Growth or space? How Scendar refused to compromise

Charlotte Bungard has spent years helping startups navigate the financial decisions that define how fast they can grow. As Director of Scendar, she knows better than most how quickly tied-up capital can slow a growing business down. So when Scendar needed to find a new office to support it’s next stage of growth, the financial trade-offs involved were ones she understood intimately.

The plans were ambitious, including growing the team, expanding internationally and building the kind of infrastructure that a scaling firm needs. All of that required an office that could accommodate where Scendar was heading, not just where it was at the time.

Finding the right space wasn’t the problem, but securing it was another matter entirely. Like most commercial tenants, Scendar was expected to provide lease security in the form of a traditional bank guarantee. For a growing firm with serious plans, that meant locking away a significant chunk of working capital with the bank. Capital that could no longer be used to support the business while it sat tied up as lease security.

“We were looking for a new office space and we were at an impasse using a traditional bank guarantee, having to choose between growth or choosing a new space.”

Charlotte Bungard – Director | Scendar

It’s a tension that accountants understand better than most. Cash flow flexibility isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s the lifeblood of a scaling business. Every dollar tied up in a bank guarantee is a dollar that isn’t going into hiring, systems, international expansion or anything else that actually moves the business forward. And that has real consequences: hiring decisions get delayed, expansion plans become more cautious and businesses end up compromising on the space they take, the location, or how long they’re prepared to commit. For a firm advising startups on exactly these trade-offs, the experience would have felt uncomfortably familiar.

Rather than accepting the compromise, Charlotte turned to eGuarantee as an alternative to the traditional bank guarantee route.

As a commercial lease bond provider, eGuarantee allowed Scendar to meet their landlord’s security requirements without locking capital away with their bank. Rather than tying up cash as collateral, businesses pay an annual fee and go through a straightforward financial assessment based on their trading history and financial position. The Lease Bond provides landlords with the same level of protection they’d expect from a bank guarantee, while freeing the tenant to put their money to work where it matters most.

The process itself was equally straightforward. Charlotte and the team were able to upload documentation securely through the eGuarantee platform and track their application in real time. The eGuarantee team stayed actively involved throughout, checking in at each stage and making sure nothing fell through the cracks.

“From the beginning to the end, eGuarantee made the process really seamless and easy for us. The eGuarantee team was also very proactive, constantly reaching out, making sure we were comfortable with the next steps.”

It’s the kind of support that makes a real difference when lease negotiations are moving quickly.

Without eGuarantee, Charlotte has been candid about what the alternative would have looked like: a short-term lease, a lower-grade building, probably not in the location that best suited where the business was heading. Constraints that would have shaped not just the office, but the firm’s trajectory.

Instead, by choosing a Commercial Lease Bond, Scendar secured a lease that matched their five-year growth plans in a premium location. The working capital that would have been tied up with a bank was redirected into growing the team, expanding their international offering and scaling the business the way they’d always intended to.

“By using eGuarantee to unlock that working capital, we’ve been able to invest that money in growing our team, growing our offering internationally and focus on actually scaling the business rather than worrying about where we were living.”

Charlotte Bungard – Director | Scendar