Case study: How a veteran filmmaker stopped chasing scores and started seeing what lenders see

Business Owner: Cheolieces Shannon
Business: Shannon Vibe Vision Productions
Location: Huntsville, Ala.
Nav Product: Funding Readiness

Overview

Cheolieces Shannon is not a typical small business owner. A United States Army and Navy veteran with advanced degrees in physics, chemistry, and theology, he approaches entrepreneurship the same way he approaches everything else: with rigor, structure, and a clear sense of purpose.

Shannon Vibe Vision Productions is his family's production company — built deliberately, with each family member contributing a distinct skill. His son, a Virginia State University graduate and music producer, handles audio and sound design. His daughter, who holds a postgraduate degree in interior design and architecture from VCU, serves as set designer. His wife, with dual master's degrees in accounting and business management, manages the financial operations. Cheolieces runs strategy and business development.

The company's model is equally intentional. Government contracts fund the operation. The other 90% of the work is pro bono or deeply discounted video production for underrepresented entrepreneurs — particularly women — who want to tell their stories but can't afford market-rate production. "We want those people to have the fair chance that other people don't have," Cheolieces says.

To scale that mission, he needed capital. And to access capital, he needed to understand something most business owners never fully grasp: What lenders actually see when they look at your business.

The problem: Credit complexity, not credit absence

Funding a production company requires serious investment in equipment — cameras, audio gear, lighting, editing systems. That equipment isn't cheap, and Cheolieces needed a clear path to accessing it.

But the credit picture was complicated. His personal credit had been damaged by identity fraud, dropping his score significantly. His children — despite their degrees and credentials — were recent graduates without established business credit histories or collateral. And the business structure itself, a parent company that subcontracts work to three separate family entities, isn't one that traditional lenders evaluate easily.

He'd structured the business this way deliberately. Each entity — his daughter's set design company, his son's audio and broadcasting company, and Shannon Vibe Vision Productions as the parent — builds its own business credit independently while still receiving steady income through the parent company's contracts. It's a model that mirrors how major corporations operate. "It's very common," Cheolieces says. "It's just not something most people talk about."

The structure made strategic sense. But it also meant that explaining the business to a lender required more than a credit score. It required a framework, one that showed lenders the full picture and helped Cheolieces understand the gaps he needed to close first.

Discovering Nav: From scores to strategy

Cheolieces wasn't new to researching financial tools. When he found Nav's Funding Readiness feature, what struck him wasn't just the data, it was the perspective shift it offered.

"One of the hardest things for people to understand is how a lender sees you," he explains. "You see a shiny number — your score — but you never get an understanding of what the lender is looking at. They're looking at other factors. They don't care about just your number or your score."

Funding Readiness showed him exactly that: The factors lenders actually weigh, organized by impact. It wasn't just a score dashboard. It was a lender's-eye view of his business.

"This is how your bank sees you, your credit card company, every person you're asking for money sees you," he says.

The solution: Prioritization as a superpower

What Cheolieces found most valuable wasn't any single data point, it was the way the Funding Readiness tool helped him see which problems to solve first.

The feature organizes funding factors by impact level, separating high-priority items from lower-priority ones. For someone juggling a complex multi-entity business structure, an impacted personal credit file, and a mission-driven revenue model, that kind of triage is essential.

"If you're focusing on one factor at the bottom and you’ve got some glaring issues at the top, you're solving issues and not problems," he says. "Funding Readiness solves problems. Stop solving issues. Solve the problem."

The tool also surfaced the specific steps he'd need to take for the type of financing he was actually pursuing. Buying production equipment requires a different funding approach than, say, a working capital line. When his team found the loan qualification section, they didn't just skim it.

"When you get to the step that we are, where you're going to need a loan to buy audio and video equipment, to have a section that tells me 'okay, going for loans, these are the things you need to have and work on' – we were glued to that section. Because you're able to click it, drill down, and it gives you so much additional [insight]."

The competitive edge: Cohort benchmarking

One of the newer features in Funding Readiness — the cohort analysis tool — turned out to be one of the most impactful for Cheolieces and his son.

The cohort benchmarking feature lets businesses compare their credit profile to similar companies in the same industry. His son spotted it first.

For a family business trying to compete for contracts and equipment financing against more established production companies, that context matters. Nav's Funding Readiness brings that benchmarking capability directly into the platform and reframed how Cheolieces thought about his credit positioning, not just in isolation, but relative to competitors and peers in his industry.

Cheolieces found the cohort analysis to be a game-changer. "Anytime you sell a service, not an item, comparing yourself to your competition is way more important than you think. For you to compare yourself to three to five other businesses in your industry, that was huge, " he says.

The outcome: A clear path forward

Cheolieces came to Nav with a complicated situation: A mission-driven business, a multi-entity family structure, credit headwinds from identity fraud, and a specific capital need tied to production equipment. What he found was a tool that didn't simplify his situation — it clarified it.

"[Funding Readiness] is simple to understand. Easy to go through. It has all the important things they need to help them build their business credit and see where they are as lenders see them,” says Cheolieces.

For Shannon Vibe Vision Productions, that clarity is what comes next. With a prioritized roadmap, sector-level benchmarking, and loan-specific qualification guidance in hand, the path to equipment financing is no longer abstract. It's a checklist.

Why getting funding-ready matters

Cheolieces' story is unusual in its specifics — the family structure, the military background, the mission work — but the underlying challenge is one that many business owners share. Most people approach funding by monitoring their score. Nav’s Funding Readiness tool helps him do something harder and more useful: Understand the full picture lenders evaluate, identify what to fix first, and benchmark his position against similar businesses.