Raising debt in the lower-mid-market, answered plainly.

Plan for twelve to sixteen weeks from engagement to money in the account, assuming nothing breaks. The first three to four weeks go on preparation, building the model, drafting the information memorandum and standing up the data room. Lender marketing and first meetings run another three to four weeks. You then give credible lenders four to five weeks to do their work and come back with firm terms. Pick a lender, sign a term sheet, and legals plus diligence take a further four to six weeks to close. The honest variable is you. Processes slip when management is slow to answer diligence or the numbers move mid-flight. A clean, well-prepared borrower with current information closes at the fast end. A well-run sponsor deal can close in eight weeks; a messy one can drag past five months.

The IM is the document lenders read first and form their view from. Forty to sixty pages, written by your adviser, making the credit case for lending to you. It covers the business and what it does, the market and your position in it, management and ownership, a financial section with historical performance and the forecast, the transaction, and the funding ask. The job is to anticipate the questions a credit officer will have and answer them before they are asked. A good IM is candid about the risks and shows you have a handle on them. Lenders are wary of documents that read as pure sell-side gloss. The IM commits you to nothing and is issued under NDA. Get it right and it carries you a long way into the process before anyone has spoken to you.

A three-statement model in Excel, monthly for the forecast period and annual thereafter, with the statements properly linked. Lenders care about cash and covenants, so the model has to show the debt schedule, the interest and amortisation, headroom against the covenants you are proposing, and the cash available to service the facility. Build in the ability to flex the key drivers, because a credit team will run their own downside. Tie the historicals to your audited accounts and the latest management figures, and be ready to bridge any difference. Where the forecast steps up, show what drives it and why it is deliverable. The common failure is a model that is internally inconsistent or cannot survive a sensitivity. That reads as a business that does not know its own numbers, and it costs you credibility you do not get back.

Five things, in roughly this order, and understanding them tells you where to spend your preparation. First and above everything, serviceability. Can the business generate enough cash to pay the interest and repay the debt on schedule, through a downside as well as the plan? A credit officer builds their own bad case and looks at how much headroom survives it. This is why cash conversion and the resilience of the forecast matter more than the headline growth rate. Second, the quality and durability of the earnings. Recurring, contracted or repeat revenue is worth far more to a lender than one-off or lumpy income, and add-backs to EBITDA get scrutinised hard, because the leverage multiple is applied to the number they believe, not the number you present. Concentration is part of this. A book where one customer is a third of revenue is a risk they will price or cap. Third, security and downside recovery. What can the lender take a charge over, and what would it recover if the business failed? A bank leans heavily on this; a cashflow fund leans less, but every lender wants to know its position if the plan does not hold. Fourth, management. Lenders back people as well as numbers. A team that knows its business, presents its figures credibly and has delivered before is a materially better credit than one that cannot defend its own forecast in a meeting, even with identical financials. Fifth, sector and structure fit. Every lender has an appetite, sectors it likes, leverage levels it will go to, deal shapes it understands, and a strong business in the wrong lender's box still gets a no. That last point is why a decline from one lender is rarely a verdict on the company. The practical lesson is that most of the work of getting a good answer is done before the process starts, in a forecast that survives a sensitivity, earnings you can defend line by line, and taking the deal to the lenders whose appetite actually fits it.

A virtual data room is the indexed online folder where lenders and their advisers find everything they need to diligence you. It holds three to five years of audited accounts and recent management accounts, the financial model, a current trading update with the order book or pipeline, material customer and supplier contracts, the cap table and existing debt documents, property leases, and the key litigation, insurance and pension detail. Set it up early, structure it by workstream, and keep it tidy. A disorganised data room signals a disorganised business and invites lenders to dig harder. Stage your disclosure so the most sensitive material, customer names and detailed pricing, comes out later once a lender is committed. Your adviser runs the index and controls who sees what, and when.

