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Join for freePosted: Tue 21st Jul 2026
Most business plans don't fail because the idea is weak – they fail because they're written to be read, not to be funded.
In this session, Orias Imafidon draws on 15 years of senior commercial banking experience – including deciding which businesses got backed and which got declined – to show you exactly what lenders, investors, and grant makers are really looking for.
Whether you're preparing for a bank loan, an investor pitch, or a grant application, you'll leave this session with a clear, practical framework for turning your business plan into one that actually gets funded.
What a genuinely fundable business plan looks like: The real difference between a plan that gets approved and one that gets quietly filed away, from someone who made those calls for 15 years
How to build a realistic cash flow forecast that gives funders the confidence to back your business, not just a spreadsheet that looks tidy
The five most common business planning mistakes that sink funding applications and exactly how to avoid each one
Orias spent 15 years in commercial banking, where his role spanned relationship management, leadership, strategic planning, and crisis management, deciding, time and again, which businesses got funded and which didn't.
He's a chartered accountant and now runs two businesses built on that experience: IAP Advisory, a commercial finance and funding advisory helping UK SMEs find the right funding, and Numbers 1st, an outsourced bookkeeping service built to help small businesses stay on top of their numbers year-round with deep commercial and industry insight.
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Lightly edited for clarity.
Beth: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's Lunch and Learn. My name is Beth, and I'll be your host today. For those of you attending a Lunch and Learn for the first time, Enterprise Nation is a vibrant community platform for start-ups and small businesses.
I'm very pleased to introduce Orias Imafidon from IAP Advisory. In this session, Orias will show you exactly what lenders, investors and grantmakers are really looking for.
If you have any questions throughout the webinar, please post them in the chat or the Q&A, and we'll do our best to answer them at the end of the session. Today's webinar will be recorded, and we will send the recording with follow-up resources later today.
So over to you, Orias.
Orias: Thank you very much, and thank you, everybody, for joining this afternoon. Today's session is going to cover what banks really think before they lend.
I'll start with an introduction of myself, what I've done previously and why I'd go with you on this. I have 15 years of commercial banking experience, working as a commercial banker and senior leader, which involved looking at multiple lending applications and assessing whether an application should be declined or approved.
I've also had the privilege of working with start-ups, SMEs and mid-corporates. Start-ups are typically zero to £500,000; SMEs, £500,000 to £6.5 million; and mid-corporates, £6.5 million and above. This meant talking to business owners about their growth strategy and how to raise finance.
I'm also a chartered accountant, and I'm the founder of IAP Advisory, where we support businesses in raising funds and provide advice on the right type of funding to grow their business.
So, as I said, we approved lending for businesses that weren't particularly profitable, and also declined businesses that looked highly successful on paper. The difference internally was always confidence.
This is quite critical because when you're approaching lending as a banker, your thought process is always about the fact that you're taking a risk and making a decision. While there were a lot of successful businesses with good turnover levels, that didn't always mean they were profitable, or that the business owner had that level of confidence.
So, how do banks actually think? The one question that goes through a banker's mind is not really about the amount of money or the lending – the question is always risk. How much risk am I taking here in approving this facility to a client, and are we sure that the client is going to be able to pay us back? That's the big question.
Often when I've looked at business plans, there's too little focus on the risk the client is proposing to the bank, and too much on the size of the loan.
What are some of the factors we look at? From a banking perspective, we look at character first.
Again, when I've looked at applications for lending, there's never enough about the management team or the story behind the business, or why it started. Banks would always tend to lend to people before businesses – business people are what make businesses work. A business doesn't work by itself; the heartbeat of every business is the people behind it.
What's the experience level? What's the track record? How much transparency and communication is there? We look far beyond just the financials.
The second thing is capacity. I've seen a lot of cases where business owners say they have a high turnover level and are profitable, but while they might be profitable on paper, that doesn't necessarily mean the business is generating that level of cash. So businesses that look quite profitable can, when you look at the bank statement or what's coming through, show clear cash flow problems.
Capital is the third thing we look at, or what we like to call skin in the game. How much are you putting in personally? Are you expecting the financial institution or investor to take all of the risk?
The next thing we look at is collateral. Security doesn't guarantee approval, and it's often misunderstood that providing security automatically means an application will be approved. Security doesn't equal affordability, which is what our bankers are often looking for – banks are looking for repayment. Security just helps reduce losses when things do go wrong.
The fifth point is conditions – industry outlook, customer concentration and supply chain risk. Certain industries historically face challenges; hospitality, for example, faced a lot of challenges after the COVID crisis. In that case, a business really has to articulate how it would mitigate those industry challenges.
