Merchant Capital · Phase 1
A business owner applies for funding at 11pm because payroll is next Friday.
Marketing has to earn that late-night apply, then carry it to a funded advance and back again when about 70% is repaid. Credit stays with you. We run everything before and after it.
The one-minute version
Your brief, answered
| Your question | Answered in |
|---|---|
| Tools and integration | 03 Reporting |
| Systems access | 06 From you |
| Lead validation | 02 Funnel · validation |
| Who’s on the account | 01 People |
| Access to leadership | 01 People |
| Lead quantity, quality and cost | 02 Funnel |
| What we prioritise | 02 Funnel |
| Drop-off in the funnel | 02 Funnel |
| How we incentivise performance | 07 Fees |
| Channels | 02 Funnel · channels |
| Working with your team and other partners | 04 Partners |
| Meeting cadence | 05 Cadence |
| Management vs production fees | 07 Fees |
| Project management and briefings | 05 Cadence |
| Scope and ad hoc requests | 05 Cadence |
Who is on the account
Frontrunner · Account lead
He coordinates the account.
Taylor’s strength is knowing what moves the needle, and putting that work in motion. Paid, SEO, email, creative and systems sit on the bench he coordinates, and that bench is inside the retainer. If design volume outruns it, we outsource rather than pretend we are a studio.
Leadership access
Direct, when the decision needs him.
Jason founded Growth Experts. He joins the weekly, or a working session, when the decision actually needs him. He is not a name on a creds slide who disappears after the pitch.
Bench and cover
Fewer things done properly beats spreading thin.
Senior specialists sit behind the account across paid, SEO, email and systems. If a better fit emerges, another Growth Expert can lead. Capacity is visible in Basecamp. Cover sits with Jason or another senior Growth Expert, with your context already in our tools so a handover does not cost you three weeks.
How the pipeline is run
We line the work up with how you already sell. Reporting follows those same stages through to a funded deal.
Audiences and queries that can actually fund.
Qualified traffic over raw CPC
Speed, proof, and a clear 24-hour turnaround.
Apply-start rate and message match
Where people drop on length or documents.
Start to complete
Gates for turnover, trading time and South Africa.
Eligible applications
Your credit team
We watch. Your credit team decides.
Pass rate from your credit team
Take-up, once timing and repayment are clear before they apply.
Funded deals in your CRM
Follow-up once about 70% is repaid.
Repeat funding
Automation for the gates we can see. Credit still decides.
The form should ask what you actually qualify on, catch a duplicate, and keep the source on the record so a lead can be traced to the ad that bought it. When your team marks a deal funded, declined or junk in the CRM, that signal comes back into how we bid and what we write. We stop paying to educate applicants who were never going to fund.
CRM stages that match how you sell, and funded outcomes you can read.
We align the work and the reporting to your deal stages, from application through to funded and re-advance. The standard is the quality of those funded outcomes. Broker, POS and affiliate volume get their own read, because they do not behave like paid search.
Meta is the honest exception. We know it well enough to brief it and to keep the account inside the rules Google and Meta set for finance ads. Where the work needs someone who lives in Meta day to day, we bring a specialist in rather than stretch the brief.
Reddit stays in the mix we run ourselves. It is cheap traffic in the South African market and it does real awareness work next to Google, which is why it sits here as a channel and not as an experiment.
WhatsApp we will run if you already have it in place. It is not a headline service for us, but we will pick up what is there and work from that. We have built approaches for it before, and we learn the rest quickly.
Community management sits outside what we do day to day. If you need it covered, we will help you place it with the right partner. That does not change our fit for the rest of this brief.
High-volume social content is also outside this retainer.
Reporting
No data dumps. Custom dashboards, with the insight and the executive summary that say what to do next.
If a funded deal cannot be tracked in your CRM today, making that event measurable comes before any dashboard.
Spotted already
Your RFP says over R18bn to more than 75,000 businesses since 2012. Your homepage says more than R17 billion into close to 70,000 SMEs, and your wholesale page says since 2013. Your own site is understating you by a billion rand and 5,000 businesses, and it disagrees with itself on the year you started. It may simply be an outdated site.
