a month, give or take, roughly. Okay? So, he owns a mobile detailing business in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He makes about 300k a year in revenue, 25k a month. I want to make sure I have all his information here. His business is The only thing with him is that his business is properly structured. So, LLC is in check, EIN is in check, okay? His operating agreement is in place. He has a legit business email. The only thing is, he is a bit younger, so he actually did unfort- not the biggest thing in the world, but did attach his business address to his personal address, okay? Coming in. But, coming into the program, he was pressed for time. So, because his personal credit profile was so strong and on the business side, he was in such great position. Normally, we try and have it to where Okay, we'll work with you to move your business address away from your home address, if possible, right? Towards a actual professional address. But, in his case, because he was pressed for time, and he was already in such good standing on the personal side and in the business side, we kind of left it as is.
And also, he has another thing, because I know people see this and be like, "Oh, he's perfect, you know, why don't you use somebody who's not as perfect?" There were certain things that were working against him. Like, for example, his business credit, right, profile was relatively thin, right? What I mean by that? He did have He did, and this is why he ultimately came with us. He did have one biz card with Wells, but on that biz card, he only had a 4.5k approval. So, that kind of spooked him, and that was actually one of the inquiries he got on here. But, it actually spooked him a bit, cuz he was just like, he didn't want to risk adding more inquiries to his report and getting lower limits, because he felt like he was doing something wrong. So, he wanted to be able to work with a professional firm who could kind of analyze his business through and through, beyond just his personal credit and his business credit situation, to see like, "All right, what's the best route for me to go ahead and go here, so I can make sure I get the approvals that I'm looking for?"
Now, when it comes to this entire situation, once again, you need to be able to not just look at banks that people are telling you on social media. You have to be able to look at your own situation, do a self-evaluation, and figure out like, "All right, cool, what is going to be the best route for me to go when it comes to getting access to financing?" How you do that is you have to be able to look at things through underwriter's lens.
So, if I'm a underwriter at a bank, what are some of the questions that I'm asking my I know the the banks are going to be looking for and asking when they're looking at Nedji? Well, one of the things they're going to be looking at is, okay, how is your personal credit structure, right? What's that looking like, right? What's the overall scope of your business? What do I mean by that, right? Does your business make revenue? His does. Is the business properly structured? His is, for the most part, right?
Banks is also looking at, as well, you know, relationships. So, if you're going to let certain lenders, they're not just looking at the relationships that you have with them. They're also looking at the relationships you have with other lenders, as well. Why? Kind of going back to a video I had just made recently, lenders feel a lot more confident and comfortable working with you when they see that you've maintained and managed good relationships with other banks, line of credit, business credit options, personal credit options that they offer. Nedji shows that on the personal side, but they're also looking at on the business side, as well, which on the business side, he does have a business credit card with Wells, albeit not a super strong line of credit. It's still something to show banks, like, "Hey, I'm not just good when it comes to managing my finances on the personal credit side. I also know what I'm doing on the business credit side of things, as well."
But, ultimately, everything that the bank is looking at comes down to one word, y'all, risk, right? Is your risk profile high or is it low? The higher your risk profile is, meaning the riskier you and your business look, the less likely a bank is likely, excuse me, a bank is going to want to work with you, because if you're out here doing other lenders wrong, what are you going to do our bank? Right? We don't want to have to deal with that. But, in the case of Nedji, everything is ultimately pointing to pointing towards him having a low risk profile, which means that he's essentially in the catbird seat, where he can now go start going out and getting access to financing. Now, we just need to pair him with the right strategy.
And before we get into strategy, if you want to be able to have your business analyzed the way that we analyzed Nedji's business, so you have a clear picture on what lenders actually care about in making a difference between you getting $5,000 approvals or $50,000 approvals. I'm going to leave a link in the description below where you can book a call with me and my team. Learn to see if you qualify to work with us and more ultimately learn more about a custom funding plan we can put in place for you and your business to get approved for the capital you need. Link is going to be in the description below, but back to this video.
