The company

It's still difficult for business owners to sell their business, or buy others, in the sub-£10m enterprise value market. Information asymmetry, lack of knowledge and low transaction values make it hard, and most M&A firms shy away from the segment because they can't serve it profitably. A generation of owner-managers is approaching retirement, and most of them have no realistic route to a sale.

manda exists to fix that. We match buyers with sellers in the part of the market everyone else ignores, and we finance acquisitions ourselves so buyers arrive pre-qualified and often pre-financed. We've sold the first businesses, funded the first acquisition loans, and we're now opening the platform up beyond the businesses that already bank with us.

manda is part of iwoca, one of Europe's leading fintech lenders. Since 2012 iwoca has provided more than £4 billion in funding and its mission is to support one million SMEs in their defining moments. That backing is why we can serve this market where others can't: a deep footprint in the SME economy with 150,000+ UK customers, the data and infrastructure of an established lender, and the ability to build clean, automated processes instead of running an advisory firm on spreadsheets.

We’re looking for a Partnership Manager - manda (iwoca's M&A Platform)

We're looking for someone to build the introducer network that brings business owners to manda, iwoca's M&A platform. Accountants, solicitors, wealth managers and brokers meet an owner who is thinking about retiring long before we do. Your job is to make sure that when they do they think of us, and that referring us is the easiest thing they do that day.

The role

Your mission is to build a referral channel that produces a steady flow of business owners who are genuinely ready to sell.

Today almost all of our sellers come from iwoca's own customer base, found by hand and worked one at a time. That works, but the pool is finite. The professionals who already advise business owners are the most credible route to the ones we'd otherwise never reach, and right now we have no systematic way of working with them.

You'll be starting from close to nothing, so the first version of this channel is yours to design. It also means the job is as much about making referrals actually arrive as it is about signing partners up.

It also has to scale. In this industry most partner flow still depends on people turning up at industry events, which works but stops the moment you stop showing up. We're after the version of this channel where referring a client to manda takes a couple of clicks inside the software an adviser already uses.

Key responsibilities include:

• Build the introducer network
  • Find and win the firms worth working with: accountancy practices, corporate finance boutiques, solicitors, wealth managers and business transfer agents. Work out which kinds of firm actually refer, and concentrate there.
  • Do the outbound yourself. Identify the firm, get the meeting, make the case, and follow up until something happens.
  • Design what we offer them: how a referral is made, what the partner gets, what we commit to in return, and how we keep them informed once their client is with us.
• Make referrals actually arrive
  • A signed partnership is worth nothing until a referral comes through. You'll own the ongoing relationship work that turns agreements into a flow: regular contact, keeping manda front of mind, briefing partner teams, and being the person they call.
  • Track referral volume and quality by partner, and be honest about which relationships aren't working so we can stop spending time on them.
• Make the channel scale
  • Judge every partnership by whether it adds referrals without adding work. A relationship that only produces when you're in the room isn't a channel yet.
  • Work out which partner technology is worth plugging into: the practice management and accounting software advisers already work in, tracked referral links and partner portals, and integrations that let a firm refer a client without leaving their own tools. You won't build these yourself, but you'll identify them, make the commercial case, and scope them with our Product Builder.
  • Look for partners who can bring a book rather than one client at a time. One firm with hundreds of owner-managed clients is worth more to us than ten firms with five, if we can find a way to surface the right candidates across the whole book.
• Work iwoca's existing network
  • iwoca already has a broker network and a partnerships function with relationships across the SME economy. Working out where manda fits into those relationships is far faster than starting cold, and it's the first place to look.
• Events and community
  • Build a focused programme of events worth attending and, where it makes sense, running our own: succession and exit planning, accountancy and adviser events, industry gatherings, and business owner peer communities.
  • Judge them on referrals rather than attendance, and stop going to the ones that don't produce. Events are how you find and land partners, not how the channel scales.
• Prove the channel pays
  • Establish what a referral actually costs us once your time, any partner incentives and events are counted, and how many convert into a signed mandate. We have an assumption in our financial model and nobody has yet tested it.