What Merced is and where it sits
Merced is the county seat of Merced County in the San Joaquin Valley. It was incorporated in 1889 and has 86,333 residents across about 23.25 square miles. It is served by Amtrak, a small airline operation at Merced Regional Airport, and three bus lines. In 2005 it became home to the 10th University of California campus, UC Merced, described as the first research university built in the U.S. in the 21st century.
Agriculture sets the scale
Merced County is ranked as the sixth-top producing county in California, and in 2019 it generated $3.271 billion in total value of production. Numbers that large trickle through the whole local economy: equipment dealers, irrigation and repair shops, trucking and hauling, packing and cold storage, seed and chemical suppliers, tire shops, diners and farm-labor service firms.
Each of those depends on a farm customer who pays at harvest, not at delivery. That is the fundamental cash-flow pattern: farm-adjacent businesses spend through the growing season and collect afterwards, or collect in smaller pieces over a year.
For illustration only: a farm-equipment repair shop carries $45,000 of parts and two technicians through the spring. Many customers pay in the fall. The shop is not struggling. It is financing its customers, and it needs working capital to do so.
The other half of the local economy
Not every Merced business is tied to the farm. UC Merced is a large institution and its calendar affects nearby apartments, restaurants, copy shops and service businesses. The Castle Commerce Center's call center closed in the summer of 2014, subtracting 400 jobs from AT&T's share of employment, which is a reminder that service employers can come and go.
Resilient local businesses often have two kinds of customers, farm and non-farm, and keep a cash buffer to ride out the quiet part of each cycle.
Planning around harvest and the school year
- Map your spending: when do you buy inventory, pay seasonal labor or schedule repairs?
- Map your collections: when do your biggest customers pay?
- Find the largest gap and its month.
- Decide whether working capital, a line of credit, or equipment funding fits that gap.
The result is a financing decision made on purpose, not in a hurry. Apply when you know the amount you need.
How we fund
We provide $25,000 to $5,000,000, with funding possible in as little as 24 hours. We consider FICO 500+, ask for about three months of business bank statements, and do not require tax returns. The application takes about five minutes with a soft credit pull, and sole proprietors can apply. See the Merced County page and the Central Valley (North) overview. Owners in Los Banos, Atwater and Dos Palos apply the same way.