By Louis du Plessis
CEO Pollen Finance | Oct 1, 2026 | 6 min read
Businesses are messy. They grow in bursts, lose customers and win bigger ones, and take risks that make complete sense to the person running the business and very little sense on a spreadsheet. That’s entrepreneurship.
And it’s one of the reasons I’ve always found the idea of a perfectly “bankable” business interesting. Because businesses exist to serve customers, create value and pursue opportunities. And other times businesses have to fit lending criteria. Sometimes those two things line up neatly, and sometimes they don’t.
There is a version of a business that is very easy to understand from the outside. Revenue grows predictably, assets sit neatly on the balance sheet, and every year looks slightly better than the one before it. Those businesses exist, but plenty of successful businesses don’t look like that.
For example, a retailer might make a disproportionate amount of its revenue during three months of the year, a manufacturer might suddenly win an order twice the size of anything it has produced before, or a fast-growing business might deliberately sacrifice short-term cash to invest in capacity. None of those things automatically tells you whether the business is strong or weak. They tell you that context matters.
I think it’s important to say this. Banks have lending criteria for a reason. They lend enormous amounts of money across thousands of businesses and individuals.
They need consistent ways to assess risk. Things like historical financial performance, security, and credit history matters. None of that is unreasonable.
The problem comes when we assume that because a business doesn’t fit a particular lending model, the business itself must be the problem. Those aren’t the same thing. Sometimes the funding model and the business simply don’t fit each other.
It just can’t tell you everything. Financial statements can tell you what happened, bank statements can show you how money moves through the business, and a balance sheet can show you what the business owns and owes. Those things matter enormously.
But they don’t always show you what is about to happen. They don’t necessarily show the customer who has just placed a major new order, the product that keeps selling out, or the supplier offering an unusually valuable opportunity.
Financial information is evidence, but business decisions also happen in the space between historical evidence and future opportunity. That is where things get interesting.
Funding models naturally spend a lot of time looking backwards. What was your turnover, what did your bank account look like, and how long have you been trading?
Entrepreneurs have to answer different questions. What happens if we open here, what happens if we take this order, or what happens if we move now instead of six months from now?
Neither perspective is wrong. One is trying to understand risk. While the other is trying to understand possibility. A useful funding decision needs some appreciation of both.
This is something I think we underestimate. Growth consumes cash. For example, a business wins more customers and suddenly needs more stock.
From one perspective, the business has become riskier. Its expenses have increased, cash is tighter, and its commitments are larger.
From another perspective, the business is doing exactly what growing businesses do. It is investing ahead of the return. Understanding the difference requires context.
This is probably the bigger point for me. Business opportunities have a habit of arriving at inconvenient times. You rarely get to say, “Could you come back once our financial year-end is complete?“
Opportunity has its own timetable. And sometimes the businesses that grow are simply the ones able to respond.
Quite the opposite. There is a danger in romanticising entrepreneurship to the point where every risk looks brave and every expansion looks visionary.
Sometimes the numbers are warning you, the opportunity isn’t as strong as you think, the business cannot afford more debt, or the right answer is no. Responsible funding requires those decisions too.
The point isn’t that financial criteria don’t matter. It’s that criteria and judgement do different jobs. The numbers tell you something important and the context tells you what those numbers mean.
Instead of asking only whether a business fits a particular box, I think there are more interesting questions. Like, is there genuine demand, is revenue consistent, can it manage its existing commitments, does the owner understand what could go wrong? And perhaps most importantly, what has this business already demonstrated that gives us reason to believe in what comes next?
Those questions still take risk seriously. They just recognise that businesses are more complicated than a checklist.
Look at almost any enduring business and you’ll find periods where the story was untidy. We tend to look back at successful businesses and turn their growth into a neat line. The people running them experienced something completely different. They experienced uncertainty.
That’s worth remembering when we’re assessing businesses in the middle of the story rather than at the end of it.
Every business contains uncertainty. The job isn’t to pretend that uncertainty doesn’t exist. It’s to understand the risk around it.
Ask questions about demand, the plan, and whether the business can absorb it if things take longer than expected? That’s a much more useful conversation than trying to make every business look perfectly predictable. Because entrepreneurship, by definition, isn’t.
I don’t think businesses should be divided into those that fit traditional criteria and those that don’t. There are simply different businesses with different circumstances, opportunities and risks. Banks will continue to play an important role in business finance and so will other funders.
The useful question isn’t which model is better. It’s whether the way we assess a business allows us to understand what is actually happening inside it. Numbers, history, and affordability all matters, but so does context.
Because sometimes the most important thing about a business isn’t perfectly visible in last year’s numbers. It’s what those numbers have put the business in a position to do next.
About the author
Louis du Plessis is the CEO of Pollen Finance, helping established South African businesses access funding to seize growth opportunities. He writes about business funding, cash flow and entrepreneurship, drawing on over a decade of experience working alongside SMEs.
