Main Street Wednesday – Boefly is the Franchise Financing Disruptor

September 3, 2014

By Bob Coleman
Editor, Coleman Report

boeflyphilly“We think the old way is broken,” says Rozman, the 6-foot-7 front man for BoeFly who churns out new ideas faster than his boss can evaluate them. That boss, CEO Bobby Tannenhauser, takes pride in BoeFly, and in his former career as a small-business lender, in getting capital to people who are shut out of the system, like women and minorities and young military veterans—and since the economic collapse, prospective single-unit franchisees.

BoeFly “makes capital access available to everyone,” says Tannenhauser. “We’re democratizing the process.

The quotes are from a Franchise Times article profiling Boefly, an online lending platform that matches borrowers with lenders. Here’s more.

Morgan Johns, senior vice president of the SBA lending group for Conestoga Bank in Allentown, Pennsylvania, says his bank was looking about three years ago for “alternative channels to produce a pipeline of loans,” and then specifically an entrée into franchise loans, and came upon BoeFly.

Conestoga took a deal for a Kiddie Academy franchisee out of Baltimore and it turned out well. That led to meetings with Kiddie Academy executives to learn everything about the brand, which in turn led to today, when the early childhood educator is one of the bank’s preferred franchise groups with which they do loans around the country, far from headquarters.

The BoeFly service “allowed us to go from one or two brands to doubling and tripling that in two to three years,” Johns says. “It accelerated our exposure and growth in the franchise world.” Other preferred franchisors for Conestoga include Goddard Schools, Sport Clips, Great Clips, Arby’s, FastSigns, McAllister’s Deli and Hand & Stone—quality franchisors, to be sure, but not necessarily the type (like McDonald’s) where money automatically flows.

“A lot of the banks are chasing the same names,” Johns says. “BoeFly, to their credit, has disbursed those percentages across more brands, meaning the franchisors are finding more banks that are able to do deals for them.”

Read the entire article here