GREAT EXPECTATIONS

There is NO ONE who can guarantee with any certainty they will be able to attain any certain dollar amount of credit for you in a specific time frame.

No matter what they promise on their websites or in their promotions, no one can guarantee your company will get credit, or pinpoint the time it will take to achieve funding, or the dollar amount their work will get for you, or whether they will even be able to start the process for your company at all. The best possible precursor to approvals is the exchange of accurate information.

If a company is promising you the sun and the moon, you need to come down from those lofty expectations and put your feet back onto a solid path again.

While it is okay to dream of those high dollar approvals, but, in reality, you could take the exact same application to 15 different banks or credit cards and get 15 different approval amounts. Reality is … the directors of every bank, every credit card company, financing organization, creditor, and lender have set their own criteria, specific to their own companies, specific to their lending practices, specific to what their own independent underwriters will allow. While a call to an agent may be necessary to raise a low approval amount or reverse a misinformed denial, computers do most of the creative thinking for lenders in today’s market.

Most creditors, but certainly not all, rely on a service D&B provides that allows them to preset their criteria for approvals and denials simply by filling in the blanks on a form. They define their criteria based upon computerized algorithm technology. This allows lenders to process thousands of applications in the time it normally would have taken a human to make a decision on just one.

For instance:

Lender "A" may approve someone who has a Paydex score that is above 75, but only if their Supplier Evaluation Risk rating is below a 6 and Financial Stress Score is lower than a 3, but not at all if their personal FICO is lower than 680. Lender "B" may deny the application altogether if all those numbers are at those same levels, but your company does not have a full D&B rating (meaning that your file is missing information).

Even the most skilled credit coaching company is not going to be able to guarantee sight unseen with absolute certainty which lender will approve and for what amount because they simply do not know what unforeseen factors may impact those algorithms. There are too many factors that come into play and each is going to vary according to each lender. When you consider that there are 75 different factors associated to five D&B risk ratings, and each factor is gauged against other variables that are directly associated to another variable, it's no wonder computers do the heavy lifting these days.

And it is also no wonder so many people can be easily convinced by the wolves in the marketplace who say they can definitively get you $30,000 or $75,000 or $150,000 in credit, and can do so in 30 days, or 60 days, or 6 months. Read the small print in your contract and you will usually find their seemingly innocent disclaimers written in.

So how much business credit can you realistically expect?

Reputable companies will tell you right off the launch pad that they cannot and will not guarantee a specific dollar amount of credit in a specified time frame. They will tell you that your credit approvals will be based upon the scores and ratings found in your D&B report, and those scores and ratings are derived from information D&B gathers from a multitude of sources.

A reputable company will tell you that your business Experian and Equifax reports may show positive payment history that your D&B report does not, and that you can oftentimes get that positive information placed into your D&B credit profile with little or no expense of your own. Truth be told, a reputable credit coach will tell you the best way to pinpoint approvals is to look at your overall Composite Credit Appraisal (and they need to actually know what that is and how it is derived).

So if you want the sun and the moon and have lots of time, money, and blind faith, the wolves are waiting for you out there.

But if what you want is an immediate improvement to your D&B report and a steady improvement in your business credit profile that will stand the test of time, as well as provide you with the credit you need for growth or investment, then you need focus on the factors that truly impact your credit approvals and not on empty promises.

LESSON: No company can promise any approvals or guaranteed dollar amounts by talking to you over the phone or submitting an online form. There are too many factors that influence corporate credit for anyone to be able to make those promises out of the clear blue sky and without precise data. They need to review where both your business and personal credit capacity is at that very moment.

CLICK HERE to schedule a free one-on-one business credit consultation.