Highly Recommend Bruce Marks at First Bank of the Lake

We recently closed our acquisition of DFW Turf Solutions - an artificial turf installation business in Dallas. redacted‌ was instrumental in getting the deal done.

The business is growing quickly which is a problem for most SBA lenders. redacted‌ recently wrote a great detailed post about this issue (https://www.searchfunder.com/post/lessons-learned-from-failed-sba-financing). Long story short, most banks will use the average EBITDA from multiple years of historical tax returns to determine whether a deal meets the debt service requirements. If you have a business that is growing quickly, the deal will never meet that threshold. On top of that we signed the LOI in late October, so the business had grown meaningfully since even the latest tax return.

We showed the deal to over a dozen banks. The majority liked the deal, but said they needed 2021 tax returns to start underwriting, which would have cost us the deal or at least resulted in the sellers renegotiating purchase price. There were several that said they could to the deal now only for us to find out later that either the person we spoke to did not have any decision power or they did their calculations wrong.

Bruce was the only one who clearly understood the business, has the internal sway to get his deals closed and was able to start underwriting based on a QoE. Search fund deals are a lot more complicated than most SBA deals so the vast majority of lenders are not equipped to underwrite and close them in the timeline needed. Bruce has a unique combination of expertise in SBA loans and business sense.,

Lastly, I cannot understate how important a knowledgeable lending partner is in managing brokers and sellers. You can easily lose credibility by processes not getting done on time or all of sudden needing documents you said you did not need. Bruce has closed thousands of SBA acquisitions and is able to provide certainty which makes you a more credible buyer.