Most Owners Are Asking the Wrong Question About Business Financing

Jared Feldman is CEO and Co-Founder of Fora Financial, which has deployed more than $5 billion to over 55,000 small businesses across the United States over the past 18 years.

Most business owners approach financing with a single question in mind: whether or not they qualify. But it’s the wrong question, as it puts the entire burden of fit on the business, when it belongs on the lender that built the product in the first place.

The better question is whether the product in front of them was built for a business like theirs. One spends years trying to reshape their company to fit criteria it was never going to fit. The other spends an afternoon finding a lender who already understood what a business like theirs looks like.

After 18 years and more than 55,000 businesses funded, I’ve watched far too many owners exhaust themselves trying to fit molds that were never designed with them in mind. The more direct path was simply to find the lender that had already built the right product for them.

What financing products are built around

A few years ago, a specialty equipment manufacturer outside Cleveland came to us three weeks after landing a $2.3 million purchase order, the kind of contract that would let it add a second shift and nearly double its output within the year. The company had four years of operating history, several million dollars in annual revenue, and thirty people on the floor. Its bank still turned it down.

It leased its facility rather than owning it. A growth curve that had only turned steep in the last two quarters looked erratic next to the three years of consistent tax history the bank wanted to see. A business at the best moment of its life looked, on paper, exactly like the risk a bank is trained to avoid.

None of that is unusual. Every lending product on the market is designed around a specific kind of borrower, and traditional bank financing has always been built around companies with long operating histories, hard assets, and cash flow patterns stable enough to model years in advance. That’s a rational, coherent product for the borrower it was designed to serve.

The trouble is that a large share of the businesses driving the American economy don’t fit that description, and structurally, they never will. A regional contracting firm on pace to double its revenue this year hasn’t been at that revenue level long enough to satisfy a model built around consistency, no matter how many crews it has running. A multi-location service business that just landed the largest client of its history looks unpredictable on paper even if it’s executing perfectly. An established company generating several million dollars a year without real estate collateral has no hard assets to offer, regardless of how many people are on its payroll.

This is a far larger population than most people assume. Small businesses employ 62.3 million people in the United States, nearly half of the private workforce, according to the SBA. The Federal Reserve’s 2026 Small Business Credit Survey found that 22% of financing applicants were approved for nothing whatsoever, not a reduced amount, a flat decline. The businesses landing on the wrong side of a bank’s underwriting model make up a defining share of the American economy.

The second question

Finding a lender built for a business like yours answers the first question. It doesn’t answer the second: will the money reach the business in time to take advantage of the opportunity at hand?

A growing business that can’t get capital at the right moment doesn’t simply stay the same size. It shrinks relative to what it could have become. The second shift doesn’t get added, the equipment stays on a vendor’s floor instead of the shop floor, and the contract goes to a competitor who happened to already have the cash on hand. None of that shows up anywhere as a loss. It’s simply a business that stayed smaller than it deserved to be.

Ask a 20-year-old company with a fully collateralized balance sheet to wait six weeks for a decision, and it can typically absorb it. The businesses I see generally can’t wait, because the value of the capital is tied directly to how quickly it shows up. Speed only matters because of what’s on the other side of it.

At an inflection point, with a contract to staff or a hire to make, a business needs capital that moves as fast as the opportunity itself, not weeks behind it. A decision that arrives three weeks after that window has closed amounts to a consolation prize for a fight that’s already over.

Getting both halves right

Current revenue trajectory, recent bank activity, and time in business tell a far more accurate story about where a growing business stands than three-year-old tax returns ever could. That’s one half of getting this right. The other half is speed, and it’s the half most lenders treat as an afterthought.

Managing a team, serving customers, and executing a growth plan doesn’t leave a business owner weeks to spend assembling paperwork, and every week spent on an application is a week not spent running the business they’re trying to grow. Applying in minutes and getting a decision the same day matters only for what that speed makes possible, not because speed is impressive on its own.

That’s why the manufacturer outside Cleveland had capital in its account within 24 hours of applying, not because we took on more risk, but because we asked different questions than its bank had. Within a month it had its second shift running and that purchase order filled. That’s what asking the right question gets you: a business that gets to become what it was already capable of becoming.

The next move

If you’re running a business that’s generating revenue, has been operating for at least six months, and has a specific use for working capital, that search comes down to two things: a lender that built its product for a business like yours, and one that can prove it can move fast enough to matter.

The owners who go on to build something significant rarely wait for that search to find them. They go looking for it, ask sharper questions of every lender they consider, and move quickly once they find one whose timeline matches their own.

Do that before the next opportunity shows up, not after. Waiting for the ideal moment usually means financing what already happened, not what’s next.

Fora Financial has deployed more than $5 billion to over 55,000 small businesses across the United States. If you’re ready to have the conversation, apply in minutes with no hard credit pull. Decisions in as little as 4 hours. Funding in as soon as 24 hours. See what you qualify for at forafinancial.com.