There are a lot of people in the business lending industry with impressive titles in their email signatures. Loan Consultant. Senior Funding Specialist. Business Finance Advisor. Capital Solutions Expert. Blah, blah, blah.
Most of them learned the business in the last three years. Some of them learned it on YouTube. Yesterday.
I’m not saying that to be cruel. I’m saying it because it matters when it’s your business and your money and your personal guarantee on the line. The person sitting across from you – or on the other end of that email – either knows what they’re doing or they don’t. And in this industry, the gap between those two things isn’t a minor inconvenience. It’s the difference between a deal that closes correctly and one that blows up in a way you didn’t see coming.
My partner Tony Golio has been in commercial lending and financial analysis for 35 years. Not 35 years of sending applications and collecting commissions. Thirty-five years of underwriting, deal structuring, lender relationships, and sitting across from business owners in every financial situation imaginable. That’s a specific kind of knowledge that doesn’t come from a certification course or a LinkedIn badge. It comes from doing the work, over and over, for a very long time.
Between the two of us we bring over 60 years of combined experience to every deal – and not all of it came from behind a desk. Before PG Strategic, Tony ran top restaurants in New York City. He knows what it feels like to sign a personal guarantee, manage payroll on a thin week, and sit across from a lender hoping the numbers hold up. I spent my twenties running a nonprofit that worked with people in financial crisis. That experience taught me something that no amount of deal flow ever could – that every client is a person with a story and a family depending on the outcome. That doesn’t change when the client is a business owner. It just raises the stakes.
This article is about what that actually means for you. Not in abstract terms. In specific, concrete examples of what happens differently when you work with someone who has genuinely seen everything.
Example One: The 30-Second Financial Read
Here’s something that happens in our office regularly that I don’t think most business owners realize is unusual.
A client sends over their financials. Tax returns, P&L, balance sheet. Tony looks at them. Thirty seconds later – and I mean that literally, not as an expression – he has a working picture of the deal. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. What’s going to fly, what’s going to create friction, and what’s going to need to be addressed before this file goes anywhere near a lender.
That’s not a trick. That’s 35 years of pattern recognition compressed into an instant. He’s seen thousands of financial statements. He knows where the bodies are buried. He knows what a healthy DSCR looks like versus one that’s been dressed up with aggressive add-backs. He knows when depreciation schedules are masking a cash flow problem and when they’re actually working in the borrower’s favor. He knows what a lender is going to flag before the lender flags it.
A newer broker looks at the same financials (if they even ask for them at all) and sees numbers. Tony looks at them and sees a story. Those are not the same thing.
And critically – the real pros don’t sugarcoat what we see. If the financials have a problem, we tell you. Not to discourage you, but because you can’t fix something nobody told you was broken. The brokers who tell every client their deal looks great are the brokers who waste your time and disappear when it doesn’t close.
Example Two: The Two-Minute Phone Call
A client came to us with a strong deal that had a wrinkle. They were acquiring a new business location – effectively a startup situation, not an established track record at that address. That’s a harder deal to get approved. A lot of lenders look at that profile and find a reason to pass.
We got it done. $1.5 million SBA loan at 90% LTV. Because the lender knew us. They knew we don’t bring deals we haven’t already pressure-tested. They knew our files are clean and our clients are prepared. That trust is built over years and it’s the reason a deal that might have stalled at another firm went through.
Then a new wrinkle appeared. The client was planning to sell his house that summer. At 90% LTV, the collateral requirements put a lien on his personal residence. A lien on a house you’re about to sell creates a title problem. He needed the loan and he needed to be able to sell his house without a cloud on the title.
Tony picked up the phone and called the loan officer. This is someone Tony has known and worked with long enough that the word colleague doesn’t quite cover it. Personal friend is more accurate. The ask: if we pull the LTV down to 85%, does the residential lien come off the table?
“Sure Tony, no problem.”
Two minutes. Deal restructured. Client protected. Done.
