Loan by Design

Most commercial loans that fail were broken before credit ever saw them.

Not because the business was bad. Not because the banker wasn't trying. Because the work that determines whether a loan succeeds - the discovery, the structure, the shaping of a request into something that actually makes sense - happens at the front end. Before the spreadsheet opens. Before the credit memo is written. Before underwriting inherits a deal the banker didn't fully understand.

Loan by Design™: How Good Loans Are Built Before Credit Ever Sees Them is a practitioner's guide to that front-end work. It is not a credit policy manual. It does not walk through underwriting models, debt service calculations, or loan committee procedures. What it does, and what very few resources do, is explain how experienced commercial lenders actually think: the questions they ask before a deal is shaped, the patterns they recognize before it goes sideways, and the discipline that separates a well-built loan from a well-intentioned one.

Built around a simple but powerful idea, banks don't find good loans, they build them. Loan by Design™ covers the full arc of front-end commercial lending practice. It begins with the foundations: what a good commercial loan really is, how operating cycles create borrowing needs, and why structure is the banker's actual product. It moves through the building blocks of loan structure, the practical differences between lines and term loans, the real role of SBA as a structuring tool rather than a fallback, and the mechanics of pricing and general terms most bankers learn too late. It then applies that foundation to the four primary loan types, SBA, construction, commercial real estate, and C&I, before addressing how deals move, where they break, how borrowers experience structure emotionally, and the warning signs that appear at the front end of nearly every problem loan.

Three appendices built for real-time use round out the book: a Deal Clinic presenting five common deal patterns twice each, the version that goes wrong and the version that doesn't, with annotation at every decision point; a Conversation Guide covering eight of the most challenging front-end moments a commercial banker faces, from reframing what a borrower actually needs to delivering a decline with the relationship intact; and ten reference pages designed to be printed, kept open, and used at your desk, in client meetings, and in coaching.

This is the book for the commercial banker who wants to understand the why behind the work - not just whether a deal gets approved, but whether it was built right.

Part of the Discipline of Banking™ Series.