More than you expect, and the load falls on the CFO and the finance team. You provide the source data, the historical accounts, the management information, the contracts and the answers to a diligence list that runs to several hundred line items by the end. You sit in the lender meetings and present the business. You sign off the model assumptions and the IM, because it is your name on the numbers. Budget two to three days a week of the finance function over the live weeks, more around management presentations and the diligence push before close. A good adviser absorbs the heavy lifting, the drafting, the lender management and the process choreography. What cannot be delegated is the substance only you hold, knowing the business and defending the forecast in a room. Free up the CFO before you start.

Yes, in almost every case. A competitive process means you approach a controlled field of lenders in parallel rather than negotiating with one. Your adviser builds a target list matched to the deal, sends the IM under NDA, holds management meetings with the serious ones, then asks for written indicative terms by a set date. You compare the terms, take three or four lenders into a second round, and let the tension do the pricing work. Competition is what moves margin, fees, leverage and the covenant package in your favour. A lender that knows it is the only option has no reason to sharpen its pencil. A deadline also keeps everyone moving. The art is calibrating the field. Too few and you lose the tension, too many and you look like you are shopping the deal and lenders disengage. Eight to twelve approaches is usually the right shape.

A term sheet is an offer with conditions, not committed money. When a lender issues indicative terms, a deal team likes your business and believes it can get the deal through their credit process. It is not yet approved. The binding step is credit committee, where the deal team takes the transaction to the people who actually sanction the risk. Until that clears you have a strong indication, not a deal. This matters because a term sheet at a sharp price from a lender who then cannot deliver committee approval is worth nothing, and you have burned weeks. So we weigh the credibility of the lender and the deal team alongside the terms. Has this team delivered deals like yours before? Are the terms ones their committee will actually sign off, or priced keen to win the mandate and repriced later? The headline number is only as good as the institution behind it.

Credit committee is where a lender's senior risk people decide whether to commit the institution's capital. The deal team presents a credit paper covering the business, the numbers, the security and the downside, and the committee interrogates it. They are paid to find the reasons not to lend. Yes, deals fall over here, and it is the most painful place for it, because you are weeks in and may have stood down other lenders. Committees also move terms, tightening leverage, adding a covenant, repricing. You protect yourself by understanding each lender's credit appetite before you back them, running a process so a credible alternative stays alive until terms are firm, and making sure the deal team genuinely has the institution behind them. A team that has pre-socialised your deal with its committee is worth more than one promising the world on day one.

It scales with deal size and lender type, but expect financial, legal and sometimes commercial diligence. Financial due diligence, usually run by an accounting firm, tests your historical numbers, the quality of earnings, working capital and the forecast assumptions. This is the one that most often moves the deal, because adjustments to underlying earnings move the leverage multiple and therefore how much you can borrow. Legal diligence reviews the contracts, the security, title and any litigation. Larger or more specialised deals add commercial diligence on the market and your position, plus management background checks. You pay for the lender's diligence as well as your own advisers, and those costs are real. Prepare for FDD as if it were an audit. The earnings adjustments that surface there are the single biggest source of surprise between the term sheet you signed and the facility you actually get.

Once terms are agreed and diligence is running, the lawyers draft the facility agreement, the security documents and the conditions precedent. The facility agreement sets the covenants, the events of default, the margin ratchet and what you can and cannot do while the debt is outstanding. This is where real money is made or lost, well after the headline price is set. The points that stick are almost always the covenant definitions, particularly how EBITDA and net debt are defined, the permissions for further debt, acquisitions and distributions, and the cure rights if you trip a covenant. Then comes the conditions precedent list, the documents and approvals you must deliver before funds release. Close is the day the CPs are satisfied, the documents sign and the money moves. Keep your lawyer focused on the half-dozen terms that will bite in a downside, and do not bleed time on points that never matter.

Budget for several distinct costs and do not be surprised by the total. The lender charges an arrangement fee on the facility, which tracks the lender type. Bank deals sit nearer one percent, fund deals two to three percent of the amount drawn. On top comes a commitment fee on any undrawn portion. You pay your own legal fees and the lender's legal fees. You pay for diligence, the financial and, where required, the commercial and legal workstreams, often the largest single line after the arrangement fee. Your debt adviser charges a retainer and a success fee tied to closing. On a mid-market raise the all-in cost runs to a meaningful percentage of the facility once everything is counted. Two points are worth holding onto. The adviser fee is usually recovered several times over through better terms, because lower margin alone pays for it across the life of the loan. And get a clear cost estimate up front from every party, so there are no surprises at close.

