Adelaide, SA
Commercial finance in Adelaide.
Adelaide engagements run remotely, and a good share of them involve a business changing hands within a family or to a long-serving employee, which is its own kind of credit problem.
What we see in the Adelaide market
More Adelaide deals than anywhere else we work involve succession: a business held in one family for decades passing to the next generation, or to a manager who has run it for years without owning it. Lenders find these harder than an arm's length sale, because the price is often not a market price and the incoming owner has no track record of ownership even though they know the business better than anyone.
That creates a specific file problem. Two decades of arrangements between the business and the people who own it have to be unwound before a credit team can read the profit, and the incoming owner needs a case built around demonstrated capability rather than a balance sheet they do not yet have. Both are doable and neither happens by itself.
Adelaide also has a strong base of long-held manufacturing and food businesses where the plant is old, fully depreciated and still productive. A lender looking at the asset register sees very little; a lender who has been shown what the equipment actually does and what it would cost to replace sees something else.
How engagements run for Adelaide clients
Remote scoping and delivery. We deal directly with whoever has kept the books, usually for a very long time, because that is who can explain how the numbers came to look the way they do. Where a transfer is intergenerational we build the incoming owner's case explicitly rather than leaving a lender to infer it.
The full process, what we arrange and how we are paid are on the commercial finance page.
Who sends us work
Other professionals put their clients in front of us.
Which is a harder test than winning a client directly. An adviser referring you is lending you their relationship, and they only do it twice if the first one went well.
Accountants
Because we never touch compliance, and never ask them to sign a serviceability letter.
Finance brokers
For commercial deals they keep, with the file built underneath and the lodgement theirs.
Business brokers
Because a buyer with tested numbers is a buyer who settles.
Buyers agents
They find and negotiate the deal; we test the earnings the price is built on.
Adelaide questions
It changes what the file has to prove. The price may not be a market price, so a lender will want to understand how it was set, and the incoming owner usually has deep operating experience and no ownership history. Both are addressable, and both are much easier to address before an application than in response to a question.
That is normal and it is exactly the work. Wages paid to people who never worked a shift, rent paid to an entity the owner also controls, the car and the phone and the trip: each one gets found, adjusted and evidenced to the standard a credit team asks for. It is the same discipline as our due diligence work and it feeds straight into the submission.
Only if it is shown what the plant does. A fully depreciated asset register tells a lender almost nothing useful. What it earns, what it would cost to replace and what it would fetch on a recovery basis are three different numbers, and the file should carry the ones that matter to the decision.
Buying a business in Adelaide?
Then the question before the finance is whether the earnings are real. We test them first, because a credit team will rebuild them whatever you do, and the figures that come out of that go straight into the submission.
Due diligence in AdelaideWant a straight read on your deal?
Book a free call with Nick. Bring the numbers you have, and we will tell you the right service level and the fixed fee. No obligation.