Getting Unstuck by Buying a Business

And he. There were some assets in my wife's name, and my wife was very, very uncomfortable with this whole thing. Like all these years that I'm miserable in la, she's like, just suck it up and don't be a bitch. Like, go to work. And she's like, you're not taking financial risk.

You're not putting our family at risk. You're not giving a personal guarantee. Just suck it up. Like, yeah, you're unhappy.

So I said, okay, well, this is in your name. And I made it a sticking point with this guy that, you know, look, this loan's well covered by my stocks, by my bonds, by my home equity, by my cash, whatever. This is my wife's, and it's not in as part of the deal.

And he was like, no, it has to be. So I have this buddy, Tim Clark, who is. He's actually the guy that got me on searchfunder.com initially, but I was like, tim.

And he was like my rabbi through the whole process. Like, he started buying businesses in 2004, and. And he and I caught up recently, and he's just, you know, he's done. He's done very well.

So get him on the pod here.

Yeah, yeah. So anyway, I called Tim and I'm like, explain the situation. And he's. He's like, dude, screw that guy. If he doesn't want to give you the terms that you need, find another lender.

He's like, there's a. There's a thousand lenders out there that want to do business with you. They don't get to dictate the terms to you.

If someone's trying to dictate terms and that's not the terms you want, then find somebody else. So it turned out the selling broker on the business that I bought had already sort of had it soft underwritten with another SBA lender where he had a personal relationship. And that's how I ended up using to, you know, for the financing for my deal.

Great. So takeaway is, as Tim Clark put it, there are a lot of SBA lenders out there, and they all work for a bank whose, you know, boards or advisory committees or whatever. I don't know the right language. Decide on various criteria, various types of loans they're willing to underwrite, and, you know, what their various thresholds are and what's required, what's not.

And it. There is a lot of variety across. Across this universe of SBA lenders. So don't assume that the answer that you're getting from lender A is going to be the same that you're getting from B, from B, C, and D.