Love at First Loan How Jack Smith bootstrapped Love Finance from zero to £200m in SME lending—proving that speed, scrappiness, and a bit of beauty can disrupt even the most traditional industries.
By Entrepreneur UK Staff Edited by Patricia Cullen
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Jack Smith is CEO and founder of Love Finance, a leading UK business lender and broker, dedicated to simplifying SME finance. With a mission to make business lending simple, fast, and beautiful, Love Finance has helped over 5,000 SMEs secure funding, facilitating more than £200m in loans to support UK businesses.
33 year old, Jack founded Love Finance in 2016. With a background in finance and a passion for supporting SMEs, he's driven Love Finance's growth into a leading SME lender, always innovating to improve the lending process. Entrepreneur UK finds out more:
What were the biggest challenges you faced when starting your business, and how did you overcome them?
Cash. 100%. I didn't take on any VC money; I bootstrapped everything. There were times I had to borrow money from my girlfriend just to cover expenses. It forces you to get scrappy and resourceful you teach yourself things because you can't afford to hire experts. I learned digital marketing from YouTube, set up systems myself, even figured out accounting basics. Honestly, not having loads of cash early on was a blessing it made me ruthless about spending and taught me how to build lean.
Related: Serve, Solve, Shine
How did you identify and seize opportunities in the early stages of your start-up?
I just looked at what was broken. Traditional lenders made SMEs jump through hoops to borrow money, weeks of paperwork, no transparency, no real urgency to help small businesses move quickly. I thought lending doesn't need to be that captious. So, we stripped it right back. Built a platform that made the journey fast, simple, and actually beautiful. And because we kept testing, learning, and tweaking the experience early on, we grew faster than we ever planned.
What do you wish you had known about the UK start-up ecosystem before you began?
I wish I'd known just how much resilience you need not just at the start, but every single year. The world moves fast, but the rules and policies seem to change even faster. One minute the economy's booming, the next there's new regulation, tax changes or some geopolitical event. You can't sit back you've got to stay sharp, adapt, and keep moving no matter what. It's like sailing in a storm you don't wait for calm seas, you just get better at reading the waves and adjusting your course. If anything, the tough bits build you.
Looking back, what's the one piece of advice you'd give to founders just starting out in the UK's start-up scene?
Back yourself and build for the customer, not the system. UK is a brilliant place to start a business, but it's not always built for speed. Policies, grants, incentives they can help, but you can't rely on them to drive your success. Focus on solving a real problem, move quickly, and stay close to your customers. If you get that right, you won't just survive the early stages, you'll create something resilient, scalable, and exciting. And if there's one thing I've learned: ambition compounds. Think big from day one, because the opportunities here and globally are huge for the ones who do.
Related: What Happens When You Bootstrap a Business from Scratch?