All right, so we analyze Niji's personal credit situation, we analyze Niji's business credit situation. Where do we go from here? Now, it's time for us to go ahead and put together Niji's funding Niji's funding road map. You can call it a road map. You can call it a game plan. Whatever name you want to give it, it's time to go out and get that bag, bag, bag.
So, typically, well, first off, Niji has a lot of opportunity here because we're going to go the traditional route with him, meaning we're going to work with some common lenders. Why? Once again, analysis business. On the personal side, he already has relationships with great business credit lenders like Chase, like Wells Fargo, like American Express. So, why would we start looking into alternative lines of alternative financing options when he's already in good position on the when it comes to relationships he has on the personal side that he can leverage to get access to more funding on the business side. And that's exactly what we're going to go ahead and do. Moreover, with some of these traditional lenders, not only has relationship, but he also has revenue that he's able to show as well that we can use as leverage to not only get him approved for business credit products, but also for line of credit products as well.
So, here's what ultimately we suggested for Niji to go ahead and do in real time. The first three lenders that we had Niji prioritize working with when we came to round one, right? Because we need we we we need to go ahead and create a funding sequence for him. Number one, of course, is going to be Chase Bank. Okay? Why? Because with Chase, they pull Experian. He already has a relationship with them, and we're going to go to Chase and request that they give Neji a 25k business credit card. That's going to be the first bank that we go.
Now, the thing when you're creating a funding roadmap, especially if you know you're going for business credit cards, you want to do what's called funding yourself horizontally. What does that mean? There are three credit reporting agencies, Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax. Ideally, the name of the game is you want to apply for a lender that pull different lenders that pull from different credit bureaus, so like Neji, you can keep your inquiry count low and maximize the amount of the size of the approvals that you're getting. So, in especially in that first round, we don't want to try and go to too many lenders that all pull from too many of the same bureaus.
So, after we go from Chase, the next bank that Neji is going to go to is actually a bit of a a dark horse {slash} wildcard that he doesn't have a relationship with, but it's still in his backyard, which is Truist. Why? Well, Truist pulls from Equifax, and they have a max lending exposure of 25k, meaning the most amount you can get approved for at Truist is 25k. And with Truist, you can get two biz cards with one inquiry, and they're a regional bank that's only available in certain cities, and Philadelphia is one of them. So, even though he doesn't have a relationship with this bank, they are available to to business owners like him that are in his region. So, we felt very confident, especially with the relationship managers that we had in house, that even without that relationship, we would be able to form that relationship in real time and be able to go ahead and apply for the 25k, and ultimately see what he was able to go ahead and get approved for.
And after Truist, the third bank that we went ahead and brought him to was US Bank. US Bank. So, with US Bank, they're powered by Elan Financial, and anyone who knows anything about Elan Financial knows that most Elan Financial banks typically pull Most Elan Financial banks typically pull TransUnion. Another thing with Elan Financial banks as well is that they're not the most favorable when it comes to limits, so we knew we were going to get approved for anywhere between 10k on the low end to upwards of 15k on the high end when it comes to how much financing that we would be able to go ahead and get approved for approved for Deji. So that's 50K and then essentially 60 to 75K that we were projecting to be able to get for him. So projected approvals of anywhere between 50K to 75K in round one.
Now after we hit round one, now we want to go ahead and swing over for round two. Okay? Cuz we want to maximize how much capital we're able to get unless the client is telling us like, "Hey, we only want X amount." If they're saying that they're okay with getting more than whatever they're they're projecting. So for Deji, he really was just looking for anywhere between 40 to 50. But he was open to us getting him more. So we said, "All right, cool. We're going to go ahead and create a two-round sequence for you in the event that for whatever reason we don't get as much as we want to get on round one."
