10 Must-Ask Questions Before Getting an SBA Loan With Your Bank
Read through this short list of questions that you should ask your local banker before getting stuck in the bank runaround.
If you are set on working with your local bank, here is a set of 10 questions from industry insiders that you must ask your bank before committing to the SBA loan application process with them:
- What percentage of applicants get a loan after starting the application process with you?
- How many other businesses have you had experience working with in the industry I am pursuing?
- Are you the one who makes the final loan approval decision? If not, can I get a pre-qualification directly from a credit decision maker?
- How many SBA loans have you personally closed and funded?
- Can you give me some recent referrals of clients you worked with?
- What was the bank’s SBA loan volume in the last SBA fiscal year?What is the bank’s average SBA loan size?
- How can I be sure that I get the best terms possible if I only submit my loan to you?
- Do you do a hard-pull of my credit score for pre-qualifications? When is the hard pull done?
- Will I have “restrictive covenants” in my loan agreement and will I be required to have my business deposit accounts at your bank? Will I be required to have personal accounts with your bank?
- Will I be able to keep my business credit card accounts open?
YourSBA.com vs Your Bank
Why are we 5x more successful than your local bank?
YourSBA.com was founded to tackle some of the toughest challenges that come with trying to get SBA financing through a bank: piles of paperwork, vague answers, false promises, and lengthy waits, only to find out you won’t be getting the loan you were initially promised and pre-qualified for. At YourSBA.com, we have made significant changes that allow us to be over 95% successful in securing our clients’ loans, compared to the 15% success rate of a bank.
We discussed in detail the difference between applying for an SBA loan with your loan bank compared to applying with YourSBA.com, but here is a brief summary:
- A typical bank has about a 15% success rate after initial pre-qualification for a number of reasons:
- banks freely give out pre-qualifications in order to get you off the streets,
- the person issuing the pre-qualification is not the credit decision maker,
- banks have very limited credit boxes,
- and banks leave it to you to prepare your application and convince them to lend to you.
- In contrast, YourSBA.com has made a number of changes that allow us to be nearly 100% successful in securing our clients’ loans after initial pre-qualification:
- we only pre-qualify something if we are very confident in our ability to get it done,
- we only work directly with credit decision makers,
- we have partnerships and access to many different credit boxes,
- and we spend a lot of time elegantly preparing your application.
HOW DO I GET STARTED?
YourSBA.com offers a suite of loan calculators for SBA loans and other funding sources here. You can automatically estimate your down payment requirement, monthly loan payments, SBA borrowing limit, and more.
See if you qualify for an SBA loan by taking just a few minutes to give us some basic information here. The pre-approval process takes less than one day and does not require a hard credit pull.
A pre-qualification is a great way to get a headstart on your application and will help in your negotiations. There is no credit check required and you’ll receive your pre-qualification letter and borrowing estimate within 24 hours.