Joseph Camberato and the Business Hidden Between Two Desks

Joseph Camberato would like one small correction entered into the record. The spare bedroom where he started his business was a nice spare bedroom. He made the point in a 2019 interview, with the timing of someone who has heard his own origin story acquire a little too much hardship. Entrepreneurs are allowed decent curtains. Even the ones who will spend the next several years wondering when their company will finally come together.

In 2007, Camberato and co-founder James Webster began National Business Capital with two people and an idea about a badly organized market. Business owners needed financing. Lenders existed that might provide it. Finding the right match could consume an unreasonable amount of the owner's time. Nearly two decades later, Camberato still spends his working life on that problem, now as the founder and CEO of a firm that says it has helped businesses secure more than $3 billion.

The number is substantial. His more revealing achievement is staying interested in the awkward space between a business owner's opportunity and a lender's requirements. That space has supplied his livelihood, his public teaching material and a long education in how slowly a supposedly fast-growing business can grow.

The question that followed him home

Before National, Camberato worked in mortgage finance. Among his clients were self-employed people who kept asking where they could get a business loan. His first answer was ordinary enough: try a bank. Their experiences made him reconsider the usefulness of that advice. A familiar institution could be a poor match for a particular company, however sensible its next purchase or expansion might seem to its owner.

He began exploring private lenders and discovered a market many entrepreneurs did not know how to reach. Different lenders wanted different industries, credit profiles and transactions. Some worked largely through referral relationships. An owner could spend days finding one and still arrive at the wrong desk. Camberato's opportunity was to learn those preferences and make the introductions less exhausting.

His business therefore depended on paying attention to distinctions. A restaurant, contractor and transportation company could all need money while presenting very different lending cases. The useful knowledge was granular: who would consider this borrower, for this purpose, under these conditions? A long list of lenders would mean little unless someone understood the list.

The company began in 2007, just before the financial crisis. It was an inconvenient moment to establish a business dependent on other people's willingness to lend. But the difficulty also put its purpose into sharp relief. Camberato was trying to make a fragmented market usable for people who had businesses to run and limited time for a second occupation as financing researchers.

Seven years is a long overnight

The bedroom makes a convenient opening scene. It is less useful as an explanation of what happened next. Camberato has described years of reinvestment, sacrifice and repeated adjustments before the business began to feel coherent. By his own recollection, meaningful progress came around years six and seven. Around year ten, its teams and management began operating at a different level.

National's October 2018 announcement supplied a public marker: more than $1 billion in financing across all 50 states, more than 80 employees and a supporting network exceeding 75 lenders. It named Webster alongside Camberato as co-founder. The business had traveled a considerable distance from a two-person operation, with the usual founder-story shorthand concealing most of the mileage.

Camberato grew it without private-equity investment, reinvesting in the company and, at times, borrowing. That distinction matters to his account of entrepreneurship. Independence did not mean building without capital. It meant choosing how to obtain it and keeping ownership. He has also acknowledged that another company's circumstances might make equity a sensible choice.

When asked years later what he would tell his younger self, patience kept returning. In his September 2026 conversation about founders and capital, he looked at progress across five, ten or fifteen years. A year can feel disappointingly short when you are building something complicated. A decade gives the changes enough room to become visible.

“We work hard, but we have fun while doing it.”

Joseph Camberato

Two days away from the usual work

In 2018, National described a different kind of investment: taking employees out of their normal routines for a two-day workshop with Delivering Happiness, the culture consultancy associated with Zappos. Some staff were skeptical about setting aside that much working time. A finance company can usually find something urgent to do with two whole days.

The immediate problem was growth inside the office. Departments were multiplying, and people who worked for the same company could become less connected to its shared purpose. National's account of the workshop described employees helping one another more readily afterward and organizing activities beyond work, including a volleyball league. The company treated the exercise as an attempt to change daily behavior.

