Marketing Manager - Manda at iwoca

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 before it becomes a deal. Our conversion event is months away from first contact and worth a lot when it lands, so you'll need a sensible proxy to steer spend against.

Build the measurement first

• Set up attribution, with needed tech support, so that customers can be traced back to the channel that produced them.

• Build the reporting that tells the team which channels are working, and be the person who questions a number that looks too good.

Turn our website into something that converts

• Make the case for manda clearly: what the process involves, how long each step takes, and why we're different from a traditional broker.

• Use our completed deals, our team's track record and our acquisition finance offering as proof, and test what actually persuades a cautious owner to start a conversation about selling.

Help us reach better buyers

• Sellers come first, but manda is a two-sided market. Once seller supply is working, you'll help us reach acquirers who are serious, credible and ready to transact, including buyers who are new to iwoca.

The requirements

Essential:

• Around 4+ years in acquisition, growth or generalist marketing, ideally in a startup, scale-up or new venture where you had to work out what to do rather than execute someone else's plan.

• M&A, marketplace or two-sided experience, especially where supply rather than demand was the constraint.

• Comfortable with a long, low-frequency, high-value conversion. Selling a business is nothing like taking out a loan: the cycle runs for months, volumes are low, and you'll have to make decisions on thin and noisy data without waiting for statistical comfort.

• Numerate and data-literate. You build the measurement before the campaign, you can read a funnel, and you're happy owning the numbers you report.

• Genuinely hands-on. There's no team and no agency to hide behind: you'll write the copy, brief the page, set up the tracking and pull the reporting yourself.

• Experience driving applications or sign-ups into a live product journey, and comfortable working with product and engineering on the conversion steps you don't own yourself.

• A commercial thinker with a bias for action, comfortable navigating ambiguity in an early-stage venture.

Bonus:

• Experience marketing to owner-managers of established SMEs, particularly around retirement, succession or exit.

• You've personally owned a paid channel with a real budget, and you've killed one that wasn't working. We care as much about the second part as the first.

• Regulated or financial services marketing experience.

• Offline direct response experience, particularly direct mail.

• Hands-on with HubSpot, GA4 or similar, and comfortable with SQL or a BI tool like Looker.

The salary

We expect to pay from £55,000–£80,000 for this role. But, we're open-minded, so definitely include your salary goals with your application. We routinely benchmark salaries against market rates, and run quarterly performance and salary reviews.

The culture

At iwoca, the best idea wins. We model our culture on independent thinking, challenging untested logic, and evidence-based decisions. We prioritise learning and growth, and give people the autonomy to develop in the direction that makes them most effective.

We're a tech company and believe in the power of AI to help us work faster and better. We provide the infrastructure where every iwocan always has access to the best models and where those models have access to all of our data. We will help our people to learn how to use and grow with the new tools available to them.

The offices

We put a lot of effort into making iwoca a great place to work:

• Offices in London, Leeds, Berlin, and Frankfurt with plenty of drinks and snacks.

• Events and community-led groups, including running groups, padel, and monthly ping-pong and pool competitions.

The benefits

• Flexible working hours.

• Medical insurance from Vitality, including discounted gym membership.

• A private GP service (separate from Vitality) for you, your partner, and your dependents.

• 25 days' holiday per year, an extra day off for your birthday, the option to buy or sell an additional five days of annual leave, and unlimited unpaid leave.

• A one-month, fully paid sabbatical after four years.

• Instant access to external counselling and therapy sessions for team members that need emotional or mental health support.

• 3% Pension contributions on total earnings.

• An employee equity incentive scheme.

• Generous parental leave and a nursery tax benefit scheme to help you save money.

• Electric car scheme and cycle to work scheme.

• Two company retreats a year: we've been to France, Italy, Spain, and further afield.

And to make sure we all keep learning, we offer:

• A learning and development budget for everyone.

• Company-wide talks with internal and external speakers.

• Access to learning platforms like Treehouse.

Useful links

• iwoca benefits & policies

Compensation: £55K – £80K

• • £55K – £80K

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