When SMB lending cratered, I found the angle nobody else was running.

The situation

One Park Financial provides working-capital financing to small business owners — exactly the audience the pandemic hit hardest. As lockdowns spread, SMBs froze spending, lenders pulled back, and the entire category's acquisition costs spiked.

For One Park, that showed up as a broken lead engine: cost per qualified lead had pushed past $100, and the volume that did come through wasn't enough to feed the sales floor. They needed someone to rebuild acquisition from the ground up — in a market where everyone was bidding on the same shrinking pool of intent.

The insight

While competitors kept running the same tired "fast business loan" angles into a fatigued market, I went looking for where SMB owners' attention had actually moved.

It had moved to one thing: the Paycheck Protection Program. Every small business owner in the country was searching for information on PPP — how it worked, whether they qualified, how to get funded. The demand was enormous and the supply of clear, trustworthy guidance was thin. Nobody in our competitive set was building creative around it.

PPP became the attention hook at the top of the funnel — the thing that earned the click and the cheap, high-intent SMB-owner audience. From there I qualified that demand and routed the right businesses into One Park's financing products. It was a clean demand-capture play: meet owners where their urgency already was, then connect them to a solution they needed.

The execution

An insight is only worth what the system around it can deliver. I built the full acquisition machine on Meta paid social:

• Creative built around the hook. Ad angles and messaging anchored to the PPP conversation, then continuously tested to keep cost per lead low as creative fatigued.
• Audience segmentation. Targeting refined down to the SMB-owner profile most likely to qualify — so spend chased real prospects, not curiosity clicks.
• Funnel & lead-quality design. A capture-to-qualify flow that filtered for fit before a lead ever hit the sales team, protecting close rates downstream.
• Performance accountability. The engagement ran on a pay-per-lead agreement — One Park paid for qualified leads delivered, so every dollar of risk sat on the marketing side. The numbers had to hold up, and they did, for two straight years.

The results

A lead engine that had been bleeding money turned into a reliable, scalable pipeline — and stayed that way.

What this shows about how I work

The win here wasn't a clever bid strategy — it was reading where the market's attention had shifted before anyone else did, then building a disciplined, accountable system to convert it. That's the pattern I bring to a marketing team: