The Garrington Lending Perspective: Volume 11 – Boots on the Ground

Our first October perspective focused on the trust referral sources place in us when they make an introduction. That introduction is only the beginning. The next layer of trust comes from the business owner who opens the door, walks us through the operation, and lets us see the business as it really is.

You can learn a great deal about a business over the phone. Walking the floor with the owner teaches you something different. Tammy Kemp, Garrington’s President and Chief Credit Officer, has spent enough years doing this that she doesn’t hedge the point. “There is no replacement for sitting across the table, shaking somebody’s hand, going on a walk with the owner of the business around their manufacturing floor or their plant floor, looking at their inventory and talking about their business,” she says. A phone call or a video screen can carry a relationship a long way, but time spent in person creates the kind of familiarity that helps you recognize when something has changed.

Between Garrington’s team walking the floor and the trusted field examiners and appraisers who bring deep expertise to the same assets, every business we finance has someone putting real eyes on it. This is part of what partnership lending means to us; the numbers matter, but so does understanding the operation, the assets, and the people behind them.

One relationship Tammy points to lasted almost 10 years. Because Garrington’s facilities renew periodically, that meant the client chose to come back through several renewal cycles. The relationship began with a facility of roughly $8 million. By the time the client graduated to bank financing, the facility had grown to $45 million. That is the outcome a partnership lender should want for a client, even when it means saying goodbye. When the time came for the client to move on, Tammy thanked the owner and each member of his team personally. Ten years of growing a business together is worth celebrating, and it remains a relationship she values.

The more difficult relationships prove the point even more clearly. Tammy spent close to nine years financing a fashion company during a period when the industry was being reshaped by e-commerce and direct-to-consumer retail. “It wasn’t that the company was going downhill,” she says. The change was broader than one business: the way the industry was structured and the way people purchased clothing were changing rapidly.

The owner could have chosen to wind down while the business was still ahead. He didn’t, because he felt, in Tammy’s words, “tremendous loyalty to his people,” including the inventory team, the finance team, and everyone who had been with him through the transition. Supporting that choice called for honesty as much as loyalty. Tammy sat with him in his office, worked through what was and wasn’t sustainable, and continued to back a business that was rebuilding around a new model. Those conversations were possible because the relationship had been built long before the challenge emerged.

Relationships like these grow because someone was willing to get on a plane, walk a plant floor, and learn what a business looks like on an ordinary day. Then, when the day isn’t ordinary, there’s already a relationship strong enough to support the difficult conversation. To every client who has let us in that far, thank you for the trust. We don’t treat it as owed. We treat it as earned, every time.