Independence
How this works, and how we make money
A site that publishes default rates about named businesses owes you its method. Here is all of it. The data work, the method behind every figure and the reading of the numbers are all Gene Deghtyar’s — there is no committee, which is deliberate: one named person is accountable for all of it, and his address is on every correction.
What we take money for
Display advertising. Advertisers have no say in anything you read.
Affiliate links for services a new owner needs — bookkeeping, insurance, payroll, entity setup. Never lenders.
A paid course on buying a business with an SBA loan.
What we will not take money for
Lender referral fees. No bank pays to appear, to rank higher or to be recommended. If that ever changes it will be disclosed at the point of recommendation, and we will still publish their bad numbers.
Your application. We take no applications and sell no details. Nothing you type into a calculator leaves your browser.
Removing a number. Any business may publish a response on its own page, unedited. Requests to delete accurate public data are declined.
How the default rates are calculated
the part that mattersLoans are never pooled across years. SBA charge-offs surface three to five years after approval, so a brand or lender that grew recently looks spotless on an all-time average. Every figure groups loans by the year they were approved and compares cohorts at the same age.
Only funded loans count. About 137,000 cancelled or never-funded 7(a) approvals are excluded. Leaving them in the denominator deflates every rate, and it is the most common way these numbers get published wrong.
Franchise, industry and state default rates are counted by loan — charged-off loans divided by the loans old enough to judge — so the percentage always equals the plain count you can check for yourself (N of M), measured within seven years of approval. Lender charge-off rates are dollar-weighted — charged-off dollars over approved dollars, grouped by origination year, over five years, because for a lender it is the dollars at risk that matter.
Nothing thin gets a page. A brand needs 30 loans old enough to judge before it is published. Below that the number is noise.
Brand names are merged by hand. SBA's franchise field contains many spellings of the same brand and several brands that merely look alike. A curated alias list resolves them; Holiday Inn and Holiday Inn Express are deliberately kept apart, because they are different investments. And when a brand rebrands to a genuinely new name — Experimac became Experimax after a trademark dispute — the federal file records the two separately; where that materially changes a brand’s record we say so on the brand’s own page.
What we deliberately do not publish
Street addresses, and anyone still repaying. The federal files carry the name and address of every borrower. We do name the businesses whose SBA loans were charged off — with their city and the SBA’s loss — both in our charge-off records and on each brand’s page, because a default record is not believable without the actual cases behind it, and every line is public-domain federal data. That is where we stop. We omit street addresses, we publish nothing about borrowers whose loans are current or fully repaid, and we build no general index of who in your town has simply borrowed.
Advice dressed as data. We publish numbers and explain terms. We are not your banker, lawyer or accountant.
Corrections
If you believe a figure is wrong, write to us with the detail and we will re-run it against the source file and publish the outcome either way. Any business described here may submit a response for publication on its own page, unedited. The full policy.