Yes. If your restaurant has been trading steadily, you can apply for unsecured funding to expand without putting up your property or your kitchen equipment as security.
Here's what to check before you apply:
- Know your numbers. How long you've owned the business and what you turn over each month is what the decision rests on, so have your bank statements ready.
- Understand what unsecured means. Nothing in the restaurant is pledged as security, so your building and your equipment stay yours.
- Ask what the funding actually costs. One fixed fee agreed upfront is a very different thing to a cost that keeps growing over the term with interest.
- Look at how you'll repay. Funding payments can run on a set schedule or move with your turnover.
Expansion doesn't have to mean a whole second site. It might be adding a deck so you can seat more people, putting in a bigger cold room so you can buy stock in bulk, opening a takeaway and delivery counter off the kitchen you already have or getting a bakkie on the road for catering work. Even hiring and training an extra shift before the season turns counts. The smaller upgrades often pay for themselves quickest, because they lift what your current site can do without taking on a second lease.
Whatever shape it takes, expansion rarely waits for a slow month. It comes up while you're flat out and your cash is already tied up in stock and staff. That's the gap quick funding is built for, because the decision rests on how your restaurant trades rather than on what it owns. A traditional bank loan can do the same job, but it usually takes longer and often asks for security a growing restaurant doesn't have yet.
Flexible payments help here, because they move with your turnover instead of holding steady when trade dips.
At GoTyme for Business, we offer unsecured funding of up to R5 million through a GoTyme Business Advance. You pay one fixed fee agreed upfront, with no interest. To apply, we look for 6 months as the business owner, 3 to 6 months of continuous turnover on your bank statements and monthly turnover of R50 000 or more. You apply online in minutes, subject to assessment.
Funding built around your business, so you can grow without putting what you've built on the line.