Most manufacturers don't hit a sales problem. They max out.

The machines run full out. The floor is packed. There are only so many hours in a day, only so many machines to run them, and only so much square footage to work inside. You've got a backlog you can't get to because you're still catching up on the orders you already took.

That's not a company in trouble. That's a company with more demand than it can physically serve.

But it's also the point where getting bigger stops being free. Up to now, growth came from working harder. From here, it costs something. More space. More equipment. More people. Every one of those is a purchase.

Now, if you're still reading, you're probably thinking: what do I need these guys for? I'll just go to my bank.

And if you're reading this at all, chances are you already have.

Here's something most owners don't know. After twenty-five years in this business, with relationships inside most of the banks in this state, I can tell you that lending capacity is limited and banks are selective with it. They take the cleanest files and decline the rest. That has very little to do with the quality of your company. Good companies get turned down every day in Michigan because they didn't fit what that institution had room for that quarter.

Meanwhile you've lost three or four months. The purchase agreement on the building has a clock on it. The opportunity that needed cash is slipping. The backlog you can't touch keeps growing.

A third-generation tool and die shop in Shelby Township was out of room. Machines running eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, a $35 million backlog they couldn't touch, and a signed purchase agreement on a building four times the size.

Five banks. Three and a half months. Nothing. The seller was getting restless and the deal was close to falling apart.

Then he found us.

We issued a term sheet at 6.25% on $2.9 million, a half point under prime, with three months interest-only to cover the move, plus a $250,000 working capital line for renovation and moving costs. He signed the commitment letter.

About a month later, his bank of fifteen years finally came back with a term sheet of their own. 7.5%, ten years, take it or leave it. No interest-only period to cover the move. No working capital line behind it. Nothing but the loan.

He left it. We closed.

He's in the new building now, twenty thousand square feet, finally able to get at that $35 million backlog.

That's the work, and it's what we do well.

We typically beat bank pricing. In the last eighteen months, we haven't lost a client to a bank on rate. We build structures a single institution can't: multiple facilities working together, terms built around your cash flow and how your business actually runs, not a credit box. And when the right answer is our own capital, we fund it ourselves.

Michigan manufacturers and lower middle market companies, at exactly this moment. The bigger building, the equipment, the working capital that can't wait on receivables.