The 90-Day Framework.

File the LLC. State of formation matters less than most new brokers think. Wyoming and Delaware get recommended for privacy and cleaner legal frameworks, but if you’re operating from your home state, forming there is simpler and avoids foreign-entity registration costs. Get the EIN from the IRS (free, fifteen minutes online). Open a business bank account on the EIN before taking a single deal.

Research broker licensing and commercial financing disclosure obligations in every state where you’ll source deals. Ten states now have commercial financing disclosure laws on the books: California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Missouri, New York, Texas, Utah, Virginia. Virginia specifically requires brokers of sales-based financing to register with the state.[1][2] New York’s Commercial Finance Disclosure Law went live August 1, 2023.[2] Connecticut’s followed July 1, 2024.[1] Texas passed HB 700 in 2025. That’s the bill that, among other things, banned automatic ACH debiting of merchant accounts without a perfected first-priority security interest, and added a broker registration requirement with the Office of Consumer Credit Commissioner.[1] California’s DFPI expanded oversight of commercial finance providers and brokers in 2026.[1][3] The landscape shifts every legislative cycle. Verify the current list before you source a deal in a new state, not after.

Also this week: a toll-free number routed to your cell, professional email on your own domain (not a Gmail address), and a CRM category chosen. Solo brokers usually run on either a dedicated MCA/ISO-focused CRM or a general sales CRM configured for alternative funding pipelines. Pick the category first, pick the product second, and don’t spend more than two hours on that decision in Week 1.

Re-read Section 1 of this report three times. Build a personal cheat sheet of the 8 lender categories with composite buy boxes. The version you can reference in 10 seconds on a merchant call. Not a design project. Handwritten index cards work.

Start a running spreadsheet. Every deal you hear about (Instagram, broker forums, merchants who reach out, industry newsletters) gets logged by which lane it fits: MCA, term, LOC, SBA, equipment, factoring, real-estate-backed, or credit-based. You’re not pricing these deals. You’re training pattern recognition before you have a live deal at stake.

By Friday of Week 2, you should hear a rough deal description (“restaurant, $40K/month in sales, 640 FICO, wants $25K”) and name the two most likely lanes in under five seconds.

Apply Section 2’s five-number framework to 20 sample statements. Monthly revenue. Daily average balance. NSF count. Existing advance debits. Deposit consistency. Twenty statements, scanned cold, until the scan takes 90 seconds without looking at the framework.

This is non-negotiable. Submit a deal before this skill lands and you burn AE relationships that take six months to rebuild. An AE who gets a Tier 3 deal submitted as Tier 1 from a new broker twice stops answering the broker’s emails. Permanently.

The $47 “Underwriting in 60 Seconds” mini-course is the fastest way to get these reps on curated statement sets with worked tier calls. You can also get there alone with enough sample volume. You cannot skip this week.

A simple web form on your domain that captures incoming deals. Business name, industry, monthly revenue, requested amount, time in business, owner FICO range, state. The form feeds your CRM. An automated workflow fires on submission: merchant gets a receipt email, a statement-request message goes out with secure upload instructions, and a stip checklist is attached.

This is your first exposure to a self-hosted workflow orchestrator. The right one for this job is free, open-source, and runs on cheap infrastructure. Building this alone from tutorials with no prior automation experience takes 3–4 weeks. With a working starter template, 3–4 days.

Workflow 1 from Section 4. The local LLM reads the uploaded bank statements, extracts the five numbers, flags anomalies (stacked positions, NSF spikes, deposit inconsistency), recommends a tier with a one-paragraph reasoning trace.

You understand the concept from Section 4. Week 5 is where you’d build it. The honest picture: production-grade prompts take weeks to tune. Edge-case handling (unusual statement layouts, scanned image quality, merchant category mis-codes) is where most solo builds break. “Works on the demo statement” is not “works on every statement that comes through your intake.”

The brokers who build this alone in Week 5 already have some scripting or automation background. Everyone else lands somewhere around Week 7 or 8 if they’re self-teaching, which is why the Accelerator ships a pre-built, pre-tuned version students configure rather than build from scratch.

Workflow 2 from Section 4. Takes a qualified deal and drafts submission emails in 3–5 funder-specific formats simultaneously. Each draft matches what that specific funder’s submission desk wants to see: exact field order, the specific stip bundle, the subject-line conventions that route the email to the right underwriter instead of a generic queue. Broker reviews each draft, edits the one or two that need a human touch, sends. A 45-minute workflow becomes 4 minutes.

