Start-up dental practice secures a blended funding package to keep launch costs manageable

A Thames Valley dentist launching a two-surgery practice needed to fund both the premises and clinical equipment without a high upfront cash contribution. We split the funding into a commercial loan and a separate asset finance facility. £333,000 was secured in total, completing in three months.

The Situation

A dentist in the Thames Valley was launching a two-surgery private practice and needed to fund both the commercial premises and the clinical equipment inside it. The challenge wasn’t whether the money existed, it was structure. A single loan facility covering both the property and the equipment wasn’t the right fit for a deal shaped like this one, and trying to force it into one facility risked pushing the upfront cash contribution higher than the client could comfortably manage at launch, right when cash reserves matter most.

What We Did

We produced lender-ready financial projections and packaged the bank application around a clear narrative of the practice’s viability, not just the numbers, but the reasoning a lender needs to see behind them to feel confident backing a business that doesn’t yet have a trading history. Rather than pursuing a single facility to cover everything, we structured the funding as a genuine blend: a commercial loan for the premises, and a separate asset finance facility specifically for the equipment.

That split did two things at once. It reduced the upfront cash requirement the client needed to find, and it gave the lender a cleaner, more clearly defined security position on each element, rather than one blended facility secured against a mix of assets that don’t naturally sit together and that a lender would otherwise have to assess as a single, harder-to-price risk.

The Result

The blended funding package was approved and the practice launched on schedule. A commercial loan of £235,000 was agreed alongside asset finance of £98,000, £333,000 in total funding, with the whole process completing in three months.

The lesson worth taking from this one: a single loan isn’t always the simplest answer, even when it looks like the more straightforward option on paper. Splitting a start-up’s funding requirement by asset type, property versus equipment, can genuinely reduce what a client needs to put in upfront, while giving the lender a structure that’s easier to say yes to.

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