Marketing Manager - Manda

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 Marketing Manager to own how business owners find manda, iwoca's M&A platform. You'll be our first marketing hire, joining as we open the platform to business owners who don't yet bank with iwoca. Almost everything about how we reach them is still to be decided, and you'll be the one deciding it. The team You'll be our first marketing hire, joining a founding team of circa 10 mandans. All highly motivated to finally free the SME M&A space from the lack of meaningful innovation in the space. You'll get the autonomy and pace of a startup, with the data, infrastructure and credibility of an established lender behind you. You'll report directly into the Venture Lead of manda. Your mission Your mission is to bring the right business owners to manda: people genuinely thinking about selling, at the point in their lives when they're thinking about it. 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 it doesn't scale and the pool is finite. Your job is to build the channels that reach owners who have never heard of iwoca, work out which of those channels produce real mandates at a cost our fee model can support, and shut down the ones that don't. You won't be inheriting a growth engine. We're launching our direct application journey this autumn, and filling it is your first job. You'll be building the first growth engine here, and you'll be the person who decides where the money goes. The role Find the channels that work Run cheap, fast tests across direct channels such as paid search, paid social, organic, and direct response. Prioritise those that work and kill the ones that don't, based on evidence. Own the budget and the allocation decisions. You'll start small on purpose: we'd rather learn which channel works than spend heavily on one that doesn't. Write and test the copy yourself, from ads to landing pages, and iterate on what real business owners actually respond to. Test offline as well as digital. Mail and email direct to business owners are two of the few ways to reach someone who isn't actively searching for a way out, and nobody has tested either properly for us yet. Earn coverage in the trade press. We have real deals to talk about now, and working with iwoca's comms team you should be able to turn them into a steady source of inbound interest. Prove the unit economics Establish what it actually costs us to acquire a seller mandate through each channel. We have an assumption in our financial model and nobody has yet tested it — replacing it with a real number is one of the most valuable things you can do in your first six months. Define how we value a lead be