The Families Behind the Facilities

Disciplined capital for lower middle-market businesses with real assets, real operators, and real stakes.

 

A third-generation, family-owned trucking company serving the Southeast and Midwest. For decades, their trucks have moved goods across short-haul and long-haul routes, quietly supporting regional supply chains. Relationships with shippers built over years. A fleet maintained through economic cycles. Drivers and dispatchers spread across multiple states.

 

When they came to us, they needed to refinance existing debt and unlock working capital to continue growing. Their bank was not moving fast enough, and the opportunity would not wait.

 

We provided an $8.3 million senior secured term loan.

 

 

 

 

The Conversation We Are Not Having

Private credit is having a moment in the headlines — and not a flattering one. Write-downs at large funds. Questions around covenant-lite structures. Concerns about concentrated exposures tied to leveraged buyouts.

Some of that scrutiny is warranted. When billion-dollar facilities are underwritten with thin protections and optimistic assumptions, risk can accumulate quickly.

 

But that conversation describes a different market than the one we operate in.

 

Garrington Private Credit focuses on the lower middle market — facilities of $2 million to $30 million extended to businesses with tangible collateral, identifiable cash flows, and owner-operators whose personal capital and livelihoods are closely tied to their businesses.

 

These are operating companies. Trucking companies supporting regional supply chains. Surgical centers expanding patient capacity. Manufacturers unlocking equipment value to acquire competitors and preserve jobs.

 

The risk profile is different. The stakes are personal.

 

Transactions of this size occupy an important but often overlooked position in the lending landscape — too operationally intensive for large institutional lenders to prioritize, yet too large for many local credit providers to support consistently. Well-structured capital in this range plays a vital role in supporting growing businesses that sit between traditional banking capacity and larger syndicated markets.

 

The Gap That Does Not Make Headlines

The need is growing. Regulatory capital requirements, internal lending thresholds, and the operational complexity of smaller facilities have gradually shifted many traditional lenders toward larger, more standardized transactions. The result is a growing population of creditworthy businesses — with tangible assets, established revenues, and clear growth potential — that lack access to timely capital.

 

Recent surveys reinforce this dynamic. According to the Federal Reserve’s Small Business Credit Survey:

 

 

For many of these businesses, the challenge is not credit quality. It is access.

It is the business that delays a hire. The contractor who passes on a bid. The manufacturer who postpones an expansion because the line of credit did not arrive in time.

Private credit has grown in part to address this gap — not as a lender of last resort, but as a lender of appropriate resort, when speed matters, when collateral falls outside a bank’s template, and when opportunity moves faster than a traditional credit process.

 

What Discipline Looks Like

Disciplined lending begins with structure: senior secured positions, tangible collateral such as equipment, receivables, and real estate, conservative advance rates, and hands-on monitoring throughout the life of the loan.

Alignment matters just as much. Our investors’ capital sits alongside entrepreneurs and operators whose livelihoods depend on the outcome.

When a third-generation trucking company needs $8 million to recapitalize and fund growth, we are not underwriting a spread. We are underwriting the business itself. When a surgical center expands, there are patients on the other side of that facility. When a manufacturer acquires a complementary business using equipment financing, jobs are preserved and supply chains remain intact.

 

 

 

 

The Stakes Beyond the Spreadsheet

Small and medium-sized businesses employ nearly half of the private workforce in North America. They are the backbone of regional economies, the engine of middle-class employment, and the employers who know their people by name. When these businesses cannot access capital, the effects ripple through everyday decisions — and everyday lives.

The role of private credit done well is straightforward: to provide disciplined capital to operating businesses with real assets and clear growth opportunities. To move with urgency when opportunity requires it. To structure loans carefully. And to provide the financing that allows those businesses to keep moving forward — for the operators running them, the employees who depend on them, and the communities they support.