By Tom Goldblatt, Managing Partner, Ravinia Capital

I've spent 35 years across the table from secured lenders. I've watched some become legends and watched others get fired. The difference was rarely their spreadsheet skills.

The best ones have something in common. They think like Stoics.

They stay calm when a borrower misses covenants. They stay disciplined when a competitor offers something dumb. They stay fair when they hold all the leverage. They stay skeptical when the rest of the market is chasing yield.

The Stoics figured out 2,000 years ago what secured lending demands every day. Here are seven principles the best lenders I know practice, whether they've read a word of Marcus Aurelius or not.

1. Underwrite the downside first.

Seneca wrote that "he suffers more than necessary, who suffers before it is necessary." Bankers can misread that. It doesn't mean don't worry. It means worry with a purpose. Great lenders imagine every failure mode before they fund. Customer concentration. Working capital swings. Key-person risk. They price it, structure it, or walk. When trouble hits later, it's already been rehearsed.

2. The workout is the loan.

Marcus Aurelius wrote in his Meditations that "what stands in the way becomes the way." The workout isn't the interruption of the credit. It is the credit. It's where reputations get made. The lenders borrowers refer to their friends are the ones who worked through the hard year without losing their heads or their fairness.

3. Control what you can. Let go of the rest.

Epictetus opened his Handbook with a line every underwriter should tape to a wall: "Some things are up to us and some are not up to us." You don't control the Fed. You don't control tariffs. You don't control whether your borrower's biggest customer files. You control your covenant package, your reporting, your monitoring, your relationships, and your response speed. Spend your energy there. Everything else is noise.

4. When the room gets hot, slow down.

Seneca's counsel on anger was direct: "The greatest remedy for anger is delay." Every workout call has a moment. Someone raises their voice. Someone threatens to sue. Someone says the equity is walking. Your value in that moment is the pause. Deals don't die from the threat. They die from the reaction to it. The best workout officers I know can sit with silence longer than anyone else in the room.

5. Know your line before you need it.

Wanting a deal too badly is how you make bad ones. Set your minimum structure, your minimum pricing, your minimum reporting before the term sheet gets shopped. When a competitor undercuts you, you'll already know whether that's a lane you can be in or a lane you shouldn't want. Non-attachment isn't weakness. It's how you avoid the credit you'll wish you never wrote.

6. Don't sell fluff. Be it.

Marcus Aurelius told himself, "Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one." A secured lender can't win on marketing. Borrowers see through it in one meeting. What separates the winners in a competitive market is substance. Do you know their industry? Can you close on the timeline you promised? Will your credit committee follow the script the RM sold? Reputation compounds. Fluff doesn't.

7. Be fair when you hold all the cards.

The Stoics treated justice as a cardinal virtue, not because it was noble, but because it was practical. A lender's reputation lives longer than any single credit. The workouts you handle fairly get remembered. The ones where you squeezed for the last dollar get remembered too. Middle-market finance is a small world. Every borrower has a lawyer, a banker, and three friends. They talk.

The math you can teach in a week. The temperament takes a career.

The best lenders I've worked with over 35 years weren't the ones with the sharpest models. They were the ones who kept their heads when the numbers turned. They saw the trouble early, held the line without losing composure, and treated borrowers like people they'd see again.

The Stoics would have made excellent asset-based lenders.