Start from what the money is for and what it costs you to keep. Debt is cheaper and it is not dilutive. You pay interest, you keep every share, and once the facility is repaid the lender is gone and the upside is entirely yours. The price of that is fixed obligations. Interest and amortisation fall due whatever the business is doing, and the covenants hand a lender rights over the company if performance slips. Equity is the opposite. It never has to be repaid and it carries no covenant that can put you in default, but it is the most expensive capital you will ever raise, because you are selling a permanent share of every future pound the business earns, and it comes with a new owner at the table. The decision framework a finance director should run is fourfold. First, predictability of cash flow. Steady, contracted, recurring revenue services debt comfortably and argues for borrowing; lumpy, early-stage or binary cash flow does not, and equity absorbs the volatility that would trip a covenant. Second, the purpose. Funding a known asset with a measurable return, an acquisition, a fit-out, a fleet, suits debt, because you can match the repayment to the cash the asset throws off. Funding something speculative with no near-term cash, a long product build or a land grab for market share, is equity's job. Third, the existing balance sheet. If you are already carrying leverage, more debt compounds the fragility; if you are ungeared, there is capacity to use before you reach for equity. Fourth, cost and control. Debt on a lower-mid-market deal costs a single-digit margin over the reference rate; equity implicitly costs far more once you price the share of exit value you give away, and it dilutes both your economics and your control. The two are not mutually exclusive, and the best answer is often a blend, a sensible layer of debt topped by the equity needed to fund the part debt cannot reach, which keeps dilution to the minimum the plan actually requires. Where a business generates cash and the use of funds has a return, debt is usually the cheaper and cleaner tool, and taking equity you did not need is an expensive mistake you cannot undo. Where the cash flow cannot safely carry fixed repayments, borrowing is the wrong tool and forcing it on is how a good company is made fragile. We advise on the debt side only, so we will tell you honestly when the answer is equity, or partly equity, rather than sell you a facility the business should not carry.

They negotiate the margin and give away everything that matters. Price is the most visible term and the least important once a deal is performing. The terms that bite are the ones nobody focuses on at signing. Covenant headroom set too tight against an optimistic forecast. EBITDA defined narrowly so your add-backs don't count. Cash sweeps and excess-cashflow clauses that pull money out before you can reinvest it. Restrictions on acquisitions, capex and distributions that strangle the plan you borrowed to fund. The other recurring error is running a process with one lender. Competitive tension is the single biggest lever you have, and it evaporates the moment a lender knows they are the only horse. Run two or three to credit-approved term sheets in parallel. The third mistake is leaving documentation to the lawyers without a commercial brief, so the long-form agreement quietly tightens what the term sheet agreed.

Look past the headline margin to the all-in cost. The margin is the annual rate over the reference rate, now SONIA. On top sits the arrangement fee, paid on day one and scaled to the lender, nearer 1% on a bank deal and 2 to 3% on a fund deal, and on fund deals often an OID, where you draw 98 and repay 100. There is a commitment fee on any undrawn amount, usually around a third of the margin. A margin ratchet then flexes the rate up or down with leverage, so deleveraging earns you a lower rate. Add it together. A unitranche quoted at SONIA plus 6.5% with a 3% fee and 1% OID costs noticeably more than the 6.5% suggests over a three-year hold. Ask every lender for an all-in cost to expected exit on the same assumptions, and compare those. The cheapest margin is frequently not the cheapest deal.

It turns on the lender and the quality of the earnings. Clearing banks on senior cashflow terms typically lend 2.5x to 3.5x EBITDA to a decent lower-mid-market business. Unitranche funds will stretch to 4x to 4.5x, occasionally 5x for a strong sponsor-backed credit with recurring revenue. Above that you are into structures with a junior layer. Two things move the number more than people expect. First, how clean the EBITDA is. Add-backs for one-off costs, run-rate synergies and pro-forma adjustments get heavily scrutinised, and an aggressive adjusted figure will be marked down. Second, cash conversion. A business that turns 90% of EBITDA into cash supports more debt than one swallowed by capex and working capital, even at the same multiple. Sponsors push leverage to the limit. Owner-managers should borrow well inside it.

