Dilia Wood closed a $2.6M SBA 504 loan in 2006 to restore a designated historic landmark, then ran the business inside it. She writes on small business capital from the borrower's side of the table.
SBA Loans
The two programs decoupled in July, so ten million is now possible inside one business. Almost everything written about it is about eligibility, and eligibility is the least useful thing to study.
Chapter 5 of The Quiet Years by Dilia Wood identifies centralized record-keeping as the architectural condition that makes information asymmetry and interpretation authority possible — and introduces six design principles of verification architecture that eliminate those vulnerabilities by design rather than by trust. Drawn from forensic accountant Marie McDonnell 's
Chapter 4 of The Quiet Years by Dilia Wood identifies interpretation authority as the mechanism that determines which institutional reality becomes enforceable — showing why forensic proof, legal representation, and perfect documentation cannot protect builders when a single party controls what evidence is allowed to mean. Drawn from forensic accountant Marie
The most dangerous information asymmetry isn't when one party knows something the other doesn't. It's when one party controls what multiple parties see—and no mechanism requires those parties to compare versions. Merit can't protect you in systems where your performance can be redefined.
Chapter 2
Collapse teaches you to see architecture. Documentation translates that vision into protective knowledge for others. Stories and systems share design principles—both can be built to protect or expose the builder.
Every system looks neutral until you watch how it behaves under pressure. Between 2013 and 2016, the middle space after collapse taught me to see the architecture I'd been building inside—how interpretation overrides evidence, how information asymmetry enables extraction.
The Quiet Years
What happens when your life's work disappears? Discover the six frameworks for understanding power and recovery, born from a confrontation at Arizona Avenue and Boston Street. This is the prologue to The Quiet Years.
SBA 504 Loans
Court-ordered discovery in Inspirador v. Southwestern Business Finance Corp. revealed CDC President Robert D. McGee coordinated false SBA certifications understating loan amounts by $250,000, enabling $1M+ equity extraction from a profitable business cleared by federal investigators.
Adaptive reuse
A first-person case study in structural vulnerability — built from a $3M historic preservation project, court-ordered discovery, and seven years of watching institutions behave exactly as they were designed to.