One of the challenges of getting a new fiber network funded is to satisfy all of the requirements of bankers in order to make them comfortable to make a loan. In my experience one of the hardest hurdles for traditional bankers to overcome is their desire to have safe collateral for every loan. Collateral is typically a hard asset that can be liquidated to pay off the loan should the borrower be unable to do so. Bankers are used to lending into businesses where there are hard assets they know are good collateral. Loans for assets like buildings or large construction equipment are considered safe since the assets can be easily resold. Unfortunately, fiber networks don’t make for good collateral.

I’ve worked with half a dozen different clients recently where the bank asked this question. The bankers want to understand the ‘value’ of an installed fiber network should the loan go into default. It doesn’t take much web research for them to find failed fiber projects where the fiber was sold for pennies on the dollar. The truthful answer to the question is that once installed, fiber has little intrinsic value as an asset.

Companies without good collateral assets have a much harder time borrowing money and this issue is not unique to fiber network. For example, firms that sell labor hours like engineers, CPAs and lawyers often encounter the same resistance with banks when trying to buy money to grow.

The right response to the collateral question is to convince the bank that they are asking the wrong question. The value in a fiber network is not in the fiber, it’s in the revenues that are generated from that fiber. Some bankers understand this and I know several fiber overbuilders who have convinced a bank to provide a cash-based line of credit. These lines of credit are typically short-term loans that can be used perpetually to build fiber. The borrower draws the funds to build fiber and repays the loan as quickly as possible as revenues are generated. Lines of credit keep renewing as the borrower pays down the balance. Over time, as the cash flows of the business grows, banks are generally willing to expand the borrowing limit, enabling the fiber builder to build faster. Eventually the loans get too large to qualify for a line of credit, but by this time the business has grown to the point where they can qualify for more traditional loans based upon their balance sheet.

I always try to look at a loan from the banker’s perspective. Building fiber sounds risky. It’s not hard for a banker to go to Google and find numerous fiber projects that didn’t pan out as promised (starting with Google Fiber!). The are no immediate revenues from that fiber until it’s completed and even after that there is no guarantee that any given fiber build will generate enough revenue to cover the debt payments. A banker has little choice but to consider building fiber to be a high-risk undertaking.

The way to overcome the perceived risk of fiber is to package the loan request in a form that bankers will understand. Bankers understand cash more than anything else, and so the best way I’ve found to avoid the collateral discussion is to focus the whole loan discussion on cash flows. The best way to make a banker feel safe about revenues is to pre-sell to customers. It’s a lot easier to ask for money for a specific fiber project if the bank can see a guaranteed revenue stream.

It’s important to remember that bankers don’t understand the fiber business. During the course of a given month they might consider loans from a dozen different industries and they can’t possibly understand the nuances of each one. I have clients who can’t understand why bankers aren’t wowed by their business plan projections – the simple reason is that they have no basis for knowing if the assumptions made in the projections are good or bad. When companies borrow from an industry-friendly place like CoBank their loan application is reviewed by somebody who understands our industry – but a local bank can’t be expected to ever understand enough about the broadband business to trust a projection.

This means that a borrower needs to package a loan request in terms that a banker will understand. All banks understand cash flows and they will be most impressed by a demonstration of sufficient revenues to make loan payments. A loan application that is boiled down to such simple terms has a much higher likelihood of being considered. If you instead let the loan discussion go down the rabbit hole and concentrate on collateral than you are likely not going to get the loan – because fiber networks make lousy collateral. You’ll be more successful by concentrating on things bankers understand, like cash flow, than you will be in trying to convince them to agree with your awesome business plan. Bankers hear all day about can’t-fail opportunities and they know many of them fail.