I hope this letter finds you well.
We need to talk. It looks like you are planning to stick around, and I would like to provide a list of wishes that are necessary for us to get along, even thrive together.
As a lender, specifically an SBA lender, I’d like you to:
Help potential borrowers and referral sources find us. There are over 4,000 of us, each with our own quirks, likes and dislikes, underwriting standards, regulatory regimes, specializations, loan terms, and a hundred more unique features. The same with borrowers: each is an individual with her or his needs, experience and financial wherewithal. The name of the game is “capital access.” We have capital we wish to invest, and the business owner has uses for capital. It’s as simple as learning about us (lender and borrower) and matching us up.
Improve our productivity. Doing SBA loans is hard work and some of it is tedious and prone to errors. We can’t hire and train fast enough to keep up with the demand and are hopeful that you can help us. We are already using you for this and looking for added innovation to make it even better.
Give me insight. The data is there, lots of it, but it’s sometimes difficult to separate signal from noise and distill it to important trends and insights. What part of the country has the most need for our capital? Industries? What makes a good SBA loan? A bad loan? What industries are deserving but underserved. To be clear, I will never ask you to make decisions for me, but I’d love you to give me insights that allow me to make the right decisions. You’re supposed to be good at it, certainly fast, so let’s get to work.
Earn my trust. Let’s be honest; I don’t trust you very much. I question your answers, especially when you tell me how smart I am (I am not, and I am self-aware). And those hallucinations?!? C’mon, get your act together. And are you sure the proprietary data I input isn’t used for model training or even worse, shared with others?
Don’t be an asshole. Scams, fake news, water and energy consumption, noisy data-centers, opaque pricing, enabling bad actors, intellectual property theft, the list goes on. You’re important, you’re useful (not the Tik Tok part); now let’s work on your ethics.
This is a fairly comprehensive list and I understand it might take a little bit of time to implement every single suggestion. In the meantime, I and my team of experienced SBA 7(a) lending professionals remain available to talk about deals. In fact, that will never change. You can’t get rid of the human element although you can certainly enhance the overall process. Anyone reading this who needs or wishes to interact with a live human, you can find a listing of our experienced SBA professionals here: https://gulfcoastsba.com/our-people/. We look forward to being of assistance.