It depends on the lender. Bank senior deals carry maintenance covenants tested quarterly, typically leverage and interest cover, sometimes cashflow cover and a capex limit. Unitranche funds often run leaner, a single leverage covenant, or a covenant-loose package that only springs when you draw the revolver. Push on three things. Headroom first. You want at least 25 to 30% against your base-case forecast, so an ordinary bad quarter does not trip a default. Definitions second. How EBITDA is defined for the covenant, what add-backs are permitted, and whether you can cure a breach with an equity injection. Frequency third. Quarterly testing on trailing twelve months is standard, so resist anything more frequent. The covenant package matters more than half a point on the margin. A tight covenant with thin headroom hands the lender control the first time you have a soft period, which is when control is worth most to them.

Unitranche is a single facility from a non-bank fund that blends what used to be senior and junior debt into one tranche at one margin. You sign one document, deal with one lender, and draw down once. The appeal is speed, certainty and stretch. A direct-lending fund can give you a deliverable answer in weeks, hold the whole ticket itself, and lend a turn or more of leverage above what a bank will offer. You pay for that. Margins run materially above bank senior, and there is usually call protection in the early years if you want to repay. For a sponsor on a deal timetable, or a business a bank finds hard to underwrite, the premium buys execution and flexibility. For a steady business that fits a bank's box comfortably, it is money spent for no reason.

Both give you a flexible line to draw and repay as you need it, but they sit in different worlds and one is far more reliable than the other. An overdraft is uncommitted. The bank can review it, reduce it or pull it, usually on demand or at a short notice period, and it typically renews annually. It is cheap and simple, useful for small day-to-day swings in working capital, but it is not money you can plan a business around, because it can be withdrawn at exactly the moment you need it. A revolving credit facility is committed. The lender contracts to make the line available for the whole term, commonly three to five years, and cannot withdraw it unless you breach the agreement. You draw and repay in tranches over that period, pay a margin over the reference rate on what you have drawn, and a commitment fee on what you have not, usually around a third of the margin. There is normally a clean-down requirement, a short window each year when the RCF must sit at or near zero, to prove it is funding genuine working-capital swings rather than a permanent hole in the balance sheet. The trade-off is straightforward. The overdraft is cheaper and lighter but revocable; the RCF costs a little more for the undrawn commitment and comes with covenants, but it is certain, and certainty is what lets you run the business on it. For a company of any scale, the committed RCF is usually the right core working-capital tool, often sitting alongside a term loan in the same facility agreement, with the overdraft kept only for the smallest, most transient movements.

Sometimes freely, sometimes at a real price, and the difference is set entirely by the facility you sign, so it is worth negotiating before you commit rather than discovering it when you want to exit. On most bank facilities you can prepay without penalty. A term loan usually lets you repay early at par, and an RCF you can pay down and redraw as you like within the term, which is one of its advantages. Fund debt is different. A unitranche or other direct-lending facility typically carries call protection in the early years, because the fund has priced its return over an expected hold and does not want you refinancing away the moment cheaper money appears. That protection takes a few common shapes. A non-call period during which you cannot prepay at all, often the first year or two. A prepayment premium that steps down over time, for instance three percent in year one, two in year two, one in year three, then par. Occasionally a make-whole, which compensates the lender for the interest it would have earned over the protected period and can be expensive. On a floating-rate deal there is no interest-rate break cost on the loan itself, but if you have hedged with a swap you may face a break cost on unwinding the swap, which moves with rates and can be material. The practical points are three. Ask every lender for its prepayment terms in writing and compare them alongside the margin, because a keen rate with heavy call protection can be the dearer deal if you expect to exit early, on a sale or a refinancing. Push for the call protection to fall away sooner, or for a carve-out that lets you prepay at par on a change of control. And match your hedging to the debt you are confident you will carry, so you are not paying to break a swap on debt you always meant to repay.

