Our Approach
A typical customer
The interesting thing about a typical Bathgate customer is that there simply is no such thing - we deal with a wide variety of businesses/organisations looking to purchase an even wider variety of assets for an almost endless number of commercial reasons.
That being said, our customers do tend to be either established well-run organisations, or newer starts with a strong financial and personal commitment from the owner. Beyond this, the combinations of business sector, asset type and reasons for purchase are reassuringly diverse!
For example, amongst our existing customers we have sole traders, partnerships, limited companies including PLCs and a number of public bodies such as schools, colleges and NHS; for whom we have arranged deals from as little as £1,000 to £1m+.
How we evaluate a deal
Given our diverse base of customers, it may seem impossible to assess each customer effectively – yet, how we ensure each deal is diligently evaluated goes to the heart of how we operate. We are not a ‘sausage machine’ with a risk policy that assumes that one size fits all... in fact, we are very much the opposite.
We want to understand our customers’ business, and the people behind it. Ideally, this will involve a face-to-face meeting which, with the current trend towards arms-length transactions, may sound a little old fashioned. However, we’ve found that by getting to know our customers we’ve been able to consider and present deals in a way that would not have been possible without really understanding the business or having met the key people.
In many cases this has secured funding that might not have otherwise been available and in others we have been totally upfront and explained that the deal just cannot be done... which, unfortunately, is sometimes the case.
Bathgate – Lender or Broker?
We are in the very privileged position of being able to lend our own money or introduce deals to other finance providers.
Being both a Lender and a Broker has opened up our services to a much wider market. We can now place a deal for a profitable, long-established business purchasing the obvious, sought-after assets with strong residual values (eg vehicles); through to a well-funded new start business purchasing a very specific asset which doesn’t have a readily available resale market.
In many ways we would like to write every deal ourselves, but to do so would not always be appropriate. This level of independence and acting in our customers’ best interests are core values at Bathgate.