Emerging-sector businesses often struggle to access conventional funding despite strong fundamentals. This case study shows how a circa £3M revolving credit facility supported a shareholder buyout and preserved working capital for a growing EV infrastructure company.

A UK company installs, operates, and maintains electric vehicle charging infrastructure. Its clients are real. Its contracts are signed. Its growth trajectory is the kind that would make most lenders want to be involved.

When it needed a circa £3M revolving credit facility to fund a shareholder buyout and preserve working capital, it ran into a problem that has nothing to do with the quality of the business - and everything to do with how lenders classify assets in sectors they haven't built models for yet.

The issue was debtor concentration. The receivables existed, but they were concentrated in a small number of clients. Standard invoice finance providers require a spread across the debtor book. This business didn't have it. Strike one for conventional routes.

Then there was the inventory. EV charging infrastructure components are specialist, evolving, and don't have the kind of secondary market values that lenders rely on for asset-backed facilities. An asset finance lender looking for a clean residual value calculation would have found nothing to work with. Strike two.

The business needed two things simultaneously: completing the shareholder buyout without disrupting operations and retaining access to working capital as it continued to scale. A term loan would have solved the first and complicated the second. The right answer was a revolving structure - draw and repay as the business required, without committing to a fixed drawdown that would sit idle during quieter periods.

We found a specialist lender prepared to do something that mainstream providers consistently fail to do in emerging sectors: assess the company's overall balance sheet strength and growth trajectory rather than running the numbers through a product-specific filter. The result was a circa £3M revolving credit facility structured against the business as a whole, not against any single asset class that didn't fit the template.

The shareholder buyout was completed. Trading continued without interruption. The revolving facility remained available to support growth as EV infrastructure deployment accelerated.

This matters beyond one deal. The UK government is committed to accelerating the rollout of EV charging points. The businesses that deliver that infrastructure are, in most cases, capital-intensive and growing rapidly. Many of them have exactly the same balance sheet characteristics as this client - contracted revenue, specialist assets, a debtor profile that doesn't map neatly onto conventional receivables finance criteria.

The financing sector's models were built for sectors it understood twenty years ago. Manufacturing with an identifiable plant. Retail with realisable stock. Service businesses with diversified invoicing. EV infrastructure operators often fit none of those categories cleanly, not because they're weak, but because they're new.

What that means, practically, for business owners and their advisers, is that mainstream routes will often produce a 'no' before a specialist lender has even been approached. The criteria that stop a conventional provider at the receivables step are not the same criteria a balance sheet-led specialist will apply. Finding the right lender is the entire exercise.

The revolving credit structure also deserves attention on its own terms. For a business that has a shareholder transition to fund and ongoing capital requirements running in parallel, a revolving facility is frequently the most efficient instrument available. The ability to draw what is needed, repay as cash flow allows, and draw again without renegotiating protects working capital in a way that a fixed-amount term loan cannot.

Execution risk in this kind of transaction sits almost entirely in lender selection and structure. The business was creditworthy throughout. The delay was in identifying a lender with both the appetite and the analytical framework to see that clearly.

That gap - between businesses that deserve capital and lenders equipped to provide it in emerging sectors - is exactly what specialist brokers exist to bridge.

Read the full case study here: https://www.ennessglobal.com/insights/case-studies/gbp3m-revolving-credit-facility-ev-shareholder-buyout