What we talked about
Ray Smith: Ray grew up on a 3500 acre dairy farm in South Dakota, where hard work, community, and resilience were daily lessons. That early exposure to uncertainty, like storms wiping out crops after months of effort, shaped his drive for a more predictable path and pushed him toward entrepreneurship. He started young, selling long distance phone service at 18, then moved into subprime credit card processing in Las Vegas, building a call center operation that reached about 65 employees.
Show notes
Ray Smith discovered a structural trap sitting at the center of American small business finance: 80 to 90 percent of business creditors do not report to the three business credit bureaus, yet every lender pulls those bureau reports before approving a loan. The result is that most business owners have no credit file, get denied without explanation, and fall back on their personal credit, which is five to ten times weaker than business credit could be.
What we covered
- The core problem Ray built Tricera Financial to solve is that the business credit system is opaque by design, lenders use AI to scan public databases for consistency across a business’s address, phone, email, website, Secretary of State filing, Dun & Bradstreet, Experian Business, Equifax Business, IRS records, bank account, and merchant account, and an automatic denial fires the moment any of those fields mismatch. Most business owners never find out why they were rejected.
- Ray’s “fundability foundation platform” pre-checks all of those data points in real time against what lenders are actually looking for, fixes what’s missing, and then submits to lenders only when approval is already predictable, turning a guessing game into a known outcome.
- He described an entrepreneur in Chicago whose fiancee had just died three weeks before they spoke. Ray is helping him set up an LLC called ChiTown Polish and Dogs and build business credit so he has $50,000 to $75,000 in working capital by May, using his EIN number rather than a social security number so the business credit profile starts clean.
- Ray told a panel story alongside his mentor Kevin Harrington, the original Shark Tank investor, where he told a room of entrepreneurs and accredited investors that the check made out to their company is really an investment in the founder personally, and that investors are specifically asking themselves whether that founder will come back and tell the truth when the dark days arrive. The entrepreneur who won the investment prize that night was the one who took that message most seriously.
- His advice about investors’ money reframes the stakes: if you earn $100,000 a year and save 10% after taxes, $100,000 in investment capital represents ten years of saving. The investor is not risking $100,000, they are risking a decade of their working life. He uses this framing to hold business owners accountable for how they treat that money.
- Kevin Harrington became Ray’s mentor after they connected in 2015, and Ray credits that relationship with teaching him the value of surrounding yourself with people who are further along than you, not friends and family, who instinctively protect you from the risks that might actually make you successful.
About Ray
Ray Smith is the President and CEO of Tricera Financial, which he has led since 2009. He built the company around helping entrepreneurs establish and grow business credit using their EIN number, separating business funding from personal credit and guiding founders from startup to traditional lending and investor capital.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ray-smith-95130516
- Website: http://www.trycera.com
Episode 114 of the PreVetted Podcast.