Before You Borrow

You've been told that the only way to save your business or scale it to greater heights is to borrow. They often said "Every functional business had to seek financing at some point" but you are still skeptical. You barely understand the mathematics of private capital, debt, equity, risk, and all the financial jargons... and it has held you back from making any decisions. You also have very limited information on which other businesses like yours, actually sought private loans and funding. There are no data to work with, no statistics, no substantial information that you can use to compare other people's past experiences with private funding, in order to determine if it would be a good choice for you. There's also a ton of financial, legal, and accounting terms that seem too complex for you to understand. This problem is exactly what this book solves, and even more.
Before You Borrow is not a textbook...its way better! It's a working manual for what actually happens after a business says yes to someone else's money. It is built entirely around one relentless idea: getting financing is not the same thing as being financed productively, and the difference is in the numbers.
Across its chapters, this book follows real decisions; a $100,000 loan tracked from the moment it hits the bank account to the day it's paid off, three competing $500,000 offers stripped down to their true cost, a merchant cash advance's "1.35 factor rate" converted into the brutal annualized number nobody tells you at signing. You'll watch a profitable company breach a loan covenant it never saw coming. You'll watch financing quietly rewrite a company's hiring, pricing, and inventory decisions until debt is running the business. And you'll watch the same $180,000 CNC machine be a brilliant decision in one chapter and a costly mistake in another, with every number on the loan document identical.
Whether you're financing your first $50,000 of working capital or building a $50 million capital stack, this book gives you the same tools a lender's own credit committee uses: DSCR, break-even math, stress testing, covenant anatomy, the real all-in cost behind any advertised rate...all translated into plain English and applied to numbers you can actually check.
Inside, you'll learn how to:

• Calculate the true cost of any financing offer, not the advertised rate, but every fee, covenant, and dilution point hiding behind it
• Tell the difference between a business that needs a bridge and a business that's borrowing to cover a sinking ship
• Read a loan contract the way the lender's own attorney does, assessing collateral, guarantees, covenants, default triggers, and the clauses buried in the fine print
• Size a loan request correctly, instead of either underfunding a real need or borrowing far more than the business actually requires
• Stress-test any financing decision against a revenue decline, a lost customer, or a delayed payment, before you sign, not after
• Negotiate the terms that actually matter, and recognize the ones that almost never do
• Walk into a lender's office and see exactly what they see: the five Cs, the credit memo, the real reasons loans get declined