Camberato's explanation was unusually resistant to the language of a quick financial payoff. He argued that beginning with a calculation of the workshop's return would miss its purpose. Employees and customers had to come first; the financial benefits would follow. For someone who sells access to capital, it was a useful admission that some valuable things resist a tidy cell in a spreadsheet.

By April 2022, he was discussing concrete office rituals with workplace author Erica Keswin, including a daily stretch at 9:01 a.m. He spoke about making room for fun and giving employees flexibility when life demanded their attention. The precise minute is a pleasing detail. Even informality, in a growing company, sometimes needs an appointment.

The team gets the applause

In September 2022, National won the small-business category at HIA-LI's Business Achievement Awards. The ceremony took place at Crest Hollow Country Club on Long Island. In his response, Camberato directed credit toward his employees, saying the people behind him were the reason he still came to work ready to enjoy it and make a difference.

The award considered employer relations, contributions to the local business community, financial trends and plans for the following three to five years. It offered recognition for running an organization, beyond the volume of money passing through it. That distinction fits a founder increasingly occupied with the people and habits required to keep a company working.

Community work has also become part of National's routine through National Cares. Its public company page reports more than 200,000 meals donated to Feeding America and more than 250 Thanksgiving baskets delivered. Camberato's public biography describes a donation of ten meals for each client funded, connecting the firm's ordinary transactions with a recurring contribution outside the office.

Grow By Joe, beyond the loan application

Camberato has built a second public role explaining what he does. Under the Grow By Joe name, he makes videos about financing and operating a business. By May 2023, he said the YouTube channel had more than 300 videos, ranging from educational explanations to conversations with entrepreneurs. He particularly valued hearing that someone had watched a video and found an answer they could use.

There is a practical connection between that work and his original discovery. Private lending was difficult to navigate partly because owners did not know what existed. Explaining the choices makes the market easier to approach. A video cannot negotiate a transaction, but it can give someone a better question to ask before beginning one.

His interviews extend well beyond lenders. The Grow Show's published episodes include entrepreneur and video creator Evan Carmichael and freediver William Trubridge. Its description emphasizes building systems and replacing yourself in daily operations so that the company can grow while its owner has a life. It is a revealing aspiration for a founder whose early progress required so much personal sacrifice.

His writing follows the same operational interests. His Entrepreneur articles cover cash reserves, financial flexibility, budgeting and communication with customers. The subjects suggest an audience already responsible for a business, trying to make next month's decisions a little better. Camberato has made the unglamorous parts of ownership a regular part of his public conversation.

A lender's reasons to slow down

By 2026, his conversations had expanded into bridge capital, growth capital and subordinated debt for small and midsized companies. In July, he discussed how additional financing could help a company act when its existing lender could go no further. National had also developed direct funding alongside its lender network, giving his team more than one route for considering a transaction.

He described the network as a way to observe changing lender preferences across more than a thousand applications a month. That was his account of the firm's vantage point, rather than a promise that every applicant would receive financing. His original task of understanding which lender wanted which deal remained recognizable, even as the transactions became larger.

He also drew a boundary around what borrowing could accomplish. Weak collections or an unprofitable part of a company could create a recurring cash shortage that another loan would leave unresolved. That caution gives his public persona more substance than a permanent invitation to apply. The person arranging money still needs to ask whether money addresses the underlying problem.

There is, of course, a walkout song

Asked in July 2026 to choose music for his entrance, Camberato picked “Juicy” by The Notorious B.I.G. He explained that he was born in the 1980s and grew up in the 1990s. It is a livelier introduction than most discussions of a capital stack receive, and a small glimpse of the person beyond the executive biography.

Off the clock, his interests include fishing, skiing, golf and drives to Long Island's East End with his family. Those pursuits sit comfortably beside his stated interest in helping owners build companies that do not require their presence at every turn. The work is meant to produce room for something else.

The spare bedroom survives in his story because it is easy to picture. What followed is harder to compress: relationships learned, money reinvested, departments connected, explanations repeated until someone could use them. Camberato now has a much larger business. He still returns to the question his mortgage clients brought him: where, exactly, does an owner go from here?