On last week’s Billboard Insider podcast Insider had this exchange with John Weller, co-publisher of Billboard Insider and a partner in Billboard Loans, LLC.

What’s one thing borrowers don’t think about that they should?

Let me give a couple of basics…Keep good records.  If you want to deal with the lending market being able to show that you can produce timely quality management information is a real plus.  Lenders love timeliness, consistency and quality of financial information…

Another thing is …deliver news early – whether it’s good news or bad news.  There’s a tendency when you have good news you call your banker and tell them right away.  But, you are going to find that even being timely on bad news, including an explanation on what’s going on and how you’re going to fix it…will create a strong relationship with a lender.

A lot of businesses don’t think about the need for key man life insurance for small companies.  The value of being able to pay a lender off in the unfortunate circumstance where maybe an owner passes away is a real gift that you can give to your family…We’ve had two times where we’ve had loans paid off because of the death of an owner operator, but fortunately they took the time to put key man insurance in place and it paid off the full amount of the debt…

So what do I do if I’m in poor health and I may have a medical condition which makes key man difficult or prohibitively expensive?

From a lending standpoint what we want to see if that there’s some level of transition set in place.  So that we know as a lender if something were to happen…there’s a plan in place for another qualified individual, whether it’s a family member or a trusted employee where they will step in and run the business, that’s a very important thing to have.

You can access the interview on our website or by looking up “billboard insider podcast” on stitcher, tunein, spotify or google play.  We will have an iTunes link live soon.  The next two Billboard Insider podcasts will feature talks with IBOUSA’s Chris Cowlbeck (February 27) and the OAAA’s Nancy Fletcher (March 13).

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