About Us

That has actually had a tremendous impact on what we do because we've used alternative lenders both in business and in personal life.

For example, when we were purchasing our last couple homes, we found that the process going through an alternative lender was a much easier process for us. Especially when you come from a situation... for people who are small business owners or self-employed, oftentimes trying to provide all the documentation the banks require to get the mortgage can be quite overwhelming.

We started with traditional lenders and we were not making any headway. And sometimes their solution was for us to just make more money. The solutions they were coming back with were unrealistic for our circumstance at the time that we were doing this.

So, we started looking deeper and that led us to alternative lenders and we found that our experience there... there was much more personal attention from the broker that we were working with, both for business and for our mortgage, that they were there guiding us, saying "okay guys, you need to do this and then it would be easier for us to fund you". There was a bit more guidance, whereas with the bank, they would just say, "no we can't" and they would not really tell you what was the problem, what can I do differently to change my application to improve.

You're not really getting that from the traditional lenders but with the alternative lenders that we've dealt with, we got much more personalised attention and that is what we are seeking to do in our interaction with our clients.

What we have found with traditional lenders is that they don't take those things into consideration. They look at... what is your credit score, is it 650, is it 730. They use the numbers more often than anything else in making their final decision. So, what is the credit score, what are the financial figures that are coming in from the business - those are the things that make the final decision for them.

The alternative lenders are prepared to listen to the story behind the numbers. To hear why is it that this particular month... you know, you were doing $100,000 - $150,000 every month, then suddenly you went down to $50,000 - what happened here? What was going on there? When you present to them and say, "well, this month we were doing renovations, so we weren't having as many sales coming through." ..."oh, now that makes sense." It was not a usual thing, it was a seasonal thing or whatever it was.

Definitely, we have found that they (alternative lenders) take much more consideration of the reason behind the numbers and not just the numbers themselves.

It depends on what you're trying to do. To reduce the risk with either party, whether you go with traditional or alternative, what you want to look at is the longevity of the lenders. You know, the lenders that have been around for a long time, they will continue to be around, more often than not, for a long time.

Every day there are new lenders popping up but you want to go with lenders who've been around a long time.

When we were creating our network of lenders, we were looking for lenders who've been around a long time, who have helped thousands of businesses, who are reputable, who have funded billions of dollars to small businesses over 10+ years.

It's tricky for many business owners to differentiate that because when they go to a lot of the websites, sometimes you don't even see things like contact information for some of these brokers. The only way you can contact them is through their email. There's no phone number, no postal address, because they are sort of hiding. Even when you go to the about page, they are being very generic in their about information.

We want to be much clearer, in terms of where we've come from, why we are in it, and what we are trying to do for business owners.

Being there for our clients, I think is the cornerstone of our business. It's so important. More than just providing the funds, is the personal attention we give to each and every one. Yes, our processes are... applying is automatic but the client... for us, none of them is a number.

We do come back to the client after the application is submitted to us and we strive to find out a little bit more about each and every one because there are so many nuances, knowing these nuances we can actually bring a better deal to the table.

Sometimes we are in a situation where we can advise the client on how to structure, and what to do in business moving forward, besides... beyond just funding them.

We know what it felt like when we were treated as a number versus when someone was prepared to listen to what our circumstance was and see how can we find a way to work with your circumstance to get you to where you want to get to. We want to do the same thing.

It's not just information comes in and we pass it on. We want to help the business owner. At least helping people get the funds they need and showing them how they can leverage those funds to really grow their business and have less reliance on the higher risk funds as they go down the road.

At the end of the day, businesses will need funds from time to time at different stages of their growth but our aim is to help them on a personal level to get through that as hassle-free as possible.