A club deal is a small group of lenders, usually two to four, who each take a meaningful hold and sit alongside you directly. They underwrite their own tickets, agree the terms together, and you deal with all of them. A syndication is led by one or more banks who underwrite the whole amount and then sell down to a wider group after close, often investors you never meet. For most lower-mid-market borrowers the club is the better fit. You keep a direct line to every lender, decisions in a workout or an amendment are made by people who know the business, and there is no risk of your paper landing with a distressed-debt buyer. Syndication makes sense once a facility is large enough that no single lender wants the whole exposure, broadly north of £75m. Below that, a club gives you tighter relationships and usually quicker answers.

ABL lends against your assets rather than your earnings. The facility sizes off a borrowing base, typically 80 to 90% of eligible receivables and a percentage of inventory, plant and property, and it flexes up and down as those assets move. A cashflow term loan lends a multiple of EBITDA and amortises on a fixed schedule. The trade-offs are real. ABL usually prices cheaper than cashflow leverage and gives you more availability if you carry a strong, well-spread debtor book. The cost is operational. You report the borrowing base monthly, the lender audits your collateral, and concentrations, overdue debtors and slow stock get disqualified from the base. For asset-rich, earnings-thin businesses, the distributors, manufacturers and recruiters, ABL frees up more funding than a cashflow lender ever would. For an asset-light services business there is little to lend against and it will not fit.

On a sponsor-backed leveraged deal, no. Lenders take security over the company and its shares and look to the business for repayment, not your house. On owner-managed lending it is different. Clearing banks routinely ask for a personal guarantee, and on smaller facilities they often want it supported by a charge over property. You have more room to push back than most owners realise. Cap the guarantee at a fixed sum rather than leaving it unlimited. Carve out the family home. Ask for the PG to fall away once leverage drops below an agreed level or after a clean trading period. And get the bank's forbearance position on any state-backed scheme confirmed in writing, because a government guarantee to the lender does not remove your personal exposure. Negotiate this before you sign the term sheet. After credit approval your leverage is gone.

When you have reached the ceiling of what senior or unitranche will lend and you would rather add debt than dilute equity. Junior debt sits behind the senior lender, gets repaid after them, and is priced for that risk. Mezzanine typically runs in the low to mid teens all-in, often part cash-pay and part PIK, where PIK interest rolls up into the balance instead of being paid in cash. The attraction is that it preserves equity and the rolled interest keeps cash in the business. The danger is compounding. PIK at 12% rolling up unpaid grows the balance by roughly 57% over four years and nearly doubles it over six, so a slow exit can quietly consume a large share of equity value. Junior debt earns its place in two situations. A sponsor optimising returns who is comfortable with the leverage, or a shareholder buying out a partner who wants to avoid bringing in outside equity. For an ordinary trading business it is usually a sign you are borrowing too much.

A cashflow lender takes a debenture, a fixed and floating charge over the whole company, plus a charge over the shares of the borrowing group and often key trading subsidiaries. In a group there will be cross-guarantees between companies and a charge over material assets like property or IP. Where there is more than one lender, an intercreditor agreement sets the ranking, so the senior lender is repaid before the junior in any enforcement. If you breach a covenant or miss a payment, the security does not trigger automatically. It gives the lender the right to act. In practice a first breach leads to a waiver or an amendment, usually for a fee and tighter terms. Security only bites if the relationship breaks down, at which point the share charge lets the lender take the equity and the floating charge lets them appoint an administrator. The earlier you talk to the lender, the further that outcome stays away.