That phone call doesn’t happen without decades of relationship building behind it. A newer broker doesn’t have that number to call. And even if they did, the answer on the other end would not be the same.
Example Three: We Start With Your Objective, Not a Product
One of the most common things that happens when a business owner calls a loan broker is this: they say what they think they need, and the broker starts working on getting them exactly that. Term loan requested, term loan delivered (maybe)
The problem is that business owners often don’t know what they actually need. Not because they’re not smart. Because they’re not lenders. They know their business. They don’t necessarily know which financial instrument serves their objective best.
We never lead with a product. We lead with a question: what are you trying to accomplish?
The answer to that question determines everything. A business owner who says they need a term loan might actually need a line of credit that gives them flexibility instead of a fixed monthly obligation. A business owner who wants working capital might be better served by an SBA loan that gives them a longer runway at a lower rate. Someone who thinks they need equipment financing might have a better path through an asset-backed structure.
The loan type is the conclusion, not the starting point. The objective is the starting point. Every time, without exception.
That approach requires enough knowledge to see multiple paths and evaluate them honestly. That’s an experience problem. You can’t know which product serves a client best if you only really know how to do one or two of them.
Example Four: We Don’t Chase the Easy Commission
This one is going to make some people in my industry uncomfortable. Good.
There is a culture in business lending — especially in the MCA space — of closing the deal that’s easiest to close, not the deal that’s best for the borrower. Revenue looks good enough, approval comes back, commission gets paid, next call. Whether that merchant cash advance puts the business owner in a worse position six months from now is not the broker’s problem. They’ll be onto the next deal by then.
We’ve watched this destroy businesses. We’ve seen business owners come to us carrying $200,000 in MCA stacks they got talked into by brokers who never explained the effective APR or what daily payment pulls would do to their cash flow. We’ve seen people lose businesses they built over decades because someone prioritized a fast commission over an honest conversation.
That’s not lending. That’s extraction.
Our objective has always been the same: put clients in a better financial position than they were in before they called us. Inform them. Educate them. Get them into the right product at the right time even if the right answer is not yet or not this one. Because a client who trusts you completely calls you back. They send their colleagues. They send their kids when those kids start businesses. We have clients we’ve worked with for ten and twenty years. That doesn’t happen by accident and it doesn’t happen by chasing the easiest close.
Example Five: Someone Has to Protect You From the Room
Tony reads the deal. I read the room. And the people in it.
Not every threat to your financing outcome comes from your financials. Sometimes it comes from whoever else has their hands in your deal. A broker you found online. A referral from a friend who meant well. Someone who reached out to you cold and seemed confident.
Before I pick up the phone with anyone involved in a client’s deal, I know who they are. I’ve looked them up. I’ve checked their LinkedIn. I’ve verified their background. I’ve asked the questions that tell me in about 60 seconds whether I’m talking to someone who knows this business or someone who learned enough to sound like they do.
That Gmail address in the email signature. The LinkedIn profile that shows eight months in the industry and a certificate from an online course. The broker who can’t answer a specific technical question about the product they’re supposedly placing. These are tells. I’ve seen all of them and I know what they mean.
I’ve gotten on the phone with brokers while a client was listening and asked the kind of questions that separate people who know this business from people who are pretending to. Sometimes those calls go fine. Sometimes they don’t. And I’m not shy when they don’t. I will tell the guy he’s a moron. I’ll call him out for self-serving. Either way, the client knows what they’re dealing with before they sign anything.
Protecting a client from a bad actor or an incompetent broker is not something that shows up in a deal sheet. But it has saved clients from genuinely terrible outcomes more times than I can count. That’s part of what we do and it’s a part I take seriously.
Example Six: Knowing When to Say No
A broker who needs the commission never turns down a deal. Every file looks fundable when your rent depends on closing something.
We turn down deals. Not often, but when the situation calls for it.
