Six Weeks or Eighteen Weeks. Same Start Date.
Two principals began on the same Monday. The difference in when they finished was not effort, and it was knowable before either started.
Take two illustrative cases. One needed $5 million against a clean receivables base. The other needed $30 million against equipment, receivables, inventory, and a specialty asset that no single lender underwrites end to end. The first closed in six weeks. The second closed in eighteen. Both processes were run competently and neither hit a genuine problem.
What matters is not the exact week count but who owns the calendar in each phase.
The smaller deal had three moving parts
The $5 million facility involved one capital source, one field exam on the receivables, and one credit agreement. No third party had to consent to anything. Three workstreams, run largely in sequence, and the borrower or the lender controlled all three.
Weeks one and two went to assembling the diligence pack and building the borrowing base. Weeks three and four produced a term sheet. Weeks five and six were documentation and close. Nothing about that is remarkable, which is the point: it is the timeline most owners carry in their heads as what financing takes.
The larger deal had eleven
The $30 million facility involved three capital sources, because each one’s mandate covered part of the collateral and none covered all of it. Four separate valuations, one per asset class. Four agreements: three facility documents plus an intercreditor deed governing how the three lenders rank against each other. Three third-party consents, including a release from an existing lender and a regulatory approval.
Eleven workstreams, and critically, they do not run in sequence. They run in parallel and have to converge on a single closing date, which means the schedule is set by whichever one finishes last.
Where the twelve extra weeks actually went
Almost none of it was work. Weeks one to three went to inventorying the collateral and commissioning four valuations rather than one field exam. Weeks four to seven went to designing a structure and approaching three sources whose mandates each covered a portion.
Weeks eight to eleven are where the timeline stops belonging to the borrower. Two term sheets were in hand, and the intercreditor terms then had to be negotiated between the lenders themselves. That is a negotiation the borrower does not sit in and cannot accelerate, and it is invisible on any plan that treats financing as one conversation.
Weeks twelve to fifteen waited on appraisals returning and consents clearing, each on a lead time owned by an appraiser or a regulator. Weeks sixteen to eighteen documented four agreements to close simultaneously.
Six times the money did not take six times as long. It took three times as long, and the majority of the additional calendar was held by third parties. That is why the cycle does not compress under pressure: there is no one to push.
The mistake is budgeting the first timeline for the second deal
Budgeting the small-deal timeline is what happens, because the six-week experience is the one an owner has had. A principal who needs funds by week eight and starts six weeks out on a $30 million structure misses by ten weeks, and the options at that point are all worse than the one they gave up.
A principal who misses the date can bridge at whatever terms are available on short notice. They can undersize to whichever single source will write against its own asset class alone, which on this collateral mix might fund $12 million of a $30 million need and leave the transaction unworkable. Or they can lose the opportunity that created the deadline.
None of those outcomes reflects the quality of the business or the collateral. They reflect a start date.
How Thalos Capital Approaches This
Larger tickets against non-standard collateral are the Special Situations profile: bigger facilities, longer structuring cycles, and terms shaped to the situation rather than selected from a menu, across a range from $5 million to $100 million and above. Thalos Capital works borrower-side throughout.
The practical work is sequencing. Before a process opens, the collateral gets inventoried, the valuations that will take longest get commissioned first, the consents that carry lead times get identified and started, and the sources whose mandates cover each component get approached in an order that lets the intercreditor conversation begin early rather than after both term sheets land. Mapping the critical path is what converts eighteen weeks from a surprise into a schedule.
Mapping the critical path is also why the conversation is worth having before there is a deadline. A principal who knows their structure takes eighteen weeks can start in month one. A principal who assumes six is committed to an outcome before they have discovered the constraint.
The cost here is not priced in basis points. It is priced in which transaction happens. A well-collateralized business with a legitimate $30 million need will get financed, and the only question decided by the start date is whether it gets financed at the size and structure the situation actually required, or at whatever a compressed calendar left available.
Most financing situations have more options than the borrower initially sees. A conversation is enough to map them. Submit your financing request at https://thaloscapital.com/contact.