What placing your own debt actually costs you.
Not in fees. In your hours — the ones you were going to spend running the company. Put your own number in and see it.
Against 2,200 working hours — about $114 an hour.
in your own time — 156 to 260 hours, spread across two to three months you were supposed to spend running the business.
- Work out which lenders even do your dealProduct, check size, sector, geography and credit box. Most owners call five they've heard of.20–40 hrs$2K – $5K
- Assemble and normalize the packageReturns, YTD financials, debt schedule, agings, PFS — then add-backs and owner comp normalized so coverage reads correctly.25–40 hrs$3K – $5K
- Complete each lender's own applicationEvery funder has its own forms and its own intake. None of them accept another's.18–30 hrs$2K – $3K
- Field follow-up document requestsEach lender asks for something different, on its own timeline, usually twice.30–50 hrs$3K – $6K
- Compare offers that aren't comparableA factor rate, a monthly rate and an APR are three different units. Converting them is the only way to know which is cheapest.8–15 hrs$909 – $2K
- Negotiate termsRate, term, covenants, guarantees, prepayment. Most owners accept the first structure offered.15–25 hrs$2K – $3K
- Chase it for 60–90 daysThe part nobody budgets for. Following up is most of the work.40–60 hrs$5K – $7K
Estimates for a $500K–$5M raise taken to several lenders. They assume you already know what you are doing — first-timers take longer.
We do that job.
Underwrite the file first
We run coverage, global cash flow, collateral and program eligibility before anyone sees it — so you find out where you stand before the market forms an opinion of you.
Match against 1,500+ lenders
Your file is compared against credit boxes, check sizes, sector and geography. Not five names we happen to know — the whole book, filtered to the ones that actually close your kind of deal.
Package it once
One properly assembled file with normalized financials, rather than eight half-complete applications in eight different formats.
Run the process
Submissions you approve by name, follow-up requests handled, timelines chased. The part that consumes sixty hours if you do it yourself.
Convert the offers to one unit
Factor rates, monthly rates and APRs expressed on a single annualized basis, so cheapest actually means cheapest.
Negotiate
Rate, term, covenants, guarantees, prepayment. Most owners accept the first structure offered because they have nothing to compare it to.
So we charge for it, and we say what it is
Most brokers will tell you they are free. They are not free — they are paid by the funder, out of your transaction, at a rate you never see. On a merchant cash advance that is commonly nine per cent of the money you receive, priced into your factor rate.
We would rather do the opposite: describe the work, name the fee, and let you decide whether it is worth it against the hours above. If it isn’t, don’t hire us. That is a real choice, and this market almost never offers one.
There is no application fee, no retainer and no charge for the underwriting memo or the package we build from it. Transparent is paid a success fee of 2% of the facility, owed only if one closes. On SBA transactions that fee is disclosed on Form 159, signed by you and by the lender. Where a lender pays us instead, we tell you the amount in writing on the same page as your terms.
It is written into clause one of our disclosure standard, which we published so it is checkable rather than a promise.
Connect your books and the package builds itself.
We’re building a QuickBooks connection so the financial half of the file — P&L, balance sheet, agings, debt schedule — is pulled and normalized automatically rather than assembled by hand. It removes the single largest block of hours in the table above, and it removes the most common reason a sound business gets declined: books nobody can read.