Say your business is profitable and you're struggling with debt. Often, you've taken on these predatory merchant cash advances and now you're stuck. You have no way out. There's just no hope. If the debt payments are taking the money before you can use it, you don't necessarily have a bad business, but you just may have a bad business debt structure. And it just no longer fits your business. There's a difference between that and having a bad business.
You could be a restaurant in Birmingham, have customers every night, and still get crushed by the daily ACH payments. If you're a trucking company in Mobile, Alabama, you can have receivables coming in, but payroll is due Friday and lenders are now taking their payment every morning. This is where business debt settlement comes in. The objective isn't complicated. We're changing the debt before your debt changes your business.
What Is Business Debt Settlement?
It's a process of negotiating with your lenders to change what your business owes them, how the lenders are being paid, or both. This can mean a reduced balance or it can mean a longer payment schedule. It can mean lower weekly payments or a negotiated lump sum payoff. There's a lot of different tools at your disposal. The point, though, is to improve your cash flow.
| What changes | Options |
|---|---|
| What your business owes | A reduced balance, a negotiated lump sum payoff |
| How the lenders are being paid | A longer payment schedule, lower weekly payments |
Why Cash Flow Matters More Than the Balance
If your company owes $200,000, the number itself may not be what's killing you, because if you're paying only 10% APR, that's good money. But say you're paying 100% APR. No business has margins to afford that type of debt. And if your cash flow is being choked off, that can mean that regardless of how profitable your business is, your cash is just getting absorbed by these daily and weekly MCA payments.
| Amount owed | APR | Result |
|---|---|---|
| $200,000 | 10% | That's good money |
| $200,000 | 100% | No business has margins to afford that type of debt |
The point is cash flow. If your company owes $200,000 but you're making payments of, say, 50% of cash flow every month, that 50% is what matters more than the $200,000. And you don't fix this problem by staring at the balance. You fix it by fixing the payment structure.
How Is Business Debt Settlement Different from Consumer Debt or Debt Consolidation?
Alabama's consumer finance statute defines consumer credit around credit which is given to a person primarily for personal, family, or household purposes. It means, though, that an Alabama business owner shouldn't assume protections given to them for personal debt automatically apply to commercial loans, lines of credit, or MCAs. Different types of debt have different contracts, different leverage, and different laws. Reading the documents is super important. Don't make any assumptions about what protections are owed to you.
Merchant Cash Advances (MCAs)
Needless to say, merchant cash advances can be commonplace emergency real quick. [UNCLEAR] And they deserve their own discussion. It's what we specialize in. Traditional business loans usually require one monthly payment. However, an MCA agreement can require more frequent payments. You can have a stack of two or three advances. And now you have several creditors that are all trying to get cash out of you. Meanwhile, you're trying to pay for payroll, inventory, rent, taxes, fuel, vendors, and everything else under the sun. Bottom line, your company still has revenue, but you have no usable cash. And that's the part people often miss.
| Traditional business loan | Merchant cash advance |
|---|---|
| Usually one monthly payment | More frequent payments (daily and weekly ACH) |
Stacking: Financing the Financing
When revenue drops, another advance can look like the solution. You're thinking, "Okay, I'll get this new money and use it to service old money." But that actually makes the cycle worse. It's what's called stacking in the MCA industry. Eventually, the business is financing the financing. And that's a vicious cycle.
What We Focus On
Our goal is settlement negotiations, focusing on reducing the daily ACH, extending repayment, resolving any defaults, negotiating a discounted payoff, or creating a new financial structure which the business can actually afford and survive on. It's all about taking the debt and making it more manageable. That can happen through a number of mechanisms, of course, such as settlement or negotiation. Typically, negotiation results in a fundamental restructuring of the debt itself.
Where Does That Leave You?
If you're a business owner struggling with a lot of business debt, you have two options. One is that you can try to use the reconciliation clause, which is in all MCA agreements. This clause makes it so that if your revenue goes down by 30%, the daily and weekly ACH payments that the lenders are taking have to go down by 30%. Often, most lenders will refuse to do this.