After a declineAugust 7, 20264 min read

What a decline actually means, and the one question worth asking

Most declines arrive with a sentence that explains nothing. Sometimes nothing arrives at all.

The reason is not cruelty. Reasons are internal, they can be awkward to put in writing, and the person who wrote it has eleven other files. So the applicant goes away believing the problem was the business, when usually the problem was the file.

Those are different problems. One of them takes years to fix and one of them takes a quarter.

Files fail on one line

A file stops on something small far more often than it stops on something fundamental.

A registry name that does not match the bank account. A missing quarter with no sentence next to it explaining what happened. Money moving between two companies the same person controls, with nothing written down. Payroll remittances that slipped for a month.

None of those is a judgment about whether the business is any good. All of them stop a file, and none of them appears in the letter you receive.

The one question

There is one message worth sending after a decline. It works because it asks for one thing, it releases them from defending the decision, and it can be answered without disclosing anything internal.

Copy this, and send it as it isSubject: My application, one question Hello [name], Thank you for the decision on my application. I am not asking you to reverse it and I am not asking for the internal reasoning. One question, and any answer at all is useful to me. If this file came back to you in ninety days, what one thing would need to be different? I understand if you cannot be specific. Even a general steer tells me where to spend the next three months. Thank you for your time, [your name] [business name]

Two rules if you send it

Send it once, and do not follow up. The message works because it costs them almost nothing to answer. A second one costs them something.

And when an answer comes back, write down their words rather than your paraphrase. The paraphrase is where the useful part goes missing. "They said the financials were thin" and "they said there was no balance sheet for the most recent year" point at completely different jobs.

When the answer is not enough

Sometimes it comes back vague. Sometimes it does not come back. Sometimes it is specific and you still cannot tell which part of your file it is pointing at.

That is the case for having somebody read the file itself.

See where your financing file stands

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LenderReady is an educational service, not a lender, broker, or financial advisor. Lending criteria vary by institution and change over time; treat this as a starting point, not a guarantee.