Garrington Didn’t Start as Garrington

 

Everyone loves a good origin story. The radioactive spider, the secret lab, the moment before anyone had powers worth talking about. There’s a reason the format works: you can’t appreciate what someone can do until you know where it came from.

Garrington’s version starts in 1999, when three entrepreneurs looked at small business factoring in Canada and built Liquid Capital, a brand that’s still part of the Garrington family today. The idea was simple: sell a factoring franchise, tied to one community at a time, to people who’d already built a career doing something else. Not a first job. A second one, for professionals with capital, credibility, and a network of local business owners who already trusted them. Some of those early franchisees-built businesses that are still standing today, now woven into the platform Garrington runs.

Much of that history isn’t second hand for Garrington’s leadership today. Erica Axani, now Executive Vice President and Chief Risk Officer, had a front row seat to it. At the time, she was at the firm that ran Liquid Capital’s back office, the essential machinery behind factoring: collections, data entry, cash application, the infrastructure needed to properly track and record every invoice a franchisee bought. She remembers the very first franchise principal, sitting in a boardroom, working the phones. “I remember it absolutely blowing up,” she says. “It went from one, to two, to three, and then this factoring machine across the US and Canada.”

A franchisee put up their own money to buy a client’s invoices, then had thirty or sixty days to collect. Without that support system in place, franchisees would have been on their own to know when each invoice was due and who owed what, a job that falls apart fast without someone keeping it straight. That’s where Erica’s firm came in, handling all of it behind the scenes while franchisees focused on relationships in their own communities.

In 2015, Liquid Capital brought all of that in-house, choosing to run its own collections and lending operations rather than lean on outside partners. It was a pivotal moment for the business, one that also coincided with new ownership stepping in, looking to round out what Liquid Capital could offer: a way to keep serving clients once their financing needs outgrew a single invoice-based facility.

Rather than build an ABL team from scratch, Garrington’s new owners went looking for a company that already had one. “It’s hard to go out and hire a whole team and create that whole business,” Tammy says. “It’s much easier to go and find a bolt-on, an entity that already has that, and bring it into the business.” That’s where Tammy Kemp, now President and Chief Credit Officer, was working at the time. As she puts it, the company was at a fork in the road: grow through acquisition or get acquired. That connection got made, and Garrington gained a full asset-based lending capability in one move.

Eleven years later, that “bolt-on” is the backbone of the company’s lending capability, and the instinct behind it, find people who already know what they’re doing and bring them in, rather than chase a trend and hire around it, has become how Garrington has grown every vertical since.

Five Verticals, Built in Order

The platform Garrington runs today isn’t five products bolted together after the fact. It’s five verticals added in sequence, each one built to answer a need the last one couldn’t reach.

Invoice Factoring came first: advances provided through the purchase of credit-worthy invoices, cash the moment a sale is made. Asset-Based Lending followed for businesses ready for the next stage, revolving lines of credit against working capital and term loans against fixed assets, for companies stable enough to lend against receivables, inventory, equipment, and real estate.

Then two verticals most people don’t expect from a lender this size, because they involve lending to other lenders rather than directly to a business. Commercial SME Finance provides loans to commercial finance companies that make their own asset-based loans to small and medium-sized businesses, other factors and asset-based lenders doing exactly what Garrington does. Lender Finance goes a layer further, loans collateralized by other commercial and consumer loan portfolios.

The newest addition, Opportunistic Finance, lends against the value of secured assets, asset pools, and realizable values, for situations that call for a closer, more hands-on read of the collateral itself.

The throughline across all five verticals isn’t expansion for its own sake. It’s the belief that a business with real collateral, a real product, and an owner who’s willing to talk shouldn’t run out of road just because their needs don’t match whatever a single-purpose lender happens to offer.

Built by People Who’d Rather Wait for the Right Hire Than Fill a Seat

Ask Tammy how the team grew to cover five verticals in a little over a decade, and the answer isn’t a hiring plan. It’s patience.

“We haven’t really gone out and said, we see this need in the marketplace, so let’s go hire somebody who does that,” she says. “It’s been: we’ve met this terrific person, we’ve known about them for years, they’re available, they’re looking. We have to hire them.”

People first, then capability. Not the other way around. It’s the same instinct that turned a factoring franchise into a five-vertical lending platform, and it’s still what shapes how Garrington shows up for the businesses and communities it works with today.