About the Proprietor
I don’t leave people guessing.
A builder with one simple habit: tell people the truth, and give the tools away.
I’m Shane. I’ve spent nineteen years and seven banks in small business finance, and the work has come down to two things people actually need: the truth, and someone who will not leave them guessing. Most of the job is making sure they get both.
So I tell people the truth, even when it costs me. Nobody who brings me a problem is a lead; they are a responsibility. The honest part is the whole job, and the rest is paperwork.
That is long enough in the business to see how easily a small business owner gets lost in a process built by insiders. So I spend most of my energy on the opposite: making the process legible, and putting the useful parts where anyone can reach them.
The habit reaches past finance. Outside the day job I build software and publish what I learn, and I put most of it out where people can use it without paying. Information locked in a vault is not worth much.
The idea under all of it is the same one. Power that sits locked up, whether it is capital or a public record nobody bothers to read, belongs in people’s hands. So I keep building ways to hand it over, honestly, and free wherever I can manage it. I would rather teach you the thing and be remembered than close you and be forgotten.
This site is the latest example. The SBA record is public, and most of it sits buried where nobody looks. So I pulled every loan the federal government has on file and checked each figure against the agency’s own year-end totals. Then I put the whole thing on a map anyone can open, with no signup and no sales pitch. Look up your own state and drill down to the zip code. If you spot a number I got wrong, tell me and I will fix it in public.
Off the clock I am a husband and a father of three, usually up before five, building things I hope outlast me. If you get some use out of what is here, that is the entire point. Welcome, and thanks for reading.
- 19 yrs
- In small business finance, seven banks
- $0
- To use anything here
- 1.79M
- Approval records in the public data
- Main figures
- Source, date, denominator, method
Shane Pierson · Purveyor of Honest Capital