Sometimes a client isn’t ready. Their financials need a six month clean-up. Their credit needs work. Their existing debt load makes any new financing a bad idea right now. Telling them that and explaining why – giving them a specific roadmap for what needs to change before they come back – is not losing a client. It’s building one. The client who gets an honest no, with a real explanation and a path forward, remembers that. They come back when they’re ready and they send everyone they know.
Thirty-five years of experience means knowing the difference between a deal that needs more time and a deal that needs to happen now. That judgment only comes from having seen what happens when you get it wrong.
What Experience Looks Like vs. What It Just Sounds Like
| The Experienced Advisor | The Title Without the Track Record |
|---|---|
| Reads financials and gives you the real picture in minutes | Tells you everything looks great before reading anything |
| Starts with your objective and works backward to the right product | Starts with the product they know how to close |
| Has lender relationships built over decades of closed deals | Has a list of lenders they found on a funding platform |
| Restructures deals with a two-minute phone call when needed | Submits and waits, then tells you it was declined |
| Vets everyone in the room before the conversation starts | Takes the deal at face value and hopes for the best |
| Turns down deals that aren’t right and tells you why | Takes every deal because every deal is a commission |
| Clients come back for 10 and 20 years | Clients don’t call back after the deal closes |
One More Thing Worth Saying
I built this entire site – this blog, the calculators, those kick-ass primers-all of it – without a single application or hard sales pitch embedded in any of it. No lead capture forms on the calculator pages. No CTAs pushing you toward a product before you’ve had a chance to learn anything. Just information, tools, and honest explanations of how this all works.
That’s intentional. We genuinely root for small business owners. We know how hard it is to run a business and how confusing the financing world is. If someone comes to our site and leaves with a better understanding of their options – even if they never call us – that’s fine. That’s the point.
The people who call us do it because they trust us. And they trust us because we never tried to trick them into it.
Bonus Section: Questions to Ask Anyone Handling Your Livelihood
Before you hand your financial future to anyone in this industry, do your homework. This is not hard and it does not take long.
Start with the basics. Google them. Look up their company. If their website looks like it was built in an afternoon by a 4th grader in 1985 and hasn’t been touched since, that tells you something about how seriously they take their work. If they don’t have a website at all, they don’t value credibility enough to establish one — which raises the question of what else they don’t value.
Check their email address. A broker handling a $500,000 financing transaction who is corresponding from a Gmail account is not running a serious operation. That is not a small thing.
Look them up on LinkedIn. How long have they been in the industry? What did they do before this? A profile showing 18 months of experience and a certificate from an online funding course is information. Use it.
You can also use AI tools (like Anthropic’s Claude) to do your own background research on anyone involved in your deal. Public information, company history, industry affiliations, regulatory records – a thorough search takes minutes and can surface things that would take you hours to find on your own. Use every tool available to you. This is your business.
Then ask them questions. Real ones. Ask them to walk you through their last two deals — what the structure was, what challenges came up, how they got resolved. Ask them something specific about the product they’re recommending: “what is the current guarantee fee is on a $500,000 loan?”, “how is this loan going to affect my debt service coverage ratio?”. A broker who can’t answer anything you ask in plain English within ten seconds has no business touching your file.
And then ask my favorite question of all- “how much money are you making on my deal, and will I see it in writing?”
A trustworthy advisor answers that without hesitation. The amount, the source, and yes – in writing. Anyone who hedges on that question, gets vague, or tells you that’s just how the industry works is giving you the only answer you need.
We welcome every one of these questions directed at us. Ask us anything. Get us on the phone and put us on the spot. That conversation will go fine because we know what we’re talking about and we have nothing to hide. The broker who gets defensive when you ask hard questions is telling you something important.
Thirty-five years in this business means a lot of things. But more than anything it means we know what we’re doing, we know who we’re dealing with, and we know how to get your deal done right. If you’ve got something on your plate and you want a real read on it, you know where to find us. Let’s talk.
