Field note · July 2026

It’s Never About Finding a Lender

A broker sends the same package to ten banks the week a deal comes in — same financials, same story, same ask — and waits to see who bites. Two weeks later, half have gone quiet and the other half have said no, and the broker reads it as a hard market. It isn’t. It’s a targeting problem, and it happens on almost every SBA 7(a) deal I look at.

The 7(a) program looks like one product with one set of rules, so it’s easy to assume any lender that fits the size and geography box is a live option. In practice, every bank running 7(a) volume has built its own internal box on top of the SBA’s — and that inner box is where deals actually live or die.

Two lenders with identical size and geography criteria will reject the same deal for completely opposite reasons.

One won’t touch hospitality because a regional concentration limit is already maxed out. Another won’t touch a first-time buyer with no direct industry experience, full stop. A third will pass on a clean deal simply because it lacks a real estate component — their internal collateral math doesn’t work without it. None of this shows up in a rate sheet or a program guideline. It shows up after the third or fourth rejection, once someone's finally willing to say why.

So the work isn’t sourcing a lender who does SBA loans — every regional bank claims that. The work is knowing, before the package goes out, which two or three lenders in the country actually clear for this specific deal: this industry, this buyer profile, this collateral mix, this timeline. Send it to those two or three, and approval stops being a coin flip. Send it to twenty at random, and you’re just burning the weeks a buyer doesn’t have before an LOI expires.

— Aksel Erga, routing SBA lenders, brokers, and buyers through acquisition financing.