Raising asset-based finance: why your choice of adviser decides the deal you get

You probably don't spend much time thinking about invoice finance, inventory lending, plant and machinery finance or working capital facilities. Your attention is on winning customers, keeping the cash flowing and growing the business, exactly as it should be.

In many ways, it's a bit like buying a car. Most people just want the right car at a fair price and not spend weeks working out whether a lease, a PCP deal, hire purchase or a bank loan is the smartest way to pay for it. They just want someone who can point them toward the best option for them.

Raising business finance works in exactly the same way.

The asset-based lending market has more choice in it than it's ever had, and that's made it a much harder market to find your way through on your own. High street banks now share the field with specialist lenders, challenger banks and private credit funds. Each of them has its own appetite for risk, its own favourite sectors and its own view on how a deal should be built.

For you, as the business owner trying to sustain growth by raising funds, all that choice can feel more like a headache than a luxury. Talk to the wrong lenders (or take the first offer that lands on your desk) and you could end up with a facility that doesn't really match the way your business makes its money.

The right adviser does more than introduce you to a lender. They can be the reason you walk away with more money and better terms than you'd have found navigating this complex lending jungle yourself. 

This article looks at why appointing a great adviser matters and what they do day to day, plus what you should have ready before you start trying to raise money.

Why the right adviser 

Advisers are all very different from each other (just like lenders can be!) and the asset-based lending market has grown a lot more specialised over the last few years. Some lenders will only work with manufacturers who own a lot of plant and machinery, while others are drawn to wholesale and distribution businesses sitting on strong stock. Some will only touch invoice finance, while others are happy to lend against receivables, inventory, equipment and cash flow all under one facility.

What a lender wants shifts all the time too, as sectors move through good years and bad years and lenders juggle their own balance sheet priorities. The right adviser tracks all of that movement so you don't have to and knows how to point you toward a lender who understands how your business actually works and wants to back businesses like yours right now, rather than whoever simply quotes the lowest interest rate.

Get this right, and you can stay focused on running your company while we deal with the funding process, instead of spending weeks talking to different lenders, filling in the same forms twice and chasing several credit teams for updates. 

Taking the first workable offer carries its own risk too. The real value in a facility usually comes down to how flexible it is and how well it fits the way your business runs and that matters every bit as much as the headline rate.

A good adviser's value really starts there. They know which lenders are genuinely worth talking to and they know how to create real competition between the right funding partners, rather than sending the same information pack out to dozens of institutions and hoping someone says yes.

What should the right adviser actually do?

In practice, an adviser's job is to turn all that market knowledge into a process that runs smoothly. That means understanding how each lender weighs up risk and knowing what their credit teams want to see before they even ask then putting your business in front of them in a way that earns a yes instead of a slow, drawn out no.

A typical process for Heligan starts with your adviser getting to know your business itself, your growth plans, your working capital needs and where you want the business to be in a few years' time. We come into that conversation already reading the market because knowing how lenders are actually behaving right now is where our intelligence-led approach really pays off. From there, we'll go through your financial information before it ever reaches a lender so questions get answered before a credit team has the chance to ask them. We'll then help you work out the right structure, whether that's invoice finance, inventory finance, funding against plant and machinery, property backed lending or some mix of everything.

Once that groundwork is done, your adviser draws on that same intelligence to identify which lenders are genuinely likely to back your business and its sector, rather than starting from a generic list of who's active in the market. We run a proper competitive process rather than leaning on a single provider and hoping for the best. And because we see things differently, we look past the headline number to the details that actually decide whether a deal works for you: how much room it leaves you and how well it fits your business day to day. Your adviser then manages the whole thing through credit approval, due diligence and legal completion.

Our objective is to secure finance that supports your business today and still works as it keeps growing.

What should you have ready?

You don't need to walk in with everything perfectly prepared before your first conversation with an adviser, but having the basics in place from the start makes the whole process move a lot faster.

Lenders will usually want to see your latest financial performance and management accounts, along with a clear picture of your debtor book and customer base. If it applies to your business, they'll also want to know about your inventory levels and the assets you hold, what borrowing you already have in place, and how experienced your management team is. On top of all that, they'll want to understand your growth plans and exactly how any new funding is going to be used.

Where any of that is still a work in progress, that's rarely a problem in practice. An experienced adviser will know exactly what's missing, help you pull it together in the format lenders expect and make sure your business is presented as clearly and commercially as possible right from the start.

Choosing the right adviser is a commercial decision that has a direct effect on how much you can raise and on what terms you can raise it. It's also a decision built on trust, the sort of trust that comes from knowing your adviser genuinely understands what you're trying to achieve and is working to help you get there.

At Heligan Group, we've worked on transactions from every angle. Our team includes former bank directors, specialist lending professionals, corporate finance partners and business owners who have built and run companies of their own, so we understand the process from every side of the table. We advise businesses across the UK on asset-based lending and wider corporate finance, helping you structure a facility that genuinely supports what your business is trying to do, while giving lenders enough confidence to back you.

Every conversation starts the same way, with no obligation, just a chance for us to understand what you need right now and where you want your business to go. If we think we can genuinely add value, we'll guide you through the whole process, from the first bit of strategy to the day everything completes.

You focus on running your business.

We'll focus on finding the right capital, on the best possible terms, to help it grow.