Welcome to Delancey Street. We’re a premier business debt settlement company. In this article, we’re going to skip the part where I tell you debt is stressful. You know. That's why you're up at Googling "Atlanta business debt settlement" and getting fed a wall of identical landing pages with a stock photo of a guy in a suit shaking hands.
Here's the thing nobody on those pages will tell you straight - most of them do not settle anything. They collect a fee and they wait, usually they’re waiting for you to drop out of the program so they can automatically collect your fees and take them all. MCA debt settlement companies are not required to get certified, or go through any vetting process before they setup shop. There’s no legal certification process. Anyone can do B2B business debt settlement.
The one thing that actually matters
The only question that tells you if an Atlanta shop is real:
Who's doing the negotiating, and have they ever actually done it with YOUR lenders?
Because business debt isn't one thing. A guy with a $40k Bank of America LOC and a guy with four stacked merchant cash advances - those are two completely different animals, and the second guy is the one who usually walks into the wrong office. Most MCA debt settlement companies are not capable of handling traditional debt. Most consumer debt shops, which you’ll find online, are not setup to do merchant cash advance debt settlement.
If you've got MCAs - merchant cash advances, the daily/weekly ACH stuff from the funders, the Kapitus and Forward Financing and ten other names of the world - you do not have a "settlement" problem in the normal sense. You have a cash-flow-is-actively-on-fire problem and the multiple advances are sinking your daily bank balance. And the company you hire has to understand that the second you stop paying position one, position two and three find out, fast, and the UCCs start flying and your processor gets a notice and suddenly your batches are getting swept and all revenue is halted immediately.
A generic debt relief shop treats that like a credit card. It is not a credit card.
What "restructuring" actually looks like
The brochure says: "We negotiate your balances down 40-60%!"
Reality. In practice, when you have multiple positions, restructuring looks like - modify everything, all at once, in a specific order, while keeping enough operating cash that the business doesn't die before you finish. Restructuring is a risky process, because you’re spinning multiple plates - each lender is a plate, and you’re trying to meanwhile keep the lights on. Typically, a candidate for restructuring is a business owner who can demonstrably show a drop in revenue, and show that the MCA debits didn’t go down despite the drop in revenue.
You can't settle position one for a lump sum if settling it leaves you with no money to keep the lights on, which is the move half these Atlanta outfits will push because lump-sum closes look good on their internal scoreboard.
Here's the part that should scare you a little: a lot of these companies tell you to STOP all payments on day one. Just stop. Go dark. This is a bad idea. The best way to start the restructuring process is by attempting reconciliation. Reconciliation is something that’s in your agreement, and allows you to ask the lender - contractually - to lower the daily, and weekly, ACH debits, based on the drop in revenue.
So what do you actually do
- Pull every contract. Find the COJs, the personal guarantees, the cross-default language. Most people have no idea what they signed.
- Map your real cash flow. Not revenue - what's left after the swipes.
- Interview three companies and ask each one: walk me through the last file you closed that looked like mine. The real ones get specific, names, numbers, timelines.