When You Have to Decline the Deal, Stay the Hero
A non-bank financing advisory built around banker referrals. You stay the relationship; we extend your reach. We don't take deposits, we don't compete for the depository, and the client comes back to you cleaner when the trajectory allows.
Founder & CEO Michael Kodinsky personally handles every banker-referred discovery call.
You stay the relationship. We extend your reach.
Most commercial bankers turn down 30–40% of their loan requests for credit-box reasons even when the underlying business is sound — thin DSCR, tax returns that don't yet reflect current revenue, leverage from a recent acquisition, industry concentration the bank can't take. The credit need is real. Your client knows it's real. And right now your client is one Google search away from a financing broker who'll pitch them an MCA at a 1.4 factor rate and quietly try to move the depository over the next twelve months.
The alternative is a referral to an advisor whose business model depends on never threatening yours. That's how Serve Funding works. We exist downstream of your decline. The client gets credit; you stay the hero; the operating account stays with you; and 12 to 36 months later, when the trajectory has cleaned up the financials, the client comes back to your credit team in a position to qualify.
“We're a, sort of, financing is our own — my wife and I work it together. It's a business financing advisory. So we're not a direct lender. We are like a broker that represents our client to the lending world, alternative from banks. Bankers that we partner with are often introducing us when a client has a need that the bank can't fulfill for one reason or another, and we seek to understand the full scope of what you're trying to do, what the options are.”
— Michael Kodinsky, Founder of Serve Funding
Why we exist — Mike's origin story
Mike Kodinsky came up on the direct-lender side. For years he was the person bankers referred their declined clients to — running asset-based deals out of one specific credit box. That experience is what built Serve Funding, and it's the reason banker referrals are at the center of how we operate today.
“David Phillips and I — we were competitors at one time. I was doing very much what he was doing on the asset-based side, and we would get referrals from bankers primarily. I did a study at one point, looked back two years, and figured out we were closing one deal out of every 15 or 16 looks we got. And the problem with that wasn't so much the closing ratio — sales is sales, it's always going to be a numbers game. It was the fact that on so many of those other ones we didn't end up closing, we still thought we had a deal, and we went down the road and spent time — which is to say, spent the client's time, and our own time — only to hit a wall later.”
— Michael Kodinsky, Founder of Serve Funding
That experience is what turned Mike into a channel-neutral, product-neutral advisor. When the only product in your bag is asset-based lending, every client's situation has to fit asset-based lending — and you spend weeks of the client's time before you find out it doesn't. The job of a real advisor is to triage the situation across every product available, not to force the situation into the one product you happen to sell.
For a referring banker, this matters in one concrete way: when you send a client to Serve Funding, the client's time is the resource we're most protective of. If we can't place the deal, we say so on the discovery call rather than after three weeks of underwriting. The banker who sent the referral never has to apologize to their client for the wasted process — which is the outcome that quietly kills banker-referral relationships across this industry.
What we do — and what we don't
We do
- •Invoice factoring and asset-based lending
- •Working capital loans and lines of credit
- •Equipment financing and sale-leaseback
- •Purchase-order funding (domestic + international)
- •Government contract financing (federal, state, local)
- •Bridge capital for timing gaps and M&A
- •Non-bank SBA placement (referred to specialty lenders)
- •Real estate cash-out for working capital
- •MCA consolidation refinances
- •Layered capital stacks (multiple products simultaneously)
We don't
- •Take deposits or open operating accounts
- •Compete with your bank for the depository relationship
- •Pay referral fees (legally restricted for bankers anyway)
- •Raise equity or place equity capital (we refer out)
- •Sell your client products that don't fit their situation
- •Cold-pitch your client services they didn't ask for
- •Hold long-term debt on our balance sheet (we're an advisor, not a lender)
- •Work consumer financing, cannabis, or crypto deals
- •Push a client into a deal because we want to close them
What kind of clients fit
Our sweet spot is a growing business that should be bankable in 12 to 24 months but isn't today. Specifically:
| Criterion | Range | Sweet spot |
|---|---|---|
| Annual revenue | $500K – $100MM+ | $2MM – $50MM |
| Deal size | $250K – $100MM+ | $500K – $10MM |
| Time in business | 2+ years preferred | 3+ years |
| Why bank declined | Almost any credit-box reason | Thin DSCR, tax-return lag, leverage, industry concentration |
| Customer type | B2B, B2G; some B2C with the right structure | B2B with strong commercial customers |
| Industries | Most | Staffing, manufacturing, healthcare supply, gov contractors, construction, distribution |
We can do meaningfully smaller and meaningfully larger than the sweet spot. We've closed $250K factoring lines and $50MM ABL facilities in the same year. The sweet spot is just the range where the structural fit is cleanest and the timeline to bankability is most predictable.
