Criteria

We provide growth loans to businesses in all sectors that have strong, verifiable future trading prospects but require short term financing. This may be due to a working capital requirement arising from trading; the result of an unexpected operational or market set-back; or because lending criteria have tightened and existing or intended bank borrowing has become unavailable.

Importantly:

• We will expect our loan to be repayable from trading cash flows or refinancing within a 2 year period.
• We will require adequate security against the risk of default.

Stage and size

We normally expect companies seeking growth loans from us to be revenue generating, but they do not necessarily need to have a long trading history. We will consider loans ranging from £500K to £3M.

Typical deal structure

A typical growth loan will have the following principal features:

• Term: a term of between 6 months and 2 years with a single bullet repayment at term. This means that the capital advanced is available for the entire period of the loan.
• Interest: we are keen to align our interests with shareholders so we aim to keep the coupon on our loans relatively low and to take our upside via separate equity warrants.
• Warrants: we will take warrants to give us upside on the businesses future performance. We expect to price these warrants at a premium to market value. This usually means that overall dilution for existing shareholders is often less than would be the case if the funds needed were raised by other means, for example a discounted rights issue or open offer.

Process

We expect to assess suitability in principle for a growth loan within 2 weeks. We will then issue Heads of Terms for our proposed loan and proceed with detailed due diligence once these are agreed. We have template legal documentation suitable for most situations and would normally expect funds to be available for drawdown within 3 – 4 weeks of agreeing terms, provided no major obstacles are encountered.