Industry routing is half the work.
Two businesses with similar revenue can get wildly different lender responses based on industry alone. A trucking company gets a yes from one lender and a no from another for the same numbers, because lenders bake industry risk directly into their underwriting.
That’s why we maintain industry coverage as part of the file-routing process. We know which lenders are funding restaurants this quarter, which ones have closed the door on cannabis, which ones love medical practices, which ones are wary of seasonal landscapers. Twelve industry pages are below, each with a sense of the funding patterns we see and the structures we typically recommend.
The list isn’t exhaustive — we work with businesses outside these categories regularly. The pages exist because these are the verticals where we see enough deal flow to publish a useful point of view. If your business doesn’t map cleanly to one of these, the application form has an "industry" field you can fill in directly.
Why financing needs differ by industry
Almost every business borrows for the same underlying reason: money goes out before it comes back in. What changes by industry is the shape of that gap.
A trucking company waits 30 to 45 days for a broker to pay a load it already delivered. A retailer buys holiday inventory in July and sells it in December. A restaurant spends nothing waiting to get paid — the card settles in two days — but earns half its year in four months. A contractor covers payroll and materials for weeks before the first draw. Each of those is a different problem, and each has a structure built for it. Factoring solves the trucking gap. A line of credit solves the retail gap. A term loan handles a build-out with a fixed price and a finish date.
The asset base matters just as much. A manufacturer with a paid-off machine has collateral a lender can value and resell, which usually means a longer term and a lower rate. A consulting firm has none of that, so the lender underwrites the owner instead. Two businesses with identical revenue can end up with very different offers for that reason alone.
Why lender fit varies
Every lender has an internal list of industries it likes, tolerates, and avoids. Those lists move. A lender that funded a category aggressively last year may have taken losses and pulled back this year. Some lenders build real expertise in a vertical — healthcare, industrial equipment, freight — and price it accordingly, because they know what the collateral is worth and what the cash flow actually does. Send the same file to a generalist and it either gets declined or priced as if it were riskier than it is.
Our job is knowing which door to knock on. That saves you from collecting a stack of declines that damage nothing on paper but cost weeks you may not have.