Every loan you send upstairs has two stories. There is the one on the spread sheet, and there is the one the borrower has not quite told you yet. In this opening episode we walk through the credit mindset that separates strong bankers from average ones, and we introduce DIRT, the simple lens that keeps you honest about what you actually know, what you are inferring, and what is still missing. You will meet Halsted Industrial Supply, a $7M Chicago distributor whose numbers look fine on the surface and whose file falls apart on a second read. By the end of the half hour you will see why the question, what could go wrong here, is the most important one in business banking.