Same honesty as Week 5: funder-format intelligence is Accelerator-only for confidentiality reasons, because it encodes specific funder preferences that only come from live submission volume. Without that intelligence baked in, a self-built version of this workflow still saves time drafting the email scaffolds, but it won’t deliver the submission-to-approval lift that format-matching produces.

This is the hardest phase to do alone. It’s also the phase that separates brokers who make it to $20K/month from brokers who don’t.

Accelerator students get the full Matrix under NDA. Report readers get the method.

Identify currently-active funders through three channels. LinkedIn (AE job titles and recent posts tell you who’s actively writing deals). Industry forums where brokers discuss funder appetite in real time (DailyFunder is the primary one, deBanked is the news side). Broker communities where small-ISO-friendly funders surface in conversation. Avoid static directories. The list of “top MCA funders” you’d find on page one of a Google search is three years stale and includes funders who paused originations, tightened boxes past usefulness for small ISOs, or shut down.

Request AE contact information through warm intros when possible. A cold LinkedIn message to a funder’s head of sales asking “who should I talk to about starting an ISO relationship” works roughly one in five times and doesn’t burn anything when it doesn’t. What burns is submitting garbage deals to a funder before you’ve established the relationship. That costs you the account permanently.

A note on protecting yourself: backdooring is a real problem in this industry. Funders or rogue underwriters who pull merchant info from your submissions and sell it to other brokers. There are watermarking tools (Aquamark is the one most brokers reference) that mark submission docs so you can prove backdooring if it happens. Worth using once you’re submitting volume.

Evaluate whether each funder is actually submitting-friendly for small ISOs. Some Tier 1 funders require $500K/month in minimum submissions to keep an ISO account active. That’s not a fit for a new broker. The funders you want are the ones who explicitly partner with small and new ISOs and don’t have volume minimums. Several exist in every category, and they’re the ones forum threads will name.

Target: 8–12 seated relationships by end of Week 7. Expect a full week of focused outreach.

The structure of an initial AE call is straightforward. 30-second intro. Your positioning (categories and deal sizes you focus on). What you’re looking to submit over the next 30 days. A qualifying question about the funder’s current appetite. Accelerator provides the exact scripts, objection handling, and the three questions that immediately position a new broker as credible. Report shows the structure.

What AEs want to hear: specifics, realism, deal flow that fits their box. “I’m mostly sourcing 2nd-position MCAs between $25K and $75K on small-ticket service businesses. Does that overlap with what you’re writing this quarter?” reads as professional. “What’s your best program?” reads as someone who has never done this before.

What disqualifies you immediately: vague pitches, out-of-box deals submitted as your first submission, pretending you have deal flow you don’t. AEs talk to each other. A reputation as a broker who submits junk paper travels between funders inside two weeks.

Four primary channels for a new broker in 2026.

Organic content. Short-form video on Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn explaining financing concepts in plain English to business owners. Cost: zero dollars, roughly 8–15 hours per week. Time-to-first-deal: 60–120 days once consistency kicks in. Sustainability: highest of the four. The channel that compounds.

Paid lead lists. Three sub-types, each with different economics. UCC trigger lists (businesses with filed UCCs, indicating prior financing) run roughly $1–5 per record at list pricing, or $25–55 per lead on a cost-per-qualified-lead basis.[4][5] Aged MCA leads (30–180+ days old, originally generated for other brokers) run $0.50–3 per record or roughly $15–45 CPL.[4][5] Live transfer leads (a lead provider’s call center qualifies a merchant and transfers the live call to you) convert at 8–12% but command premium pricing: typically $50–150+ per transfer depending on exclusivity and filtering.[4] One thing to know: the lead-quality complaint is loud across the broker forums. Plenty of brokers buy lists where merchants don’t qualify for anything (sub-$5K/mo, no FICO, dead phone numbers) and burn weeks figuring out why nothing converts. Cost-to-first-deal on paid leads for a new broker: $2,000–5,000 in list spend before the first fund, with high variance. Not where to start without the budget to absorb a month of learning-curve losses.

Referral partnerships. CPAs, business brokers, adjacent ISOs who don’t cover your categories. Cost: relationship time, not dollars. Time-to-first-deal: 30–60 days once a partner sends their first introduction. Highest-quality deals come from here.

Warm network. People you already know who own businesses, or who know business owners. Cost: zero. Time-to-first-deal: often inside 30 days if the network exists. Not a repeatable channel once the warm list is exhausted.

Recommendation for a new broker with no audience and no ad budget: warm network for the first fund, referral partnerships for the second through fifth, organic content building in parallel from Week 9 onward. Paid leads enter the mix in Month 4 at the earliest, after you have a working submission system and enough live-deal reps to convert inbound calls without wasting them.

