What a Thousand Closings Taught Me About Saying No
The transactions I declined shaped the business more than the ones I closed.
I have closed more than a thousand transactions and funded more than a hundred million dollars. People ask about the closings. The declines are what actually built the business.
Closing is not the skill
Anyone can close a deal that should not happen. It requires no talent at all. You simply stop asking questions at the moment the answers would get inconvenient.
The skill is qualifying. Knowing inside the first ten minutes whether this should proceed, and being willing to say so while everyone can still walk away cheaply.
Early in my career I closed things I should not have. Nothing improper, just wrong. Wrong size, wrong timing, wrong structure for what the business in front of me actually needed. Every one of them cost me the relationship eventually, and the relationship was worth more than the fee.
Three tells
The urgency does not match the stated use. When someone needs the money faster than the thing they say they need it for, the stated purpose is usually not the real one. This is rarely dishonesty. More often it is a hole they have not said out loud yet, sometimes not even to themselves.
They will not tell you the other offers. An owner shopping honestly will tell you what else is on the table, because they want you to beat it. Someone who will not is either negotiating poorly or stacking. Stacking is the mechanism by which a survivable cash flow problem becomes an unsurvivable one.
The capital does not solve anything. If the money fixes this month but not the reason this month happened, you are financing a decline. The honest answer in that conversation is that they do not have a capital problem, and delivering that answer is the entire job.
The only metric that cannot be faked
Roughly sixty percent of my business is repeat and renewal.
You cannot manufacture that number. No marketing budget produces it. It comes from people funding a second and third time, and from people sending someone they know. It is a lagging indicator of every no you said two years earlier.
What saying no costs
It costs you the deal in front of you. Every time. Immediately. There is no version where the discipline is free.
It is not a moral position, it is arithmetic. One relationship that funds five times across six years is worth more than five relationships that fund once and never call again. The math is not close.
The people who last in credit are not the best closers. They are the ones with the most reliable instinct for what should not happen.
How to evaluate someone in this business
Do not ask about their biggest transaction. Anyone can narrate a win.
Ask about one they walked away from. Listen for whether they can explain the reasoning without positioning themselves as the hero, and whether they can name what it cost them. That answer tells you more in ninety seconds than a track record does in an hour.
Edward M. Liceaga has spent more than 25 years across private credit, specialty finance, and capital markets, with over $100 million funded and more than 1,000 transactions closed internationally. MBA, Derivatives Concentration, Loyola University Chicago. More at edwardliceaga.com.