Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing bonus story of the week.

Today on Forbes, small business loans could be easier to get thanks to this entrepreneur.

Small business administration loans are a great deal.

They are federally guaranteed, profitable for banks, and a boon to both entrepreneurs and the overall economy.

Some 20% of the American labor force is employed by companies with fewer than 20 employees.

But bankers hate to make these loans.

There are 9,000 federally insured banks and credit unions in the U.S., yet only 1,452 of them

made any 7A loans, as they are known in the jargon, in 2024.

The long-term trend is bad, too. Ignoring a spike during the pandemic, the overall number of

SBA lenders is down 9% from 2017. So what's going on? To hear small banks tell it, one big reason they don't make

7A loans is the expertise and staff needed to navigate and document compliance with SBA rules.

Mess up that complicated paperwork, and both the bank and the borrower can suffer delays

or even put the SBA guarantee at risk.

Enter Chris Hearn, who is 52 years old and a big name in small business lending.

He's betting that small banks want back in on the SBA guarantee, so long as someone else

handles the red tape. In January, he launched Phoenix Lender Services, a 40-person team that bills itself as a

full-service shop that will handle underwriting, servicing, and liquidations, so community lenders can

offer SBA loans without building an entire back office or risking a ruinous mistake.

Hearn, who now operates out of Winter Park, Florida, first got involved in SBA lending in the 1990s

when he started his business career at the old GE Capital.

In 2015, he founded Fountainhead Commercial Capital, a non-bank lender, which made more than $28

billion in small business loans, most of them SBA guaranteed.

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