What happens in the 48 hours after submission decides whether the deal funds. Follow-up cadence that doesn’t annoy funders: one check-in the morning after submission if there’s been no status update, one mid-afternoon check the following day, then spaced follow-ups every 24–48 hours after that. AEs get 40+ deals a day in their queue. A broker who checks in politely and specifically (“any update on the Martinez file, submission ID 48291?”) gets prioritized. A broker who sends “??” three times in a day gets deprioritized or dropped.

Counteroffers are where new brokers lose deals. When a funder comes back with less money, a higher factor, or a shorter term than the merchant requested, don’t sell the merchant on taking it. Explain the math. “They approved $40K at 1.35 over 6 months instead of the $60K at 1.30 over 9 you asked for. Here’s what that actually costs versus what you’re going to earn with the capital.” Merchants respect math. They resent being pushed.

A note on the “carrot” tactic. Some funders will float an aggressive offer to lure the broker and merchant in, then walk it back at funding call (lower amount, higher factor, shorter term). It’s industry slang for what’s effectively a bait-and-switch. If a funder has a pattern of pulling the carrot, brokers on the forums will name them quickly. Read the contract before signing the merchant up. Specifically read the section on origination fees and back-end fees, because that’s where the gap usually shows up.

Declines aren’t personal. A decline tells you the deal didn’t fit that funder’s box. It doesn’t tell you the deal is dead. Rework, resubmit to a better-fit funder, or explain to the merchant why this specific deal isn’t fundable right now and what would change that. The AI follow-up system from Section 4’s Workflow 3 keeps every deal warm through this phase automatically. Tracks status across multiple submissions, triggers nudges on the right cadence, surfaces the deals that actually need human attention.

The contract phase. DocuSign is the category standard for e-signature. The funder usually sends the contract directly to the merchant and copies you. Final verification call (the funder confirms business ownership, bank account, and deal terms directly with the merchant) happens within 24 hours of contract signing on most Tier 1 MCA files. Expect the funder to ask the merchant: “What promises has your broker made you that aren’t in this contract?” If you’ve been straight with the merchant, that question is fine. If you’ve made promises the contract doesn’t back up, the deal dies on the funding call and the funder may terminate your ISO agreement on the spot.

What to say when the merchant hesitates at the factor rate or the daily debit amount: the same math from Week 10, applied to their specific numbers. “$300/day on $40K/month in revenue is 10% of daily revenue. You ran 12% on payroll last month. This is a capital decision, not a cash-flow decision. The question is whether $40K in the account Monday morning earns you more than $12K in financing cost over 6 months.” Let them answer. If yes, they sign. If no, the deal shouldn’t fund anyway.

Commission timing surprises new brokers every time. The 2026 trend among Tier 1 MCA funders is same-day or next-business-day commission payout after funding, and several direct funders now advertise same-day payouts as an ISO acquisition feature.[6][7] Some funders still run a 1–3 business-day window. A smaller number hold back a percentage of commission for 30–60 days until early payments clear, particularly on larger deals or newer ISO accounts. Know your specific funder’s terms before you submit the deal, not after. It’s a question in the initial AE call, not an afterthought at funding.

Refine the intake system based on what actually happened in Weeks 9–11. Which questions on the form generated friction with merchants? Which automations fired wrong or didn’t fire at all? Which stip requests did merchants ignore, and what would have made them respond? The intake form you build in Week 4 is a draft. The intake form at end of Week 12 is the first real version.

Identify which lender relationships produced and which didn’t. An AE who responded fast, gave honest feedback, and offered competitive terms gets a monthly deal minimum from you going forward. An AE who ghosted, stalled, or pushed bad counteroffers gets deprioritized. Eight to twelve relationships becomes four to six active and four to six dormant. That’s normal. That’s the point of Phase 3 being a starting shortlist.

Decide whether Month 4 is volume through the same channels or adding a new channel. If warm network and referrals are working, Month 4 is more of the same plus organic content starting to produce inbound. If warm network is exhausted and referrals are slow, Month 4 is the paid-lead test with a capped budget.

The full broker progression from $10K/month to $30K/month to $100K/month lives in Section 6. Short version for Week 12: don’t hire your first 1099 rep before the system is documented enough to hand off, and don’t start spending on paid acquisition before you have repeatable deal flow from organic and referral. Hiring too early and spending too early are the two most common reasons brokers who hit their first fund in 90 days still don’t have a business at Month 6.