Reward, cashback, affiliate and creator platforms
You built the growth. Who has checked the machine underneath it?
Follow a transaction from the moment it happens to the moment everyone has been paid. How many times did it stop?
A funding round, an acquisition, or somebody's buyer going through it line by line. At some point they look, and what they find decides your number.
I only work with a small number of leadership teams at any one time.
Is this you
What gets asked about
- Revenue is growing faster than the operation underneath it
- Different teams have different versions of the same number
- Money takes longer to move than anyone can quite explain
- Something has become "just how we do it" and nobody remembers deciding
- The technology is in place and the joins between it are still manual
- You are about to scale something nobody has walked end to end
You are probably fine
- You can already say how long money takes to move end to end, and prove it
- Every stage has a name against it, and that person would agree it's theirs
- Nothing important depends on 1 spreadsheet or 1 person being at their desk
- You know exactly what needs fixing and you just need hands
Designed for
- Cashback, reward and voucher platforms
- Card-linked and bank-embedded loyalty
- Employee benefits and incentive platforms
- Gift card platforms, and anyone managing a float
- Creator commerce and creator payouts
- Affiliate networks and partner platforms
2 journeys, 1 business
I follow the money twice.
Most businesses have only ever mapped the first one.
The second one pays for the first. A member cannot be paid until the merchant has.
Scale = Growth − What stands still
Everyone measures the growth. Almost nobody measures what stands still.
What they will ask
3 questions a buyer will ask, long before you are ready for them.
If I asked how long it takes to get a new partner live, would 3 people in your business give me the same number?
When a transaction reverses after you have already told someone they had earned it, what happens next?
Who owns the journey from a transaction happening to everyone being paid, end to end?
Every single one is money.
In practice
What that looks like in practice.
Two platforms where nothing looked broken. In both, 1 small change took weeks out of the wait.
One of the largest programmes on the site. Tracking was clean, but nothing could be matched back to a live order, so validation was still being done by hand.
1 change to what we captured made the matching automatic.
Nothing here was broken. The brand simply refused to settle for "good enough".
A targeted cash-flow fix took a quarter off the wait, and 5-star reviews followed the same quarter.
What people say
"Nat is a pleasure to work with: friendly, proactive and highly strategic. We worked closely together on the BT programme during her time at Quidco, strengthening the partnership, improving operational efficiency and delivering strong results.
In particular, Nat helped introduce a more effective validation process, which improved both performance and the customer experience for people purchasing BT products through Quidco."
What working together looks like
2 reasons somebody goes through it line by line.
All remote. Fixed scope and fixed price, agreed before we start.
You are selling, or raising
Buyers do not investigate an operation they cannot see. They hold money back against it. Investors do not hold money back, they price lower or release the money in stages against milestones.
Either way you carry it, and the time to find out what they will ask is 12 to 24 months before anybody asks.
You are buying
The plan says 2 platforms become 1. That means 2 merchant estates, 2 tracking systems, 2 invoicing cycles and 2 payout runs, all resolving into a single way of working.
Where they refuse to resolve is where the plan gets more expensive, and it does not appear in the numbers you have been shown.
Where I learned the machine
Awin · Rakuten Advertising · CJ · Partnerize · Tradedoubler · Income Access · Webgains · TradeTracker · Optimise Media · Affiliate Future · Paid On Results · Silvertap
The names change by sector. The machine doesn't.
You built the growth. Who has checked the machine underneath it?
Let's find out. Tell me about your platform and I'll come back to you personally within 1 working day.