It is the agreement that sets the ranking between everyone with a claim on the business, and yes, it matters, because it governs what you can pay and to whom while the debt is outstanding. Where a deal has more than one layer, senior debt, junior or mezzanine, vendor loan notes, shareholder loans, the intercreditor, or a simpler deed of priority, fixes who is repaid first, whose security bites first, and what the junior parties can do if things go wrong. Junior lenders typically accept a standstill, a period in which they cannot enforce while the senior lender decides what to do, and payments on junior instruments are blocked or limited to a permitted schedule that switches off on a default. The borrower is not a bystander here. The permitted-payments schedule decides whether the vendor's loan notes and your shareholder loans can be serviced, and on what conditions, so agree those terms at term-sheet stage, while you still have competitive tension, rather than in documentation, when the lawyers are negotiating what has already been conceded.

Usually yes, but on the lender's terms, not yours. A lender sizing debt against the business treats money owed to shareholders as quasi-equity rather than as a competing debt claim, and it documents that treatment. The shareholder loans are subordinated, by a subordination deed or within the intercreditor, so nothing is repaid while the senior facility is outstanding, and any interest either accrues or is paid only through a permitted-payments basket that switches off if a covenant is breached or a default is live. Handled properly this is rarely a problem, and it can help the credit case, because subordinated shareholder money sits underneath the lender as additional cushion and signals the owners' commitment. What catches borrowers out is asking after the event. If you expect to draw interest or repay a tranche of shareholder debt during the life of the facility, negotiate the basket up front, because the default position in most documents is a hard block, and unwinding one mid-term is an amendment the lender can price.

Almost all leveraged and mid-market debt is floating, priced over SONIA, so your interest cost moves with base rates. Lenders frequently require you to hedge a portion, commonly 50 to 75% of the drawn term debt, for two to three years. You do that with an interest rate cap or a swap. A cap sets a ceiling on SONIA for an upfront premium and lets you benefit if rates fall, which suits most borrowers. A swap fixes the rate outright, cheaper in carry but you are locked in and pay a break cost to exit early. The curve is close to flat to mildly upward-sloping and the Bank has paused its cutting cycle, so there is no cheap fix on offer and no strong steer either way. A cap keeps your downside protected without locking you in, which is why it is the sensible default for most. Don't over-hedge. Hedge the senior amortising debt you are confident you will carry, leave the revolver and any debt you expect to repay early unhedged, and check the break costs before you sign anything with a fixed leg.

We work with profitable, established businesses raising roughly £3–15m of debt, though that range is a guide rather than a gate. There is no hard minimum turnover or EBITDA. What matters more is that the business is fundable. A company with predictable cash flows, a sensible balance sheet and a clear use of proceeds is a good fit, whether it turns over £8m or £80m. We see owner-managed trading companies, sponsor-backed portfolio businesses, and family-held groups planning a refinancing or an acquisition. If you are smaller than the typical lower-mid-market borrower but the situation is interesting and the capital need is real, talk to us anyway. We would rather tell you honestly that a deal is too small for us to add value than take a fee for work you could settle directly with your bank.

Send us a note or call, and we will have an exploratory conversation at no cost and with no obligation. Most first discussions are a single call where you tell us what you are trying to do and we give you an honest read on what the market is likely to offer. If it would help, sign a short NDA and let us see your last set of accounts and current management figures, and we will come back with a more specific view. What kind of structure fits, roughly what it should cost, and whether a process is worth running at all. Nothing is committed until you sign an engagement letter, and we will not send one until you have seen enough to know it is worthwhile. If the answer is that you should stay with your bank, we will tell you that too.

It starts with a conversation and a look at your numbers, usually three years of accounts, current management figures and a sense of what you are trying to do. From there we tell you what the debt markets will realistically offer, which is often more, or differently structured, than your bank has suggested. If you appoint us, we prepare the materials lenders need, build a shortlist, and run a competitive process so you see real terms from several parties side by side. We negotiate the commercial points, the margin, the leverage, the covenants and the fees, and we manage diligence and documentation through to drawdown. You stay in control of every decision. We do the heavy lifting and the chasing. A clean raise runs twelve to sixteen weeks from mandate to money, depending on complexity and how ready your information is.

