A guided diagnostic that reads your business across the six dimensions senior lenders, mezzanine providers, asset-based lenders, and SBA underwriters actually weigh when they price and structure a credit facility.
A credit decision is rarely a yes or a no. It is a price, a structure, and a set of covenants — and each of those is set by how the underwriting reads the business across a handful of credit dimensions. Two borrowers with identical earnings can receive materially different terms based entirely on how ready they are to be examined the day the credit committee convenes. This instrument reads your business the way the underwriting will read it, before the facility is on the table.
The Lender Readiness Check is a structured eighteen-question read across the six dimensions credit committees apply when they price and structure a facility, calibrated against the same thresholds institutional lenders use in their own underwriting. It is not a survey and it is not a marketing quiz. It is the same set of questions a sophisticated credit advisor would walk through with you before you enter a renewal, a refinancing, or a new-facility conversation — structured so that you can answer them at your own pace and read the underwriting context for each answer as you go.
The six dimensions, the eighteen questions, the answer options, and the underwriting commentary between questions reflect the accumulated practitioner work of TEOL Capital's principals and alliance network across lower-middle-market operating businesses. The calibration draws on the institutional underwriting patterns observed across the decades of combined experience of TEOL Capital's principals and partners, across the manufacturing, distribution, oil and gas, technology, professional services, healthcare, and broader real-economy sectors TEOL serves, supplemented by published credit and transactional research from PitchBook, Mergermarket, BVR, GF Data, and sector-specific institutional sources, and the structural patterns defined by TEOL's proprietary frameworks.
The eighteen questions are organized into six sections, each addressing one credit dimension. Before each section begins, you will see a brief explanation of what the next three questions are testing and why that dimension matters to a credit committee. After each question, you will see underwriting commentary on what your specific answer indicates — what most borrowers look like at this position, how a senior lender or an asset-based lender typically reads it, and what the path forward looks like.
At the end of the instrument, you receive a composite Lender Readiness score from 0 to 100, a placement on one of four pricing-position bands, individual dimension scores across all six credit dimensions rendered on the Lender Lens Radar, an indicative Pricing Impact read that estimates the basis-point effect of your current position against the institutional baseline, four counterparty reads across Senior Lenders, Mezzanine Capital, Asset-Based Lenders, and SBA Lenders, and a set of specific recommended actions calibrated to your weakest dimensions with the expected credit impact of each quantified where the observed data supports specificity.
The instrument takes fifteen to twenty minutes to complete carefully. There is no time pressure. You can move back to any previous question, take a break and return, or stop and start.
The Lender Readiness Check applies a six-dimension framework measuring how an institutional credit committee will read the business. The methodology mirrors what credit committees examine internally before pricing and structuring credit facilities.
Cash Flow Defensibility measures EBITDA defensibility through the credit committee lens including documentation discipline applied to add-backs and normalizations.
Coverage and Leverage Position measures current Fixed Charge Coverage Ratio, Senior Leverage, and Total Leverage against institutional thresholds plus headroom against existing covenants.
Cash Visibility and Treasury Discipline measures forward cash visibility maturity, treasury controls, authority matrix, and scenario modeling capability.
Collateral and Security Position measures asset coverage including accounts receivable quality, aging discipline, inventory quality, and fixed asset coverage.
Reporting and Covenant Compliance Capability measures lender-grade reporting cadence including monthly close timing, compliance certificate discipline, and budgeting and variance reporting.
Sponsor and Guarantee Architecture measures equity sponsorship depth, equity cure availability, personal guarantee structure, and capital partner relationship documentation.
Each dimension scored 0 to 100 based on responses to three questions per dimension (18 questions total). Composite score maps to band placement with estimated pricing impact: Significant Repricing Risk (0–25, estimated +150 to 300bps), Pricing Degradation Expected (26–50, estimated +75 to 150bps), Institutional Pricing (51–75, baseline pricing), Pricing Improvement Position (76–100, estimated -25 to -100bps).
The Pricing Impact Estimate quantifies the basis point variance versus institutional baseline calibrated to observed credit committee behavior across $20 to $100M revenue facilities. The counterparty reads module identifies how senior lenders, mezzanine lenders, asset-based lenders, and SBA lenders specifically would price and structure the facility. Recommended actions identify the highest-leverage remediation priorities with quantified pricing improvement and remediation timeline.
Calibrated to observed lender behavior across middle-market credit facilities in the past 36 months.