Q: I work in a senior management position for a company whose owners are behind the times and many employees dislike them. One example as to why the negative attitude is they are anti-technology and we are not allowed to use it. This impediment creates inefficiencies and employees believe it is much harder to do their jobs. I will need a large loan because the company has a warehouse, must meet many government compliance requirements, and I do not have the money myself. Can you advise me on how to go about getting the loan?
A: You did not ask this, but I will say it anyway. Before you walk away and start a rival business. Ask the owners if they would consider selling you the business. If you leave you would be borrowing money to compete against an operation you already know cold, with none of its customers, staff, or compliance history. That is the rocky road. You are driving on the paved road right now.
Buy the company you already run.
You know where the compliance risk actually lives, not where a due diligence checklist guesses it might. You know the warehouse, the staff, the vendors, and the customers. None of that has to be rebuilt or discovered during underwriting, because you already discovered it on the job. A lender treats that as reduced risk, and reduced risk is what gets loans approved.
You also have something no outside buyer has: standing. The employees you mentioned already dislike the current owners. They do not have to be won over to a stranger. They already work for you.
Owners who resist AI and modern tools while running a compliance-heavy warehouse operation may frequently be owners nearing the end of their interest in running it at all. That resistance to change is often fatigue, not philosophy. Approach them as a buyer, not a critic, and ask directly whether they have thought about an exit.
If they have, this is where going straight to the owners works better than a stranger’s financing ever could. Seller financing is common in exactly this situation. Worth knowing for context: recent SBA guideline changes let a seller’s standby note count toward a buyer’s required equity injection, which is part of why seller-carried deals have become easier to arrange even when a bank is involved. But the cleaner path, and the one that fits your situation, skips the bank altogether. The owners finance the sale themselves, buyer and seller, nobody else in the room.
The owners get a structured, taxed-over-time payout instead of a single buyer search. You get a transaction where the seller is financially motivated to see you succeed, because your payments to them depend on it. These transactions are very common. Check out what bizbuysell.com has to say.
Here is how that works without a lender involved. You and the owners agree on a price, then put it in a promissory note: an interest rate, a monthly payment, and a term, often five to ten years for a business this size. The warehouse and the business assets stand as collateral on the note, the same protection a bank would insist on, except now the owners hold it directly. There is no underwriting timeline, no guarantee fee, no SBA application. The down payment is whatever the owners are willing to accept, which for someone they already trust running the business can be far less than the 10 percent a bank would require as a floor. Closing moves at the pace the two of you agree to, not a lender’s calendar.
You are not looking for a loan to fund a new business. You are looking for terms on the one you already know.
