
Shannon Lawton on The Red Sofa
Interviewer: Good morning and welcome to the red sofa.
Today we have the pleasure of having Shannon Lawton of Lawton & Co with us who help businesses to secure funding to enable growth.
Good morning, Shannon.
Shannon: Good morning, Roger. Thank you for having me.
Interviewer: So, Shannon, please give us a bit of background to Lawton & Co.
Shannon: As Roger said, we’re a commercial finance brokerage based in Banbury, Oxfordshire, and have a range of clients to cure funding for their business.
Interviewer: What type of services do you offer and what scenarios or business types do they typically support?
Shannon: Types of finance I secure for clients are asset finance, invoice finance, and all different types of business loans, as well as acquisition and also property funding as well.
Interviewer: You talk about funding for growth. Are you able to enlighten us into how this can be a benefit for business and what growth may look like?
Shannon: Yeah, of course. Many businesses face a bit of a struggle when they need to get certain things to actually grow. For example, if there’s a construction company that’s got a new project coming up and need two new vans, they’re likely to get the funding for it, because they don’t want to take money out of that cash flow. As soon as they use the money in their bank, obviously they’re going to have cash flow concerns. Also, if they open up a new site, for example, a second restaurant, they need the funding to obviously do the fit out for this site as well. Again, if they use the money in the bank, it could cause major cash flow concerns.
Interviewer: What is the typical process of how you assist business in securing finance or funding? And do you continue to support the business after funding has been granted?
Shannon: Okay, so the initial process is, I have an initial meeting with the clients. Either over Zoom or I meet them for a coffee and I get to know the clients, I want to know all about their business. Obviously the struggles they’re facing and what the requirement they need is.
After that initial meeting, I’ll request the financials. This could be accounts, bank statements, I’ll do initial kind of review of these and I can give feedback on which options are available. Most of the time I might have a client, they might come to me and say, oh, I need £100,000 loan. But why do they need the funding? Because a lot of the time they need assets, which means we could do it on a different type of agreement, which makes more sense.
In terms of after I’ve done the transaction, I don’t want to be transactional, I want to be a partner with the client. So once I complete on the finance, if they come back in a year’s time or six months and they’ve just got a couple of questions or need further funding, I want to be there to help.
Interviewer: So Roger Essendon is known as the Business Godparent, for the help, support and advice he brings to his clients, especially family businesses and new startups. How do you support startups with funding if they have no credit history?
Shannon: So startup finance can be a bit of a minefield, but there are options available. So you can do asset finance, we can do invoice finance and we could do a secure business loan. Unsecured we wouldn’t be able to do because there’s no credit history. But if you’ve got a good solid business plan, we can definitely help.
Interviewer: Shannon, are you able to give me a case study of a recent application that you’ve had?
Shannon: Yeah, of course. So I’ve got one in the hospitality sector. So what happened was there was a pub that had two different locations and they were struggling with some difficulties with cash flow due to the fact that obviously all the inflation with food at the moment, so they need help with extra funding. So I’ve done that for them. And then also another case was another pub, actually, that were open second site. So we did the fit out for the whole pub.
Interviewer: That’s Shannon from Lawton & Co, helping you secure funding for business growth.
Shannon: Thank you.
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