Building a repeatable 10-deals-a-week machine before the December close.
Disclaimer and terms of use. This document, including all strategy, diagnosis, creative platforms, campaign territories, frameworks, funnel architecture and commercial modelling contained within it, is the intellectual property of Justine Pogroske Private Brand Consulting and Advisory, trading as Million Dollar Branders and remains so at all times whether or not this proposal is accepted. It is supplied in confidence to Shortgap Finance for the sole purpose of evaluating this engagement. It may not be reproduced, transmitted, disclosed to any third party, or implemented in whole or in part, by Shortgap Finance or by any agency, contractor or employee acting on its behalf, without prior written consent. Full terms and conditions appear at Page 9 of this document.
Your marketing was written to win someone who is deciding whether to borrow $250,000. Your commercial target needs someone who wants $10,000 by Friday. Those are 2 different people who behave in 2 different ways and no single set of ads, one website and one application process will win both of them.
Here is the difference in practice. The $250,000 borrower reads, compares, asks questions and takes 6 weeks to decide. They can be persuaded, so brand, belief and education are worth the investment. The $10,000 borrower has a problem this week and will go with the first lender who gives them a straight answer. They cannot be persuaded because they are not listening long enough to be. Everything about reaching them is different: the ad, the promise, the page they land on, how many questions you are allowed to ask and how fast you have to answer.
The Marketing Launch Playbook is a strong document and it was written for the first of those 2 people. The positioning is intelligent, the creative library is distinctive and the compliance discipline is better than most lenders in this market ever bother with. Nothing in this proposal asks you to throw any of it away. What it does ask is a harder question: the target discussed on 1 September was 10 deals a week, $10,000 increments and that is the second person. Running them both through the same marketing means the small deal gets buried inside a process built for the large one and neither performs. Below is what has to change before a dollar of media is spent.
The Full Picture Matters is a beautiful argument for a borrower who has time to be convinced. It builds belief across awareness, curiosity, relevance and eligibility. The 10-a-week borrower does not travel that road. They have a problem this week and they will resolve it with whoever answers first.
The chat to client to capital journey noted at around $29,000 runs 6 to 8 weeks. That is acceptable at scale value. In the sub-$10,000 band, competitors publish 3-hour approvals. Every additional day of process is a measurable percentage of the funnel lost, not a service difference.
Language, metaphor, belief and tone are fully developed. Nothing in the current system asks a stranger to do a specific thing, today, for a specific reason. Brand creates permission to be considered. Volume requires an offer. Shortgap currently has the first and none of the second.
Charging to apply is the single most effective qualification filter available to a lender and almost nobody in this market has the confidence to use it. Framed as a fee it suppresses volume. Framed as a priority assessment it raises application quality, lowers cost per qualified application and screens out the tyre-kickers your credit team is currently absorbing for free.
Australian settlement, broker and credit activity thins from the 1st week of December and effectively closes on Friday 18 December. The revenue people call a Christmas campaign is not earned in December. It is earned in October and harvested in November. A campaign that launches in late November has already missed.
10 deals a week from cold paid acquisition is a significant and permanent media budget. 10 deals a week across a live panel of 30 brokers is 1 deal per broker per fortnight, which is a modest ask of a relationship that costs nothing to run once built. The volume target is a distribution problem before it is a media problem.
Shortgap does not need a bigger campaign. It needs a second lane, an offer, a deadline and a broker panel, built in that order and live by the 3rd week of October. Everything that follows in this document is the shape of that build.
The Australian volume lending market is crowded, loud and almost entirely undifferentiated. Its shared blind spot is the exact position Shortgap already owns on paper.
Industry reporting in 2026 puts bank processing at 21 to 35 days, with a majority of small businesses abandoning applications over documentation alone. Every one of those is a warm borrower with a live need and no destination.
Strategy: Intercept at the point of rejection, not the point of search.
From late October, any borrower with a settlement, a supplier deadline, a tax instalment or a stock order has a mathematical problem. The bank cannot physically get there. This is the most valuable and most short-lived demand pool of the year.
Strategy: Own the calendar, not the rate.
Brokers lose files they cannot place and losing a file often means losing the client relationship entirely. A lender who takes the awkward file in December earns the clean file in March.
Strategy: Be the file a broker sends rather than the client they lose.
Publishes 3-hour approvals from $5,000 upward, leads with an open-minded credit posture and runs an aggressive broker commission programme.
Gap: Permissiveness reads as risk. Their language actively signals that their borrower had nowhere else to go.
The strongest unaided awareness in Australian SME lending and a platform ambition well beyond a loan book.
