Working capital management has always involved complex problems, but recent financial events have resulted in additional challenging and new difficulties for most businesses. On the bright side, there are practical and effective commercial finance solutions for most of these problems. The bad news is that successful business financing programs (which avoid the key problems) have become more complex and are usually difficult to find.

With working capital management and commercial mortgages, there is often a need for both problem-finding and problem-solving. With the recent banking chaos, the importance of finding the commercial lending problems has assumed a new level of importance because there is in fact a new set of business finance difficulties to be confronted by small businesses. Most of these problems are typically not apparent to the average commercial borrower, and this can produce unpleasant surprises later.

For many new commercial borrowers, their previous investment finance experience has been limited to their home. An ongoing major difficulty to overcome in this situation is that there are approximately 25 key differences between residential mortgages and commercial mortgage loans. For example, most new commercial borrowers are confused that they cannot obtain a business loan for the same interest rate, terms and cost as a mortgage for their personal residence.

One of the biggest new commercial financing problems has been that many lenders have simply stopped making business loans. While this is a serious problem, an even bigger problem currently emerging is that many commercial lenders are not informing their business owner clients on a timely basis of their inability to provide commercial loans. There are many disappointing reports about commercial borrowers being told at the last minute that their commercial loan would not be approved after waiting several weeks to complete the commercial financing or refinancing process.

The growing shortage of lenders that will provide short-term working capital is a critical new business financing problem. While the number of lenders providing commercial real estate loans (which require the property as collateral) is shrinking, working capital financing (which does not require separate collateral) has become even harder to find consistently. This particular problem is currently impacting virtually all businesses because even thriving businesses usually need periodic help with short term business financing.

Solutions will of course vary based on circumstances for both old and new business loan problem issues. Commercial borrowers should be encouraged to know that they have more commercial financing choices than they probably realize. With the help of a commercial loan expert, finding and solving business finance obstacles should be easier than tackling the challenge alone. Business owners should probably be prepared to avoid the banker and bank that caused their business financing and working capital problems in the first place when seeking commercial finance solutions.