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Accountants, lawyers, and other professional services firms have unique borrowing profiles built on partnership structures, trust accounts, and steady but non-linear cash flow. We arrange practice acquisition and succession finance, partner buy-in loans, and working capital facilities structured around your firm's billing cycles. Alasdair's banking background means he knows how to present professional services firms in a way that unlocks funding most generalist brokers can't access.
Accounting, legal, engineering, consulting and advisory firms have borrowing profiles shaped by partnership and trust structures, work-in-progress and lock-up, and goodwill that has value to lenders but little to a liquidator. The classic transactions are equity buy-ins that fund an incoming partner's stake, and succession or acquisition of another practice, both underwritten largely against maintainable earnings and profit per equity partner rather than hard assets. Specialist lenders in this niche will advance high LVRs against goodwill and even lend unsecured to established firms, pricing off the partnership's track record, client concentration, fee recurrence and the strength of the partner agreement.
Lock-up days, being work-in-progress plus debtors, are the operational lever, and a firm that bills and collects promptly needs a smaller facility. Service trusts, related-entity rent and the tax treatment of partner drawings all shape serviceability. Cash flow is steady but non-linear, with quarterly BAS work, annual compliance peaks, and milestone or contingent billing in litigation and transactions, so facilities need headroom through the trough. Professional indemnity, run-off cover and regulatory obligations sit in the credit assessment. We package partnership accounts, the buy-in or acquisition terms, a work-in-progress and debtor analysis and a partner-by-partner earnings view, then tender across the banks and the professional-services specialists, comparing rate, whether security is limited to guarantees, amortisation that matches a partner's tenure, and how each lender treats goodwill on a future exit.
Alasdair is a former banker and Executive Manager at both Westpac and CBA, bringing decades of senior banking experience to every commercial deal. He understands exactly how lenders assess risk, structure facilities, and price commercial debt, and he uses that insider knowledge to negotiate outcomes that most brokers simply can't access. If you're looking for an adviser who has run the bank's side of the table, you've found him.