Gap: Competes on scale and share of voice. Shortgap cannot and should not try to buy into that auction.
Competitive pricing for clean, established files with connected accounting and bank feeds.
Gap: Automated assessment structurally excludes the complex file, which is precisely Shortgap's stated appetite.
Platforms matching across 90+ lenders now sit between the borrower and every generic search term in the category.
Gap: They match, they do not judge. No relationship, no advocacy and no second loan.
Owner-occupier bridging built as a consumer product rather than a credit product, with buy-before-you-sell framing a borrower understands without explanation and location-level search coverage across every capital city.
Gap: Locked to owner-occupied property from $300,000 and 1 use case. No answer for a business borrower, a small facility or any file that is not a property transition.
Lending since 2012 with more than $3.3 billion funded through brokers, conditional approval inside 24 hours and bridging facilities to $10 million. This is the incumbent sitting in the panel slot Shortgap wants.
Gap: Built for scale tickets and property security. A $10,000 facility sits beneath their cost to serve, which is precisely the ground Shortgap can take without a fight.
Every lender in the volume band competes on permission or on speed. Not one competes on dignity. Shortgap is the only brand in this market already positioned to lend $10,000 without making the borrower feel they had to ask for it. That is the opening and it is the entire campaign.
Shortgap has a better brand than the category deserves and almost no presence in it. Those are different problems and only one of them is solved by a document.
A brand guideline is a set of intentions. A brand in market is a set of memories and memories are built by repetition of a very small number of things. The risk over the next 90 days is not that Shortgap looks wrong. It is that Shortgap looks like everyone else at 6 metres on a phone screen and that a volume target quietly erodes a premium position that took real work to build. This page is about protecting the brand while making it work commercially.
Azure and navy are the default palette of virtually every Australian lender and fintech. The colour system is well built, but it will not make Shortgap recognisable on its own. Distinctiveness has to come from somewhere other than colour, because 4 of the 5 brands in any feed are already blue.
Iceberg, Owl, Lighthouse and Keyhole are genuinely distinctive and almost nobody in Australian lending is working symbolically at all. That is the moat. It is currently being treated as decoration rather than as a consistently repeated brand asset.
7 metaphors used once each build nothing. 2 used relentlessly build a brand. The recommendation is that Iceberg and Owl carry every awareness placement for the next 12 months and the remaining assets stay campaign-only exactly as the playbook already instructs.
Shortgap is a literal description of the product. Bridging the gap between where you are and where you need to be is the most ownable verbal territory the brand has and it currently sits 3rd in the messaging hierarchy behind 2 abstractions. In a volume lane, the literal line will outperform the philosophical one.
In private lending, trust transfers through people faster than through logos. Ryan, Jordan and Petro are currently allocated 10% of the content mix under team and corporate. In this category they should be carrying a meaningful share of awareness, particularly into the broker audience where a face converts a panel meeting that a brand cannot.
Within 6 weeks of a direct-response campaign going live, someone will suggest a countdown timer, a rate claim or a bad-credit headline because it lifts click-through. Each one is a small withdrawal from the only differentiated asset Shortgap owns. The guardrails must be defended by someone whose job it is to defend them.
Every lender that has tried to be premium and high-volume at once has failed in the same way: not through a strategy decision, but through 40 small creative concessions made under performance pressure over 1 quarter. Holding the line is an ongoing advisory function, not a launch deliverable.
5 things, used without deviation, in every placement for 12 months. Nothing else is added to this list without approval and nothing on it is rested because the team has grown tired of it, which typically happens around month 3 and roughly 2 years before the market has noticed it at all.
The playbook's prohibited language list is correct and should not be relaxed for the fast-track lane. What changes is not the register but the distance: shorter sentences, a named situation and the borrower addressed directly rather than described in the 3rd person.
Note the discipline in all 3: the urgency belongs to the borrower's circumstance, never to Shortgap's sales technique. That is the rule the playbook sets and it is the rule that keeps this brand out of the category it is trying to beat.
One brand, 2 entirely separate acquisition systems. The governing rule is absolute: the lanes never share a landing page, a form, a call to action, a conversion event or a budget line.
Paid social, long-tail scenario search and the broker channel. Priority assessment at $99.95. Decision measured in hours, not weeks. This lane carries the 10-deals-a-week target and it is where the entire Q4 build is concentrated.
Strategy: Volume, velocity and a dated offer.
The existing playbook stands unchanged. Iceberg, Bridge, the leadership series and the eligibility narrative all continue to run here exactly as written. Nothing in this proposal disturbs the work already done.
