What placing your own debt actually costs you.
Not in fees. In your hours — the ones you were going to spend running the company. Put your own number in and see it.
Against 2,200 working hours — about $114 an hour.
in your own time — 156 to 260 hours, spread across two to three months you were supposed to spend running the business.
- Work out which lenders even do your dealProduct, check size, sector, geography and credit box. Most owners call five they've heard of.20–40 hrs$2K – $5K
- Assemble and normalize the packageReturns, YTD financials, debt schedule, agings, PFS — then add-backs and owner comp normalized so coverage reads correctly.25–40 hrs$3K – $5K
- Complete each lender's own applicationEvery funder has its own forms and its own intake. None of them accept another's.18–30 hrs$2K – $3K
- Field follow-up document requestsEach lender asks for something different, on its own timeline, usually twice.30–50 hrs$3K – $6K
- Compare offers that aren't comparableA factor rate, a monthly rate and an APR are three different units. Converting them is the only way to know which is cheapest.8–15 hrs$909 – $2K
- Negotiate termsRate, term, covenants, guarantees, prepayment. Most owners accept the first structure offered.15–25 hrs$2K – $3K
- Chase it for 60–90 daysThe part nobody budgets for. Following up is most of the work.40–60 hrs$5K – $7K
Estimates for a $500K–$5M raise taken to several lenders. They assume you already know what you are doing — first-timers take longer.
We do that job.
Finish the package
BRUNO reads what you upload, reconciles it against your intake and tells you exactly what is still missing — in plain English, as the file changes.
Underwrite before outreach
We run coverage, global cash flow, collateral and program eligibility before anyone sees it, so you know where the file stands before the market forms an opinion.
Build the deal materials
Normalized financials, an underwriting memo and an investment-banking-style teaser — one coherent story instead of a forwarded folder.
Screen 1,500+ lenders
The full book is filtered by credit box, check size, sector and geography, then narrowed to the strongest matches for your approval.
Run the process continuously
Approved submissions go out, opens are tracked, questions are chased and timelines keep moving. A commercial credit analyst handles the judgment and negotiation, with Carmine overseeing the desk.
Convert the offers to one unit
Factor rates, monthly rates and APRs all put on one yearly rate, so cheapest actually means cheapest.
The first yes is the start of the negotiation.
The point of a process is leverage. Ours is built so a lender has to price your numbers before it learns whose numbers they are, while you keep control over the document and every lender that receives it.
- 01
Upload what you have
Start with the documents already on your computer: two years of business returns, YTD financials, a current debt schedule and an A/R aging if receivables matter. You do not need to know whether the package is complete before you begin.
- 02
Know exactly what is missing
BRUNO reads the documents, reconciles them against your intake and gives you a live, plain-English checklist. No email ping-pong. No guessing what a lender means by a full package. A commercial credit analyst reviews anything that requires judgment.
- 03
Approve the deal story
We normalize the financials and build an investment-banking-style teaser and underwriting memo. You see the work first, correct anything that needs context and approve the final version before it can move.
- 04
Approve the lender strategy
The AI screens 1,500+ lenders by credit box, check size, sector and geography, then recommends the strongest 50. You see why each lender belongs and approve every lender by name before anything leaves.
- 05
Go to market under a codename
Approved lenders receive the credit metrics first — not your company, address or owners. Nobody pulls your credit to give an indication. A lender has to say what it would do before it learns whose file it is.
- 06
Keep the answers competing
BRUNO tracks opens, chases questions and keeps the process moving after hours. However many lenders answer, the strongest are run against each other on rate, structure, covenants and timing; a commercial credit analyst handles the negotiations that require judgment, with Carmine overseeing the desk.
So we charge for it, and we say what it is
Most brokers will tell you they are free. They are not free — they are paid by the funder, out of your transaction, at a rate you never see. On a merchant cash advance that is commonly nine per cent of the money you receive, priced into your factor rate.
We would rather do the opposite: describe the work, name the fee, and let you decide whether it is worth it against the hours above. If it isn’t, don’t hire us. That is a real choice, and this market almost never offers one.
There is no application fee, no retainer and no charge for the underwriting memo or the package we build from it. Transparent is paid a success fee of 3–4% of the loan, owed only if one closes. SBA is different: on an SBA loan our compensation follows SBA's own rules for agents (SOP 50 10 8) and comes from the lender, not from you. Either way, where a lender pays us we tell you the amount in writing on the same page as your terms.
It is written into clause one of our disclosure standard, which we published so it is checkable rather than a promise.
Connect your books and the package builds itself.
We’re building a QuickBooks connection so the financial half of the file — P&L, balance sheet, agings, debt schedule — is pulled and normalized automatically rather than assembled by hand. It removes the single largest block of hours in the table above, and it removes the most common reason a sound business gets declined: books nobody can read.