What happens after the referral
- 1
Discovery call (20 minutes)
Mike Kodinsky personally takes the call. He maps the situation — collateral position, revenue trajectory, use of funds, timing — and identifies which two or three products fit. If nothing fits, he says so honestly on this call.
- 2
Diligence and lender shopping
Serve Funding builds a data room with the client, shops the deal across the relevant subset of our 30+ lender network, and returns with two or three real options — not just one quoted rate but actual term sheets the client can compare.
- 3
Delivery — closing the facility
Mike negotiates terms on the client's behalf, coordinates underwriting, and guides closing. You're kept in the loop on closing timing and any material structural changes — we don't run separately from the banking relationship.
- 4
Ongoing advisory — and graduation back to the bank
Most clients stay engaged with us through one or two refinances as the business matures. The endpoint of a well-built engagement is often a hand-back to the original banker once the financials qualify for a bank line again — typically 12 to 36 months depending on what got them declined in the first place.
- 5
The warm hand-back to your credit team
When a client looks ready, Mike emails the original referring banker with a short summary of where the business is — current facility, monthly debt service, recent tax-return trajectory, DSCR posture — so your credit team can pick the conversation up cleanly. You stay in the driver's seat on whether and when to re-open the bank credit conversation. If Serve Funding ever has to decline a referred deal we couldn't place, the same courtesy: a short written summary back to you so you know exactly where the client landed and why.
“How our time is our most valuable resource, because it's literally the one that's finite. You cannot make more — everything else in the world, you can make more of, but not time. It's part of my talk track to bankers, because the worst outcome for a banker referral is when the client wastes three weeks with the wrong advisor and comes back angry. We'd rather tell a client honestly on the first call that we can't help than spend their time pretending we can.”
— Michael Kodinsky, Founder of Serve Funding
What to say to your client when you make the referral
You know your client better than we do. The framing below is just a starting point — adapt it to how the two of you actually talk.
“Our credit team can't get this done in our box — it's a structural fit issue, not a question of whether your business is sound. I want to introduce you to a financing advisory we've worked with before. They're channel-neutral, banker-referred, and they shop deals across about 30 alternative lenders to find what actually fits the situation. They don't take deposits, so your accounts stay with us. The founder personally takes the first call and he's straight with people about whether he can help — he'll tell you on the call if it's not a fit. First call is 20 minutes. Here's the link.”
Direct link to share: servefunding.com/discover
Banker FAQ
The questions referring bankers ask before sending the first client.
Useful links to send your clients
The content on this site is built so you can send a client straight to the page that matches their situation. A few starting points:
For clients who want to see the full menu first.
For clients weighing two specific products.
Send a manufacturing or staffing client straight to their industry page.
For clients who need a conceptual frame before our call.
For clients already in stacked MCAs — the consolidation arc.
32 plain-English definitions of terms your client might encounter on a term sheet.
Ready to make the introduction?
Open a pre-drafted intro email in your own client. Edit it however you like — we just wanted to take the blank-page problem off your plate.
Or send your client straight to servefunding.com/discover.
