Seeing beyond the numbers to help secure funding

Finance: Focalise Finance

What’s often forgotten or ignored is everything else: the knowledge of the market, the business acumen to know how to best operate in that space, and the vision to see how to deliver to that particular audience.

Combining all these things can be critical to obtaining the right funding.

The importance of insight

As a director, you’ll be using data and information all day every day to provide an insight into your own business. Combining these key metrics with your own knowledge can help to highlight its strengths and weaknesses.

All are used to support decision-making, be those decisions big or small. And that strategy should also apply when seeking finance.

If your business is looking to borrow, you could, as many often do, approach your high street bank or even online platforms similar to ‘Compare the Market’ to see what boxes you tick and what the potential outcome could be. These will almost certainly focus primarily on the financial aspect of the business.

However, at Focalise Finance, we know that doesn’t tell the full story, and lots of businesses are now benefitting from our method of painting the full picture to prospective lenders.

Leveraging knowledge and vision

When talking with any of the East Anglian SMEs we work with, we’re looking to develop a strong relationship with the firm from the outset. This is not done through tick boxes and closed questions, but through conversation. This enables us to gain an insight into their personal knowledge, which we then use to support them in finding the right solution from the lenders we work with.

We still need to provide the right financial information – year-end accounts, bank statements etc. – but we make sure that we provide the context and story behind those numbers. We explain what’s happened to trade in that period, highlight the new customers or new products, openly discuss challenges but also show how they are navigated. It’s not a line-by-line commentary, but it’s picking up on key areas that, without the background, would likely cause concern to a bank underwriter.

Once we’ve talked about what has gone before, we look to the vision. Not our vision, but yours: what you, the business owner who lives and breathes the business every day, see for and feel about the future. That might include how you see the purchase of a new machine supporting the business, and whether to maintain its current position or expand into new opportunities. We also want to understand what else the business is planning to do and how these other changes might impact the future.

Leveraging this knowledge and information is all done to scale with the funding that you require, but regardless of the size of the opportunity, we’re always looking to develop a relationship.

We want to be your funding partner for growth.