We are paid mainly on success, a fee on completion that is a percentage of the facilities raised, sometimes with a modest retainer credited against it. We set out the numbers in the engagement letter before you commit. On whether the bank is free, it is not. The bank's pricing already carries the cost of selling you its own product, and a single bilateral conversation rarely produces the keenest terms, because there is no competitive tension. Across a typical mid-market raise, the margin and fee improvement from running a proper process usually covers our fee several times over, before you count the value of better structure and looser covenants. If we did not expect to more than pay for ourselves, we would say so and send you back to your bank.

Our fee comes from the client we act for. We do not lend, and no lender pays us anything that is not disclosed to you in the engagement letter first — on most mandates, nothing at all. That removes the conflict that sits inside much of the advice in this market. A bank that arranges your debt is selling its own balance sheet. A broker paid an undisclosed commission by the lender has a reason to steer you towards whoever pays the best introducer fee. We have neither. Because we run a competitive process across the whole market, banks, debt funds and asset-based lenders, we have no incentive to favour one over another. The only way we win the next mandate is by getting you a better outcome on this one. We disclose any prior relationship with a lender on your shortlist before you see it, so you can weigh it yourself.

Tightly, and by design. Before anything sensitive changes hands we sign a confidentiality undertaking with you, and every lender we approach signs an NDA before they see your numbers. We control the flow. Lenders receive information in stages, so a name on a long list sees far less than a party in final diligence. We run the process so your competitors, your customers and your staff hear nothing until you choose to tell them. Where a situation is delicate, an early refinancing, a shareholder change, a stressed balance sheet, we can approach the market on a no-names basis first and reveal identity only once a lender is seriously engaged. Information sits on access-controlled systems, not in inboxes. The point of using an adviser is that the market learns what you want it to learn, when you want it to, and not before.

We disclose it before you see the shortlist. We know most of the active mid-market lenders, so prior contact is normal and useful, because it means we know their credit appetite and their decision-makers. The line we hold is simple. Nothing reaches us from a lender that is not disclosed to you first, and on most mandates nothing does, so a relationship gives us no financial reason to favour anyone. Where we know a particular fund especially well, we tell you, and we still run a full competitive process. You are free to strike any lender off the list for your own reasons. The value of our relationships is access and speed, getting your situation in front of the right credit committee quickly. It is never a reason to push you towards a worse deal.

We are generalist across most of the trading economy. Business services, manufacturing, healthcare, consumer brands, software and tech-enabled businesses, distribution, and asset-backed sectors like logistics all fit comfortably. The common thread is a fundable cash flow or a fundable asset base. We are more cautious on early-stage businesses with no profits, pure development real estate, and a handful of sectors where the lender pool is thin and specialised, project finance for large infrastructure being one, where a dedicated house serves you better. We also steer clear of sectors that mainstream lenders avoid for reputational reasons, because the available capital is too narrow to run a competitive process. If your sector sits outside our sweet spot we will say so quickly and, where we can, point you to someone who does it properly.

Plain commercial corporate debt advice sits outside the FCA perimeter. Advising a company on a term loan, a revolving facility or a unitranche to fund growth or an acquisition is not a regulated activity, so it does not require FCA authorisation. The relationship is governed by an engagement letter, by confidentiality undertakings, and by professional indemnity insurance, the same contractual framework the corporate finance houses use. Regulation bites in specific places. Arranging certain regulated mortgages, consumer credit, or anything touching retail borrowers is a different matter, and authorised firms handle it. Advising on the issue of certain securities can also engage the perimeter. For the corporate borrowing we do, mid-market companies raising senior or junior debt, no FCA authorisation is needed. If a mandate ever strayed into regulated territory we would tell you and bring in an authorised party.

Our focus is UK-headquartered companies borrowing in sterling, which is where the lower-mid-market is deepest, and we act UK-wide. The lender universe, though, is international now. A London-based unitranche fund, a German Mittelstand lender and a Nordic bank might all sit on the same shortlist, and a proper process reaches them. A UK company with European operations, a cross-border group structure, or an appetite for continental debt funds and euro-denominated facilities fits comfortably within that. Where a deal needs local legal or tax input in another jurisdiction we bring in counsel we trust rather than pretend to cover it ourselves. What we do not do is private placements into US institutions or large syndicated paper. That is a different market with different houses.