That took four minutes. The Phase 2 audit will close the gaps so the numbers you use internally and the numbers the market sees match.
Teams, partners, retention
Media, web and social partners keep their seats. We bring what we are good at, and we work it with your people.
Shared briefs, shared numbers, one story.
We translate business objectives into marketing objectives and campaigns with your team, not around them. Brand identity, if it is a separate mandate, sits with whoever already owns it.
Email sequences, and the other channels that bring someone back to re-advance.
A re-advance becomes available once roughly 70% of the facility is repaid, and around 80% of Merchant Capital customers take one. The work is timing and message: sequences that retain the relationship and reopen the next advance.
Your affiliate programme is a channel, run in bursts.
Positioning, landing, tracking, enablement and reporting when you need it. Partner volume gets its own quality rules, because it does not behave like paid search.
Tell people the truth up front.
The buyer is a human with a shop, a practice, a kitchen. If the ad implies money tomorrow and the process feels like a bank, they leave, and they tell the next owner. Funnel copy has to match how you actually fund.
What clients say
“Campaigns that have been in the planning stage for a year with the previous provider are now done and delivered.”Don Wiid CEO, CRM Insights
“They simply ‘got us’ and were quick to action. No fluff that typically slows down a go-to-market strategy.”Aiden Choles CEO, Unifi
“After more than two years of partnering with them, I can confidently say their service is outstanding.”Mri Gray UX & Project Lead, Isoflow
Cadence and briefing
Taylor is in the weekly. The point of that meeting is decisions, and those get written down the same day. Anything that arrives between meetings is a brief in a shared tracker, with an owner and a due date, before anyone starts on it.
| Cadence | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Weekly, 60 min | Priorities, blockers, live work. Taylor in the session. |
| Async | Email, Basecamp or WhatsApp. Decisions in writing. |
| Monthly | Dashboard update. Action, outcome, insight, trend, recommendation. |
| Quarterly | Look at the mix. Change it if the market moved. |
| Ad hoc | Logged brief, turnaround agreed before work. If it blows the month, we say so before it uses the capacity you are paying for. |
What we need from you
The useful thing you can give us is a clear picture of a good funded deal, and access to the CRM where those deals live. Ads, analytics, the site, and the stages a deal moves through. When a lead is junk, or a deal is funded or declined, someone on the credit side sends that back, so we stop buying the wrong applications.
Fees and billing
No line-by-line billing, and no second invoice for work that was already in the brief. Media spend, software and hosting stay outside it, on their own lines.
Monthly retainer
R64,500 $3,950 USDThis is our standard published price, the same one on our website. No pitch premium. Invoiced monthly. VAT where applicable. Month to month, 30 days’ written notice. Account and data remain yours on exit.
We charge one flat fee that covers everything, and we do not itemise invoices. No line-by-line billing, no arguments about whether something was in scope, no surprise invoice in month two. If we have quoted it, it is included.
The accountability is 30 days’ notice, any month. If we are not delivering, you tell us and you leave. We will not dress that up as a performance clause. We would rather stand behind the offer than spend the first quarter negotiating a bonus structure while we could have been getting results.
We will not take CPA on applications, because in lending that incentive pays us to send you junk.
Disclosure
More than three years ago, Growth Experts did work for Bridgement, mainly lead generation through cold email. Nothing is live, there is no ongoing relationship, and no data or accounts carry over.
What we took from it is how this market behaves: an application is a long way from a funded deal, cheap leads cost you later, and repeat funding is the quieter half of growth. What stays with Bridgement is anything specific to Bridgement.
For the life of the work and six months after, we will not work with Lula, Retail Capital / TymeBank SME, Cash Flow Capital / Pref Cap, Bridgement, GetFunds, or other short-term (24 months or less) SME business finance in South Africa. The restriction is geographic: South Africa. A lender in another market is outside it.
Thank you