7 Reasons Growth Stalls for Factoring Companies
Written by: Husam Jandal, Digital Marketing Consultant and Business Strategist, Husam Jandal International
Has your factoring company stopped growing or even started moving backward? It can be alarming, but it’s usually a sign that your business has reached a certain stage of maturity, but is still relying on relationships and processes you’ve outgrown. Below, I’ll walk you through what this looks like in practice and how to address each challenge.
1. Reliance on Familiar Partners Instead of Proven Specialists
Finance businesses are built on trust, so it makes sense when factoring companies retain their most trusted marketing partners as they grow. In many cases, this means the company that developed your website eventually begins to manage things they don’t specialize in, such as search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) ads, or social media marketing. This ultimately shows up in the results they achieve in those areas.
To achieve strong results across all areas of digital marketing, allow your longtime vendor to focus on what they do best and fill other roles with experts in those areas.
2. Treating Marketing as a Side Job Instead of a Function
One of the most endearing traits of young but well-run factoring companies is that everyone is willing to roll up their sleeves and pitch in wherever they’re needed, especially leadership. That means you might be the founder and head of sales, or a VP who handles the operations side of things, but then moonlights as the email campaign creator. Or, maybe you have a very gifted salesperson who steps up to craft your articles. These things can work in the very early stages of a company’s growth, but eventually, the demands of each role increase. That means your article-writing salesperson is no longer closing sales or is closing sales but not writing. That means you’re either jumping on the phones and creating campaigns or spending time on strategy, but not both. Generally speaking, it’s the marketing duties that get pushed aside for later.
However, marketing systems require consistency, prioritization, and follow-through in order to be successful. If you’re serious about growth, you must have a dedicated resource assigned to each essential role. While some individuals can manage multiple roles as you transition to a more robust structure, you’ll need to ensure their plate is clear enough to be able to focus on their marketing role and have a plan to split the roles in the future.
3. Operating without a Long-Term Growth Plan
Businesses often set goals, but never connect them to a build-out. They know what they want to achieve, but not what has to be put in place first to support it. As a result, marketing decisions get made in isolation. A campaign launches, adjustments follow, and then attention shifts to the next idea before anything has time to mature.
Without a long-term plan, it becomes difficult to tell whether a channel needs refinement or simply more time. Teams end up restarting instead of building, which keeps growth uneven and hard to sustain. A clear growth plan creates continuity, so each effort supports the next instead of competing with it.
4. Underestimating the True Value of a Client
Factors are often hesitant to invest heavily in marketing. It’s understandable, as your specialty is avoiding risk. The challenge here is that the average cost per lead in the finance industry is much higher than you’ll see in other industries, and the quality of the leads you receive often hinges on whether you’re targeting everyone or targeting the businesses most likely to become clients. In other words, if you’re judging your client acquisition costs based on other business types, you’ll always feel like you’re spending too much. Equally, if you’re judging “reasonable cost” based on low-quality leads that don’t convert or become long-term productive clients, you’ll keep your ceilings low and continue to attract low-quality leads.
Instead of looking only at the cost of the lead, it’s important to consider the cost as it relates to the value of that client over the lifetime of your relationship. When you know your client lifetime value (CLV), you can set spend thresholds that maximize profitability while supporting your long-term growth.
5. Scaling Spend Before Fixing the System
Another common theme I hear within the industry is that marketing efforts that used to work have stopped. The business knows these strategies are effective, so it funnels more money into the initiatives that used to work.
While it’s true that shortchanging your budget stalls your marketing, what’s happening in these situations—where marketing initiatives used to work but no longer do—is systemic. It’s like trying to construct a house on a weak foundation. You might be able to build the house, but cracks will eventually appear, and the structure will eventually crumble.
When this happens with your digital marketing, you need to backtrack and shore up your foundation first. Then, you can work your way through a proven process like the Digital Marketing Tree to fill in gaps and build.
6. Failing to Measure What Actually Drives Growth
Many factoring companies collect data, but still struggle to use it. You might see lead counts, spend totals, or campaign reports, yet still feel unsure which efforts are bringing in strong, long-term clients and which ones are simply creating noise. When that happens, marketing decisions start to rely on gut instinct or recent results rather than patterns over time.
This lack of clarity makes growth harder than it needs to be. Leaders hesitate to commit more budget, pull back too quickly when results fluctuate, or keep funding initiatives simply because they’ve historically worked. Clear, consistent measurement changes that dynamic. When you can see where profitable growth is actually coming from, it becomes much easier to prioritize, adjust, and invest with confidence.
7. Building for Short-Term Performance Instead of Long-Term Value
It’s easy to focus marketing efforts on what produces the fastest results. In factoring, that often means prioritizing immediate lead flow while putting less attention on differentiation, client experience, or long-term positioning. Over time, this creates a dependency on constant acquisition just to maintain momentum.
When growth is built this way, every slowdown feels urgent. Marketing has to keep working harder to replace churn instead of benefiting from stronger brand recognition, referrals, and repeat business. Companies that break through invest not only in lead generation, but in assets that continue working overtime, such as clearer positioning, stronger systems, and tools that improve the client experience. These investments may take longer to show results, but they reduce reliance on short-term tactics and create more durable growth.
Move Forward with Clarity
If you’re spotting these traits in your own factoring company, it’s usually a sign your business has outgrown the tactics that once served it well, and your marketing strategies must mature alongside it. Recognizing that shift is the first step toward building a more mature, durable approach to growth that fits where the company is today and scales with your business going forward.
About the Author
Husam Jandal is an internationally recognized marketing and business strategist who has been helping businesses achieve transformative growth for more than two decades. As a trusted consultant, author, educator, and speaker, Husam’s in-depth knowledge of the challenges businesses face and unique ability to fuse proven strategies with tailored insights empower companies to reach new heights and attain lasting success.
The views expressed in the Commercial Factor website are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, the International Factoring Association.