What's the competition in the sector? What's the customer concentration? If a client provides roughly 20% of your income and you lose that client, what would that look like? Two identical businesses could get two different decisions depending on market conditions alone.
Businesses applying too late is very frustrating, sometimes, from a lender's perspective. I strongly say to clients that if you're working on your business daily, or five or six days a week, you should have a good idea of when your cash flow tightens, when you need lending and what your growth looks like. Banks get nervous when funding is requested out of desperation rather than planning.
There's often no clear purpose – you're asking for a significant amount of money, but don't have a detailed breakdown of what it will be used for. In cases where approval happens without a clear plan, the founder often ends up spending on other things that don't help repay the loan.
There's often no repayment plan either. A lot of business plans talk about why they need the lending, but don't clearly articulate how they're going to repay it. Many of the plans I've looked at don't say enough about what the monthly repayment will look like, or how they plan to make those repayments.
I've also seen forecasts that are very hard to believe, where a business with single-digit growth is forecasting double-digit growth through the lending request, which we know is often not realistic given market conditions. Unfortunately, you also get owners who don't know their numbers well and come in to ask for lending regardless. Once a banker senses there's no real understanding of the numbers, they start to lose confidence.
Another big factor I saw during my time in banking was poor financial reporting. This is very much underestimated across businesses. Most businesses get their annual accounts from the accountant, which is great for compliance and tax reasons, but they don't have a month-by-month breakdown of what they're actually doing – and that often plays a critical role in whether a financial institution approves lending or not.
So what makes a business fundable? It's not about having a polished plan – it's good to have one that comes across well, but what you're really looking for is monthly reporting. What does the cash flow forecasting look like? What scenario planning is there, and how do board meetings happen?
Everything that gives the banker or financial institution confidence that the owners have an absolute understanding and control of the business matters. Funding, if done correctly through a process, ends up being a natural outcome rather than the objective you're chasing.
Then there's the business case – why are you borrowing the money, what's the opportunity, and what's the background? A thorough assessment of the management team is also important. Again, this is very often not presented in the detail required by financial institutions.
As I said, people run businesses, so you're looking to understand clearly the people behind the management team, financial performance and cash flow analysis – what's actually going to happen versus what's likely to happen. Then there's the decision itself: risk-mitigating factors, security and the final recommendation, all of which come through in the credit report.
So what are some of the red flags that often come up? Weak bookkeeping is one of them. It's critical, and it's often underestimated in terms of how well the business runs. A really good bookkeeper is essential to having a successful business – someone who can look at the numbers almost on a daily basis. What the bookkeeper does and what the accountant does should really be different in terms of what's covered.
Late accounts, late VAT, declining margins and large directors' loan balances are all red flags. From an operational perspective, if you have customer concentration, the rule of thumb is generally around 20%; anything higher tends to be a worry.
Overtrading is a big one – taking on bigger projects or contracts without the capacity or capability to deliver is often a red flag in itself. A business that doesn't regularly produce management information, has no succession planning, and no contingency planning is a big worry. All of this has to be included in the business plan itself.
I wanted to share, without going into detail, two businesses I worked with. One got funded quite quickly because they applied six months early. All of the data was there – the monthly accounts and forecasts – and they'd also produced, which was very impressive to see, a plan for the downside if things went wrong. The owners knew their numbers really well.
Another business was declined, unfortunately, because cash was already tight. A 40% growth forecast with no downside, no clear ask and accounts that were already late meant there were multiple red flags. While the idea itself was good, there were too many red flags to be able to support that particular client.
So at IAP Advisory, what we do isn't just help you raise funds as a broker – we're also very much strategic advisers. Being ex–commercial bankers, our role is to help you get funding–ready. We don't just introduce lenders until we have a clear funding strategy.
We've often seen cases where clients come to us and say, "I need £1 million." We need to be absolutely sure of the strategy so that it's well aligned with which funders we go to and speak to.
Who do we work with? Owner-managed businesses and SMEs turning over between £250,000 and £25 million across all sectors, though we have deep knowledge in professional services, healthcare and education.
We also specialise in commercial property finance, growth capital, acquisition finance and succession finance. If you're looking to acquire your own premises, we're very good at talking to multiple lenders across the market to help with that. If you have a business that's growing and structured, we can help you get funding to support your growth plan, and also acquisitions, which I think is always a fantastic way to grow a business. If you want to understand how acquisition finance works, we'd be happy to sit down and have a conversation, whether it's a smaller business you're looking to acquire that complements what you're doing.
Again, banks don't just fund business plans – they fund businesses they have confidence in, and that's the confidence IAP Advisory helps you build too.
