The Challenge
Building a lending business from scratch, without a lending platform
Cove Lending launched in 2024 as a private hard money lender focused on fix-and-flip loans in Minnesota. From day one, owner Kerby Skurat and loan manager Kristi Johnson came in with real estate and administration roots, but no lending background. With only a handful of loans on the books, they tried to make do with spreadsheets and a project management tool built for contractors.
The tool offered features such as checklists and a section for storing files, but it had no support for loan terms, payment tracking, borrower contacts or document generation. Every time a new loan came in, the process was essentially: figure out how to make it work, from scratch. A loan application took shape as a Google Form, closing documents were assembled manually and payment tracking was tedious.
“It wasn’t even like just go set up the loan — it was: figure out how should we do this? And what does our application look like? For a while it was just somebody emailed Kerby and we didn’t even have an application,” Kristi Johnson recalls.
Setting up a single loan was taking two to three hours. The tools they had weren’t built for lending, and it showed.
The Solution
A single platform that actually understood private lending
Early in Cove’s journey, Kerby Skurat connected with the Baseline team, and the fit was immediately clear. Unlike general project management tools, Baseline was built specifically for private lenders, with a designated place to record origination terms, payment automation, draw management and a borrower portal all in one place.
Cove’s onboarding was handled with care by the Customer Success team at Baseline. Kristi Johnson credits them with taking the time to understand exactly how Cove wanted to structure their loans before prescribing any specific features. “They weren’t just showing us features. They were figuring out what we actually needed,” she says.
For a team new to lending, that patience made a real difference. Baseline’s support team helped Kristi Johnson understand the intricacies of private lending and how to model different loan products inside the platform - not just how to click buttons.
The platform became the operational backbone of Cove’s lending business: application information feeding directly into loan files, document packages generated automatically for title companies, ACH payment collection handled within the system and a self-serve portal for borrowers to submit and track their own disbursement requests.
The Results
Growing to 60+ a year, without adding headcount
Loan volume nearly tripled in Cove’s first full year
Cove entered 2025 having done roughly 20 loans in the back half of 2024. By the end of 2025, they had closed approximately 60 loans — almost entirely through word of mouth and Kerby’s network, with zero formal marketing. The team stayed lean: Kerby, Kristi, a designated finance person and a virtual assistant. Baseline made that math work.
“There’s no way we could have done that without a platform like Baseline. We would have had to hire more people or have other people helping. The fact that we could do that with him [Kerby] running multiple businesses and me very part-time — we still kind of go, how did that happen?”
Loan setup went from hours to under an hour
Before Baseline, setting up a single loan took two to three hours — with Baseline, repeat borrowers are especially fast: their details are already in the system, so only the new loan-specific information needs to be entered.
“Because of the application, once you have someone in there as a returning borrower, it’s super fast. I wouldn’t even say an hour.” One of Cove’s most active brokers has now completed about 15 loans through the platform this year alone. The streamlined process makes it easy for him to apply, get borrowers funded, and come back again.
Baseline became the source of truth
Before Baseline, Kristi Johnson was manually cross-checking loan terms across spreadsheets. Now, whatever is in Baseline is treated as correct. The team maintains a separate payment-reconciliation spreadsheet, but it’s only there to verify that everything lines up - and when it doesn’t, Baseline is the source they trust.
“If anything is off in the tracker, we definitely come back to Baseline and look. We know it’s right in there 99.9% of the time, unless it was human error entering it. Just having that understanding that it’s going to be correct is huge.”
Draw management simplified for borrowers and lender alike
Cove’s fix-and-flip borrowers rely heavily on draw disbursements throughout their projects. Baseline’s borrower portal lets them submit draw requests and track disbursement history directly. It reduces back-and-forth, and gives both sides a clear picture of what’s been released and what’s still available.
“Most of our borrowers really like it. It’s pretty easy for them to be able to submit and do all their stuff in there,” Kristi Johnson notes.
Looking Ahead
Scaling to 100s of loans without scaling the team
Cove’s goal is to build a solid core of repeat borrowers while continuing to grow loan volume — without proportionally growing headcount. Kristi Johnson sees Baseline’s automation capabilities, borrower portal and continued product development as central to making that possible.
“Baseline opens every morning when I start work and doesn’t get shut down until I’m done. There’s no way we would be able to do what we’d like to do without it.”