Strategy: Belief, patience and referral.
A meaningful share of Lane 1 borrowers are Lane 2 borrowers who have not disclosed their full position yet. A $10,000 fast-track file is the cheapest qualified lead into a $250,000 facility Shortgap will ever buy.
Strategy: Nurture by design, not by accident.
Volume requires a reason to act now and in credit a deadline outperforms a discount every time, because the borrower's constraint is time rather than price. The recommendation is a single named, dated Q4 offer built around the market's own calendar rather than Shortgap's sales pressure. That distinction matters: your own playbook rightly prohibits urgency as a technique. Describing the banking calendar is not pressure. It is a fact your borrower needs and nobody is telling them.
This document states the diagnosis and the shape of the solution. The keyword architecture, audience matrices, creative scripts, bidding logic, broker sequences and funnel instrumentation are the engagement itself and are delivered on commencement, not in a proposal.
Every dollar of the media plan resolves on 1 page. At present that page is selling a $250,000 proposition to a $10,000 visitor.
The home hero currently runs a $20,000 to $1M+ proposition. A fast-track visitor arriving from a Meta ad about a supplier invoice reads that as evidence they are in the wrong place and they leave without ever seeing a form.
The preliminary eligibility interface is the strongest conversion asset Shortgap owns. On the fast-track landing page it should be the 1st interactive element on the screen, above any brand narrative at all.
70% or more of paid social traffic will arrive on a phone, in a queue, with 1 thumb. The current home-page composition reads as a desktop layout adapted downward rather than a mobile experience designed upward.
Licence status, privacy posture, 20+ years of lending and the absence of a credit-score impact are all decided in the first 3 seconds. At a $10,000 ticket, from a lender the borrower has never heard of, these are not reassurances. They are preconditions.
Progressive disclosure: 4 questions covering amount, purpose, security and timeframe, then a result, then contact details. Everything else moves behind the email capture. Each field removed before the first commitment point is measurable conversion recovered.
Partially completed eligibility sessions are the warmest audience Shortgap will ever hold. Instrumentation, event tracking and recovery automation must be live and tested before a single dollar of media is spent, not built once the leaks appear.
Direction only. Every line below is subject to credit and legal sign-off before publication, in line with the guardrails already set in the playbook.
The findings above are the opening read. A full review of shortgap.ai is a named deliverable of Phase 1, assessed against 1 question throughout: what does the $10,000 fast-track borrower need in order to complete an application today. The review covers the following and is delivered as a prioritised set of recommendations your development team can build from.
Separate from the core site, with its own hero, its own form, its own proof and its own conversion event. The permanent website stays clean, minimal and technology-led exactly as the playbook requires. The campaign environment is allowed to work harder.
Scenario-led, deadline-led and dignity-led, tested against each other from the 1st day of spend rather than sequenced after a month of guessing.
Credit appetite, commission structure, submission pathway and the scenario library in 1 place a broker can bookmark and return to. Most lender partner pages are a form and a promise. That is a low bar to clear.
Analytics, conversion events, attribution and abandonment tracking specified, built and verified in Phase 2. Media does not go live against an unmeasured funnel under any circumstances.
10 settled deals a week is not a marketing aspiration. It is a funnel with a defined shape and the shape tells you immediately whether the media budget is realistic.
These are planning assumptions, not forecasts and they are deliberately conservative. Shortgap's real approval and settlement rates will replace every one of them inside the first 30 days. Rebuilding this model on your actual credit data at day 30 is a fixed deliverable of the engagement, not an optional extra.
A borrower whose bank has just declined them no longer types "business loan" into Google. They ask a model what their options are, in a paragraph, with their actual circumstances in it. That is the single most qualified question in this entire category and it is currently being answered without Shortgap in the room. This is also the only line in the allocation where being early is worth more than being large.
Do not fight Prospa, Bizcap and the panel aggregators on generic search. Buy the situations they cannot name, the moment after the bank says no and the broker who is holding a file they cannot place. That is a cheaper market and a defensible one.
The target is reachable through media alone, but only expensively and only for as long as the budget runs. Through a broker panel it becomes structural and it compounds. Your own playbook already says referral partners are an acquisition engine rather than a website page. It is right and it is the single most under-resourced line in the document. 1 deal per broker per fortnight across 30 active brokers delivers 15 a week and the cost of running that panel once it exists is a fraction of the media required to replace it.
December is the only fixed thing in your borrower's year. Everything else is negotiable. That single observation is the campaign.
