Reward, cashback, affiliate and creator platforms
You built the growth. What happens when somebody goes through it line by line?
Before a buyer's team or an investor's does it, I follow a transaction through your platform from the moment it happens to the moment everyone has been paid. Then I follow a merchant from signature to the first commission it ever earns.
The join between those 2 is where your valuation gets decided, and it is the part nobody has asked you about yet.
I take a small number of engagements at a time and I do the work myself.
Your vendor due diligence will cover the numbers. Your lawyers will cover the contracts.
Nobody is covering the machine that produces the numbers.
Being bought, or buying one?
When you are selling, or raising
Buyers do not investigate an operation they cannot see. They hold money back against it. A slice of your price, sitting in somebody else's account for a year or 2, released only if the things they were unsure about turn out not to matter.
Investors do not hold money back. They price lower, or they release the money in stages against milestones.
Either way you carry it, and you carry it because nobody has had to explain the machine to a stranger before.
The time to find out what they will ask is 12 to 24 months before anybody asks it, while there is still time to change the answer. You get the findings first.
When you are buying
The plan says 2 platforms become 1.
That means 2 merchant estates, 2 tracking systems, 2 invoicing cycles, 2 payout runs and 2 sets of partner terms, 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.
I follow the same 2 journeys through the target, and say what it costs to join the 2 together.
One deal, one side, agreed in writing before anything starts.
What the financial work does not reach
It is not that anybody missed it. It is that it does not appear as a line.
Commission that was earned and never invoiced sits inside gross commission cost. Goodwill paid out to members because a transaction could not be traced sits in the same place. The people working the exception queue by hand sit in operations headcount, where they look like the cost of running the business rather than the cost of a field nobody captures.
None of it is hidden. All of it is absorbed. And every one of those lines scales with volume, which means the growth case is the thing that makes them bigger.
Publisher payments routinely take longer than 120 days.
I follow the money twice
Once from the sale through to the payment landing.
And once from onboarding a merchant through to the first commission it ever earns.
Most businesses have only ever mapped the first one. Most data rooms only contain the first one.
The second one pays for the first. A member cannot be paid until the merchant has.
The growth plan in your deck is a journey 1 forecast. Whether it can be delivered is a journey 2 question.
What I am actually looking for
The Domino Principle. A field nobody captures at onboarding decides whether an invoice is right 4 steps and 3 months later. By the time it is visible it looks like an invoicing problem, so that is where it gets fixed, and it comes back.
The Elastic Band. A manual workaround holds for as long as somebody is watching it. Volume doubles, attention moves, and it snaps back to where it was. Most operations have 3 or 4 of these and nobody has written any of them down.
The Invisible Tax. Goodwill paid because a transaction could not be traced. Commission earned and never invoiced. An exception queue worked by hand every week. None of it is hidden and none of it is anybody's fault. It sits inside headcount and gross commission cost, and it grows in proportion to the thing the plan is relying on.
A data room can be read by anybody. 20 years in operations, 9 and a half of them inside a cashback publisher, is what tells you which absence matters.
What gets looked at
- Partner onboarding - how a merchant gets from signed to earning.
- Recording what happened - tracking, attribution, matching, the tracking file.
- The checks before money moves - validation, approval, auto-approve windows, reversals.
- Invoicing, payouts and reconciliation - the invoice cycle, payout runs, settlement, what does not reconcile.
- Data into decisions - what the numbers are used for once they exist, and who sees them.
- Team and process resilience - what happens when the person who knows breaks their leg.
Scored against 5 pillars: settlement and cash movement, commercial economics, attribution and allocation, leakage and operational risk, execution and scalability.
What you get
3 pages. 3 to 4 weeks.
Page 1. The risk profile across the 5 pillars, with a rating against each, what checks out, and the overall read.
Page 2. Every finding that carries a number, written as what was found, what it costs and what it means when somebody asks about it. Annual margin separated from working capital, with a total.
Page 3. What to do about it and in what order, by value against effort, with an owner and an effort estimate against each move. Then what the assessment is based on, and what it does not cover.
It is a constructed example on a made-up target, so there is nothing confidential in it and you can pass it round.
Before you go to market, and after
Before you go to market
I work from your transaction records, your tracking and invoice files, and 2 conversations with the people who work the queues. You get the 3 pages, and a call to walk through anything that would move your price.
After
The fixes, with me doing the work rather than writing a plan for somebody else to do it. Stop what is leaking, re-sequence what is funding itself, and put a limit on the terms that carry no limit.
Scope and a fixed fee in writing after a conversation. Nothing on this page is a price list.
Who does the work
I do. There is no team behind this and no associate doing the first pass.
20 years in operations. 9 and a half of them inside a cashback publisher, across 12 affiliate networks and an estate of 4,200 retailers, running the part between a transaction happening and everybody being paid. 4 years since then in payments and embedded finance.
I have been the person whose job it was to explain to a merchant why an invoice was wrong, and the person who had to find out why. That is a different kind of looking from a workstream.
You spent years building this, and nobody has ever had to explain the machine underneath it to a stranger. In a funding round or a sale, somebody asks.
No junior analysts, no associate doing the first pass, no tick-box report.
Find where the money stands still.
nat@scale-equation.com