Now going into round two, this is where we started to circle back to some of the relationships that Deji already had. Okay? We wanted to prioritize these lenders. Number one, with a bank like Chase, you always want to go hit regardless of what your relationship is with them. You always want to go to them first because they're the most strict when it comes to you applying with for funding with other lenders. Truist because it was in his backyard and we knew that we had a lot of leverage in terms of the amount of cards he would be able to get. And to maximize the TransUnion side, ultimately bringing him to US Bank because we knew that from a regional standpoint, he would still be able to get financing with them.
Now we do Chase, we go we go Chase, we go Truist, we go US Bank. Now for round two, we're going to circle back. And this time we're actually going to go American Express. Why? Why did we go American Express round two instead of round one? So that we can preserve our inquiries for Experian and also because American Express is a lender that doesn't really care as much when it comes to how many inquiries you have on your report before they approve you. Now full disclaimer, what's great about American Express is because Deji already has a relationship with them, they're not going to do another hard pull on his credit. They may do a soft inquiry, but they're not going to do a hard inquiry when they apply. The only annoying thing is that now with with since 2026, Amex is still approving, they're just not giving sizable limits like they used to between 20 to 25K. They're more in the 10 to 15k range.
But after we hit MX, the next bank that we're going to go to shortly after that is going to be another Experian bank. And our last Experian bank of the sequence, which is going to be Experian. Similar to once again at this point we're being conservative, right? For us it's not about getting large limits in round two, it's about getting our foot in the door and just continuing to pad on as much approvals as we can for Nji that he can build long-term even after he's done working with us to where hey, if you get approved for 10k now 6 months after if you're once you're done working with us, you can go back and circle back for a limit increase with them and get get that 10k to 25k. You don't got to pay us anything. That's your money, right? You can do whatever you want to do with it. So we got MX and Experian from Experian, Wells Fargo and Experian. We're going to hit one more TransUnion bank and as a bit of a gem for you guys, when creating a funding sequence, Equifax is one of the hardest lender hardest bureaus to find multiple lenders that pull from there unless you're going the credit union route. There are a lot of credit unions you can work with that pull Equifax, not really a lot of, you know, larger banks that are out there. So we're going to go one more TU based bank and that TU based bank is going to be Ameris Bank, which pulls TransUnion and ultimately probably going to give a lower limit of like 5k to like 10k. Ameris is very stingy.
So now for projected round two approvals, we're currently sitting at what is that? 50 to 75k. So that's 60, 70, 75. So now you're talking about on the low end 75k potentially to upwards of 75k. This is eight eight 90k plus 105k plus 115k. So you're talking about anywhere between $75,000 to $115,000 in capital. Did I just add every I did. I kind of just I just I forgot to do the round two and I just added it all. Total so we're going to call this total projected approvals anywhere between 70 to 115k. And as a result, he would have only ended up getting what is this? One, two, three additional inquiries on his three inquiries on his report on Experian right? Two inquiries on Equifax, excuse me, TransUnion, and then one inquiry on Equifax.
So, we protected his credit report, analyzed his business through the lens that the banks look at it, and ultimately we were still able to put him in a position where not only is he potentially getting the 50K he's looking for, but way more than that all while without getting a bunch of inquiries on his report that he ultimately would have found himself in a situation in, right? When it comes to getting the approvals, uh getting the, excuse me, approvals that he was looking to get through and through.
So, ultimately, understanding your your ability to understand how lenders are analyzing your business is ultimately going to be the make or break that determines the size of the approvals that you're able to go ahead and get going forward. But, that's all for this video.
If you haven't already, ladies and gentlemen, like I mentioned earlier, if you're interested in having us analyze your business through the same exact lens as an underwriter so that you are able to have a clear picture on how we're able to go and go ahead and put you in position to get the funding approvals that you're looking for, the link for that is going to be in the description below. I repeat, the link for that is going to be in the description below. As always, my name is Marvin Francois, and until next time, peace.