The existing creative library is not replaced. Iceberg, Owl, Lighthouse and Keyhole continue to carry brand awareness and they are re-cut as 6 and 15 second vertical assets so they can work in the placements that matter. What sits beneath them is new: a direct-response layer purpose-built for the fast-track lane. 6 campaign territories, sequenced across the quarter.
The banks stop lending well before your borrower stops needing to settle. This is the market's calendar stated plainly, not manufactured urgency and it is the highest-converting message available in the quarter. Extends the existing Lighthouse asset into direct response.
It is not a big number. It is just the wrong week. The single largest conversion barrier in sub-$10,000 borrowing is embarrassment and every competitor amplifies it by leading with bad credit language. Shortgap removes it. This is where the brand's premium posture becomes a commercial weapon rather than a constraint.
A structural comparison against the bank timeline rather than against any named competitor. Positions process as the product. All timeframe language in this territory is written against credit-approved parameters and cleared before it goes live.
Every broker has a file they cannot place in December. Their lenders go quiet, their client goes elsewhere and the relationship goes with it. Trade-facing throughout and the highest-leverage territory in the entire plan.
School fees, tax instalments, rates notices, insurance renewals and the thinnest trading month of the year, all landing at once. This is the cheapest media in the calendar and almost nobody in the category shows up for it.
Iceberg, Owl and Keyhole re-cut for vertical placement, short-form and story formats at platform-ready resolution rather than exported screenshots. Awareness continues to run above the direct-response layer so the 2 compound instead of competing.
Every date in this plan is set by 1 fixed point: the last business day before the Australian credit market closes for the year.
Advisory, creative production and campaign management. Media spend is paid by Shortgap directly to the platforms and is not marked up, held or invoiced through Million Dollar Branders. All figures are in Australian dollars and exclusive of GST.
| Phase & scope of work | Duration | Timing | Investment (AUD) |
|---|---|---|---|
Phase 1: Strategic Advisory & Architecture
|
3 weeks | September | $7,500 |
Phase 2: Creative Platform & Conversion Build
|
4 weeks | Sept to Oct | $16,500 |
Phase 3: Activation & Management
|
8 weeks | Oct to Dec | $13,000 |
Phase 4: January Reset & Scale Advisory
|
5 weeks | Dec to Jan | $7,500 |
Commencement fee of $7,500 plus GST is payable to open Phase 1. Phases 2, 3 and 4 are invoiced monthly in advance and each may be concluded at the end of its phase with 30 days notice. Recommended media investment of $11,000 to $14,000 per month across Phases 3 and 4 is paid by Shortgap directly to the platforms and sits outside this figure. Website development, CRM configuration, photography, video production shoots and third-party licensing are quoted separately if required.
At steady state the model returns a blended acquisition cost of roughly $440 per settled fast-track deal, advisory and media combined, against a facility of up to $10,000. Whether that is a good number is a question only Shortgap's revenue per deal can answer. That is precisely why day 30 rebuilds this model on your real approval and settlement data rather than on my assumptions.
The banks close on 18 December. That is not a problem to be solved. It is the entire opportunity.
A copy of this scope for signature will follow by email. Please return the executed document to commence Phase 1.
These do not happen in sequence. Every one of them opens in the same week, because 18 December does not move to accommodate a delayed approval.
Countersign this scope and settle the commencement fee of $7,500 plus GST. Phase 1 opens within 5 business days of acceptance. Owner: Ryan Hillas and Petro Banis. By: 11 September.
Schedule a half day with Ryan, Petro and Jordan to fix fast-track parameters, approved appetite and the claims that can lawfully be made. Nothing else in this plan can be built until that room has met. Owner: Ryan Hillas and Petro Banis, Shortgap credit team. By: 15 September.
The final pre-Christmas funding cut-off confirmed and published internally. Every asset, ad, email and landing page in the quarter is then built backwards from it. Owner: Ryan Hillas and Petro Banis. By: 30 September.
Analytics, conversion events, CRM attribution and abandonment recovery specified, built and verified. No media activates against an unmeasured funnel. Specified and advised by MDB, built by your development team. Owner: Ryan Hillas and Petro Banis. By: 20 October.
Assemble the target list of 40 brokers, accountants and referrers and book the first 10 introductions. This track can and should start before the panel deck exists. Owner: Ryan Hillas and Petro Banis. By: 6 October.
This proposal is issued by Justine Pogroske Private Brand Consulting and Advisory, trading as Million Dollar Branders. Acceptance of this scope, whether by countersignature or by settlement of the commencement fee, constitutes agreement to the terms below.