Ty Crandall, Credit Suite File Ch. 11 Bankruptcy

Key points from the Credit Suite Bankruptcy case

If you know what Credit Suite does and how well-known Ty Crandall is for offering services related to business credit and financing, then the irony of their bankruptcy filing is off the charts. I am not here to pound on the situation that they have found themselves in, but there are three key points to this case and its coverage that I want to point out.

Point 1

From the outside, as a business owner or broker seeking to become more educated in the services and content Credit Suite and Ty Crandall offer, you would never know its business was struggling financially. They are a constant on many different platforms online, including Meta, YouTube, and LinkedIn. To have filed for bankruptcy due to its own financing using various credit products, it provides another example of how things can go wrong in any type of business when it's least expected. 

Who is Ty Crandall

“Ty Crandall is an internationally known speaker, author, and business credit expert. With over 17 years of financial experience, Ty is recognized as an authority in business credit building, business credit scoring and business financing."

"He is also the author of two of the bestselling books on consumer and business credit. These include “Perfect Credit” and “Business Credit Decoded."

"He has been featured in Forbes, Entrepreneur and Inc. He currently serves as the CEO at Credit Suite.”

Point 2 - Biased slant against MCAs (not a loan)

The reporter for the Tampa Bay Business Journal uses MCA Loan in the headline, yet over a dozen other creditors are listed in court records. Dunn and Bradstreet is listed as being owed just over $650k by itself. The MCAs, now more frequently called Revenue Based Financing (RBF), named in the TBBJ article are CFG Merchant Solutions and Capchase, which is not the traditional MCA or RBF company. Court documents also list Fox Business Funding. Total owed to those three is over $446k, less than Dunn and Bradstreet.

Other creditors include Fundbox, which offers a Business Line of Credit, American Express, Capital One, Citicards, Brex, BayFirst National Bank, Divvy Card, and Hubspot (see image below for amounts).

My opinion is that the reasoning the writer takes this position on MCAs is that she has a continuing article series anytime a business runs into bankruptcy while they have taken out one or more MCAs. In that series, she continues to incorrectly call it an “mca loan”, as a lot of media does, but a merchant cash advance is not a loan.

She also uses the phrasing of “ high-interest-rate MCA loans”, which is also incorrect, and it has been decided in court many times that there is no interest since it's not a loan. Then she describes two of the creditors as MCA 'lenders’ when the correct terminology would be MCA 'funders'.

These errors matter, whether writing about or offering the product. The perceived biases against the MCA product, also known as sales-based financing in commercial finance laws, are clear to me here because the article does not cover the positive effects that tens of billions of dollars per year in funding contribute to SMBs nationally and much more globally.

Point3 - The focus on credit but not paying back

Ty Crandall and many other business credit or finance content creators focus much of their time on the front side of getting funding and make it seem easy it is to build business credit and get financing if you take the right steps. Rarely do they focus on how to pay or make sure you can pay everything back. I have seen it with the zero-interest credit card stacking, where many even hide the costs associated with liquidating the cards for cash, and then some use deceptive business practices. The FTC recently banned Seek Capital and its owner, Roy Ferman, from business financing and credit repair services because of deceiving small businesses calculated at $37 million.  

So just like in any funding, the easy part is sending out the cash. The hard part is collecting. In other words, anyone can fund, but not everyone can collect. And in this case, one of the people who has a business that teaches people all the right business credit and financing things to do, got too far into debt that they had to file Chapter 11.