What am I actually signing with a personal guarantee?

It is standard and it is a big deal — both are true, but the lender is only telling you the first one. A personal guarantee makes you personally liable for the business debt: if the business cannot pay, the lender can pursue your personal assets, and the corporate structure you set up to prevent exactly that does not stand in the way.

• Is it limited or unlimited? A limited guarantee caps exposure at a stated dollar amount or percentage
• Is it joint and several? If so the lender can collect the whole balance from whichever guarantor is easiest to reach
• Is there a validity-only carve-out, limiting you to fraud and misrepresentation rather than the full debt?
• Does it survive a sale of the business, and what specifically releases it?

On availability: SBA rules require a guarantee from every owner of 20% or more, so there is no version of an SBA loan without one. Conventional lenders occasionally release a guarantee after a period of clean performance, and asset-based and factoring facilities are sometimes written with validity-only guarantees instead. Below roughly $5 million in revenue, an unsecured business loan with no guarantee at all essentially does not exist.

“A lender that will not ask for a personal guarantee has usually priced that risk somewhere you will like less.”

If your partner will not sign, the practical routes are Equipment Financing or Invoice Factoring, where the asset carries more of the risk than the owners do. Call the desk before you negotiate — guarantee language is one of the few terms that is genuinely negotiable, and only before signature.