Every year, sound businesses with real revenue and real customers are turned down for funding. Rarely because the business was weak — usually because the owner never understood what the person across the desk was actually evaluating.
An Unfair Advantage is the system John Garry built from fifty years on both sides of that desk. Not theory. Not motivation. The actual mechanics of how funding decisions get made — and how to stand on the right side of them.
Most owners prepare for a funding application the way they were told to: gather the tax returns, print the bank statements, write the plan, hope. Then the decline arrives with no explanation, and the assumption sets in that the business simply was not good enough.
That is almost never what happened. Funding decisions run on a set of criteria that is rarely explained to the applicant — because no one on the lender's side of the desk is paid to explain it. Owners who understand those criteria structure their business around them long before they apply. Owners who do not, apply blind.
That gap is the whole subject of this book. Once you can see what is being evaluated, you can prepare for it. That is the advantage — and it is only unfair if you are the one without it.
What decision-makers weigh when an application crosses the desk — and why it differs from what most owners are told to prepare.
How a business is structured and presented long before an application is filed, and why that groundwork carries more weight than the application itself.
Two separate systems that owners routinely confuse — and what that confusion costs when the file is reviewed.
This is written the way one business owner talks to another. Plain language, no jargon, no filler.
John Garry became a self-made millionaire at twenty-six and went on to build and operate more than twelve business enterprises. He is a commercial and residential real estate investor in Southern California and the founder and chief executive of Wilshire Financial Group, Inc., of Beverly Hills.
Before any of that, he founded In Person Inc., trained as an ITU journeyman typographer and printer, and worked as a Million Dollar Club advertising copywriter and direct mail marketing expert. He was editor and publisher of a national financial newspaper with a circulation of 220,000, and has written seven books on business and finance.
He works today as a business consultant and copywriter, and has spent decades helping owners get approved for capital they were told they could not have.
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The book is the system in your own hands. For owners who would rather have the work done alongside them, Wilshire Financial Group takes on a limited number of clients directly — funding strategy, corporate structure, and capital placement, run by the same person who wrote the book.