Thank you for joining. As I mentioned to Beth, I'm happy to offer everyone a free discovery call with anybody who wants to follow up with me later; I believe my details will be shared. Beth, I'll hand it back to you now.
Beth: I think we've got some questions in the chat already. And just to echo that, I've popped Orias' Enterprise Nation profile in the chat, so please do go ahead and book a free discovery call.
Right, let's go to a bit of Q&A, if that's okay. So what's the single biggest reason you've rejected a business plan that looked strong on paper?
Orias: For me, it's where I genuinely didn't believe the business was viable – that's where I've often had to reject. You can put together great words and a lot of information, but if it's not viable, it's not viable.
If you have an industry where we know there are a lot of challenges, and the business doesn't have a USP or something that makes it viable, then even though the business plan might look great, it becomes very hard to believe the business has any credibility at all if the owner can't articulate that USP.
Beth: Yeah, that makes sense. So, looking in the Q&A: what section of a business plan do lenders typically spend the most time reviewing?
Orias: All of it. If a business plan is well written, then a banker or a funding institution will read it from start to finish. Something I really like, and always recommend to clients, is that your business should tell a story.
If you have a business plan that's very analytical but doesn't tell enough of the background, the founders or the long-term outcome, then it loses its whole selling point. So something we often do with clients is say that your business has to tell a story – the numbers have to tell a story, the founders have to tell a story, and the why has to tell a story. It's all reviewed from start to finish, and it all has to make sense from start to finish.
Beth: That's good to know – so there's not one particular section; it all has to be polished and tell a story. So, what are the most common mistakes you see in cash flow forecasts?
Orias: Too optimistic. You often see a cash flow forecast and know that's just not going to happen – a business that's been growing at four or 5% forecasting double–digit growth, with nothing in the plan that actually supports how that's going to happen.
Also, you look at macroeconomic conditions where it's already hard to grow in that particular sector, and the business is forecasting double–digit growth anyway. While you still give the benefit of the doubt to the business, you're looking for a USP or something that makes it credible to believe that growth would actually happen.
So I often say to clients I work with that it's better to go in a little bit lower when speaking to the bank – realistically, this is what we think we will achieve. I've seen many optimistic cash flow forecasts.
Beth: Right, okay, so be realistic – not all guns blazing. Got it. So what assumptions in a financial forecast tend to raise red flags?
Orias: Market conditions, sometimes – the first one is where you're looking at growth based on certain macroeconomic conditions, which we know are outside the business owner's control.
There's also the expectation that things will always be stable and not plan for a downside. I'm often surprised how many business plans don't talk about what would happen if things went wrong, and how they'd mitigate that – they're always very optimistic in terms of the forecast output.
So what we recommend to clients is to look at the best case, and actually have three scenarios: the best case, everything going well, and the worst case. That way, you're fully presenting a plan for any of the scenarios that may happen.
Beth: Got it. So there's a question about whether creating a business plan is absolutely necessary. This member would like to know: can they put together a feasibility plan with an executive summary of the business, or would that not suffice?
Orias: I think it depends on the business, and it also comes down to the purpose of the lending – why you're asking for it. I don't think there's a perfect blueprint around this, and that's where having strategic advice comes in when you're going up for lending or putting together a business plan.
It's the purpose of the application that guides the business plan, not the other way round. So, for an established business that's been operating for a while, where you can find information about it online, do you need the same level of detail as a start–up asking for lending, with trading history and so on? That's really what decides how the business plan will look going forward.
Beth: Great, that makes sense. So, if that member who posted the question would like to continue the conversation and provide some more detail, I'm sure Orias would be happy to provide some more answers around that.
Brilliant, so I think that's all our questions for today, Orias. If you could go away with some main takeaways from this session, what would they be?
Orias: I think when you think about lending or borrowing, the first question you have to ask yourself is: if this were my money, would I lend it? Would I approve it? That's the point I often ask – you have to take the sentiment and emotion out of it and say, would I be able to repay this money back?
Once you're satisfied with that, look out for an experienced, unbiased, independent strategic adviser to give you sincere advice. We often do a free one–hour discovery call at IAP Advisory to talk it through and see whether it's realistic.
So for me, the takeaways are: would I lend if this were my money, and have I had an independent review of what I'm doing going forward?
Beth: Absolutely, that's great, thank you very much. Thanks so much for the session today, and thank you, everyone, for joining. As I mentioned, please do reach out to Orias, and we'll be sending the recording along with some further resources today.
So thank you so much for your time, Orias, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today.
Orias: Thank you, everyone. Bye.
Beth: Bye.
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