Midland County Business Funding for Oilfield and Local Trades

Halfway between two cities

Midland County takes its name from its location halfway between Fort Worth and El Paso on the Texas and Pacific Railway. Midland is the county seat. The 2020 population was 169,983, and the county is in the Midland metropolitan statistical area and the larger Midland-Odessa combined statistical area. We list it in our Permian Basin grouping.

The Permian Basin is the highest-producing oil field in the United States, averaging 4.2 million barrels a day in 2019, and covers West Texas and the far southeast of New Mexico. That sets the pace for a lot of the local economy.

What an oilfield service company actually carries

This page is about the business side, not the commodity. A contractor, hauler, welding shop or equipment-rental firm in the Permian Basin has three recurring money problems.

1. Payroll. Crews are paid weekly or every two weeks, whether or not the operator has paid the invoice.
2. Equipment. Trucks, trailers, pumps and tools wear out and must be replaced or repaired in a hurry.
3. Receivables. Invoices to operators and prime contractors often sit for weeks before release.

Working capital fits between those three. It does not change how the customer pays; it lets you keep the crew and the trucks current until they do.

Not only oil

A county of this size has plenty of other small businesses: restaurants, auto and truck repair, offices, medical practices, retail, landscaping and property services. They are affected by the energy cycle indirectly, through staff and customers who work in it. The common thread is variability. When activity climbs, shops hire and buy equipment; when it slows, fixed costs remain.

Example for illustration only

Say a Midland equipment-hauling company bills $90,000 a month and receives payment 60 days after invoicing. It is carrying about two months of work before it sees a dollar: roughly $180,000 of receivables. These are round numbers to explain the timing, not our terms or a typical result. If the company wants to take on a new job requiring one more truck and a driver, the added payroll has to be paid long before the first check. That, not the oil price, is the question working capital helps with.

Questions oilfield service owners should ask before applying

• How many days, on average, do your largest customers actually take to pay?
• How many weeks of payroll are in the bank today?
• Which piece of equipment would stop revenue if it failed this month?

Answers to these three tell you whether the issue is receivables, payroll or equipment, and the request can be sized to that one problem.

Applying in Midland

We fund $25,000 to $5,000,000, and funding can arrive in as little as 24 hours. The application takes about five minutes and uses a soft credit pull. We look at about three months of business bank statements, no tax returns are required, FICO 500+ is considered, and sole proprietors can apply. Start the application.