Success On the Last Day? It’s Really About What Happens All Month

There isn’t a more chaotic time in this industry than the last day of the month. Brokers on the front line scramble to close deals to hit their sales targets while funders provide vital support from the backend.

Paul Boxer, COO of Merchant Marketplace calls the last working day “the most insane day of the month.” Boxer told deBanked “… for us we know that on the funding side to make our investors and syndicators happy it’s a very crucial integral day that we’re all hands on deck to do whatever we can to make sure as many deals get funded as possible.”

Among the secrets to a successful end-of-month performance, however, is operating efficiently throughout the month, several sources opined. For Moe Braun, the Senior Director of Business Development at Rocket Capital, he said that means communicating with ISOs about what deals they’d really want to see get closed and funded so that their ISOs are spending their time pursuing the right files all along. Braun himself even sets his own daily and weekly goals to maximize efficiency.

“I think the easiest way to avoid the pressures are to kind of granulate those quotas, instead of monthly, as granular as you can get,” said Braun, “So weekly, daily; when I come into the office every day, I know what I want to get done that day. And then if I get it done that day, I try to focus on how I did and copy that for the next day. And same goes for my week, I look at the end of the week on Fridays, I say ‘hey, was this a good week? Was this a bad week? What went well, how can I do that again next week? And what went wrong and how can I correct that for next week?’”

For Russell Kimyagarov, the Founder and CEO of Fratello Capital, he says they’re constantly tuned into their CRM, tracking deals that receive pre-approvals and identifying follow-ups needed.

“We also have meetings once a week with the staff, with the team, to make sure if there’s anything that we could do better that we’re discussing it and implementing it to close more files and stay in touch with the ISOs a little better,” Kimyagarov said.

“In our CRM, we do track how many submissions a day from which broker,” said Boxer of Merchant Marketplace. “How many offers? Then the breakdown between submissions to offers to contracts out. Why it did or didn’t fund. To the ones that didn’t fund, what happened? Did they get funded somewhere else? Did the merchant just start ghosting the broker? Did it die for other reasons?”

Even for Boxer who knows what the last day of a month is like, he affirmed that there is a bigger picture to it all.

“I think that in this business there are other ways to focus your business, a lot of it’s based on like mentioning quotas and numbers, for us it’s really about relationships,” Boxer said.