Walk into Lehigh Financial Group’s office at 122 N. 5th Street in Allentown and you are not there to talk about your 401(k). You are there because you found a building, or a business you want to buy, or a piece of equipment you cannot operate without, and you need someone who knows which lender will actually say yes. For more than two decades, that someone has been Jeff Barber.
What He Actually Does
Barber founded Lehigh Financial Group and serves as its president. The firm is a commercial finance intermediary, which is a formal way of saying it stands between small business owners and the money they need. Its work covers SBA lending, conventional commercial real estate financing, bridge loans, accounts receivable financing and equipment capital.
The distinction matters. Lehigh Financial Group does not manage retirement accounts or sell life insurance. Its clients are business owners and real estate investors, and the questions they arrive with are concrete: can this deal be financed, on what terms, and how quickly.
Barber works across banks, non-banks, private money investors and SBA lenders, and that range is the real value of the arrangement. A business owner who walks into a single bank gets a single answer. Someone who knows two dozen lending appetites can find the one institution willing to underwrite a particular building, a particular industry, or a borrower whose numbers do not fit neatly in a box.
The New Tripoli Hotel
Here is what that looks like in practice. In August 2016, Jackie and Carl Harford, who already ran Fossil’s Last Stand in Catasauqua, bought the historic New Tripoli Hotel in Lynn Township. The property came with a restaurant and bar, five boarding rooms, two apartments, and the kind of deferred maintenance that makes conventional lenders nervous.
Lehigh Financial Group arranged an SBA-guaranteed loan that covered the purchase, restored the liquor license and left capital for a new roof and other building improvements. Barber pointed to the buyers’ track record running Fossil’s as the reason a lender got comfortable with the deal.
“This is a classic SBA Loan where the government guaranteed loan program is helping a small business,” Barber said at the time.
That pattern, a proven operator buying an older property that needs work, runs through much of the firm’s portfolio. Helping local entrepreneurs acquire and revitalize aging commercial corridors has become a recurring theme of the practice, and it is slower, harder work than financing a new build on a clean site.
Betting on the Valley
Barber is bullish on the region in a way that shows up in his lending. He has described the Lehigh Valley as the fastest-growing region in Pennsylvania for business and job growth, and the firm’s volume has followed. In 2022 he said demand had tripled the office’s normal volume.
Handling a surge like that means staff juggling lenders, borrowers and deadlines at once, and Barber has consistently credited his team’s professionalism through those stretches rather than claiming the work as his own.
More Than Two Decades on Fifth Street
In a business where plenty of operators would have decamped to a suburban office park, Barber has kept Lehigh Financial Group downtown. That is not incidental. The commercial corridors his clients are buying into are the ones outside his own front door.
In 2026 he was named to the inaugural LVB 300, Lehigh Valley Business’s list of 300 leaders across 26 industries recognized for sustained success and a commitment to the regional economy.
For a Valley small business owner, though, the practical takeaway is simpler than any award. When a deal needs capital and the first bank says no, there is someone on Fifth Street who has spent more than twenty years learning who might say yes.
