Two familiar names in the Louisville-area U.S. Small Business Association (SBA) lending scene have recently reunited on a new business opportunity.
The company, Venturus, is the latest partnership between John Handmaker and Christian Bowles, as two longtime colleagues look to specialize as a direct small business lender to clients across the country as the SBA arm of Atlanta area-based Tandem Bank.
Founded in August, Venturus provides SBA 7(a) loans between $25,000 to $5 million to small businesses for a variety of purposes, such as growth capital, owner-occupied commercial real estate, debt refinancing, franchise financing and business acquisitions.
The firm places loans within two sectors: Those for working capital up to $150,000, and higher-leverage loans that go up to the $5 million cap that often involve owner-occupied commercial real estate. The average loan in the latter sector has been $1.1 million so far.
The average loan term for a small business loan in the first sector is about 10 years, whereas the average loan term for a real estate-based loan is 25 years. As of a recent date, the company had completed four loans, with approximately 40 customers going through the loan application process.
“We’re a one trick pony in the sense that it’s all we do,” Bowles told me. “It’s very niche within a much larger sector, and if you're not doing it all day, every day, you can very easily not know what you’re doing.”
Handmaker and Bowles recently talked with me at their office in Glenridge Office Park off of Brownsboro Road — not too far away from their alma mater, Ballard High School.
“Different years, but ...” Bowles joked, referring to their age difference.
The two last worked with each other at Q2 Business Capital, which Handmaker founded in 2015 as a joint venture with Clarksville, Indiana-based First Savings Bank (Nasdaq: FSFG).
In 2017, Handmaker, as the CEO, had hired Bowles to be the vice president of business development. When Bowles left Q2 last January, the company had become the 30th largest SBA lender in the country.
“In many ways, it was very inevitable. We are very aligned on business objectives,” Handmaker said. “I think we’re both very entrepreneurial. We love creating and building things and growing them.”
Collectively, the two business partners have nine other side businesses in a multitude of industries.
“We can sit there and look at [clients] — whether it’s across the table or on the screen — and say, ‘I know exactly what you're going through, because I've also done that,” Bowles said.
Handmaker and Bowles first met with each other in 2015 through a networking opportunity. Handmaker was targeting small business loans with Q2 Business Capital. Bowles was going after the same demographic as a financial adviser at Merrill Lynch specializing in small business retirement plans.
Back in the game
In June 2021, Handmaker was ready for a new chapter. At 54 years old, retirement seemed like a good option at the time.
He had been in the SBA industry for 32 years and started up three lending companies that had done between $120 million to $250 million in annual volume. He had nothing more to prove.
“I really had no intent of starting this up again,” said Handmaker, who was named to Louisville Business First's 40 Under 40 class in 1997. “I really had no intent of getting back into the business. I figured if I [had] built three top 30 SBA lenders — that’s good enough.”
Then he met Charles DeWitt, the CEO and president of Tandem Bank, who had founded the bank in 2019. In DeWitt, he found a fellow entrepreneurial spirit in the banking industry.
“I began to get excited again,” Handmaker said. “My batteries got recharged again. I began to see the opportunity — but doing it differently.”
Meanwhile, Bowles had found a new opportunity to work remotely from Louisville as a senior vice president and SBA national sales manager for Tampa Bay-based BayFirst Financial Corp. (Nasdaq: BAFN) last January.
When Bowles, a recipient of the 40 Under 40 recognition in 2021, took over his position at BayFirst, the bank had lent out approximately $200 million in SBA loans, putting them at 15h in the nation. When he left in November, the bank had done about $400 million in loans and ranked No. 8.
Ultimately, the opportunity to work with Handmaker was too good to pass up. There was also appeal in building enterprise value for his family through a unique corporate structure arranged with Tandem Bank — while not having to answer to shareholders at a publicly traded institution.
“I think it was the allure of being able to build what you want to build,” Bowles said.
Handmaker first made waves in the business world after founding Quadrant Financial Inc. in 2001, which later merged with CertusBank before being acquired by BankUnited in 2015.
In 2012, Quadrant Financial was named our Business of the Year for medium-sized companies.It ended up becoming, at one point, the 14th largest SBA lender in the country.
Venturus hopes to do between $40 to $50 million in loans in 2023. It currently has eight employees, but also would like to have two to four additional team members, while looking to grow 15% to 20% every year.
“For a lot of people that might be fast,” Handmaker said. “That’s not fast for us.”
