How we fund growth
The two biggest costs that stop operators from scaling are building a real marketing engine and paying to run it. We put up both — and we watch every dollar like it’s our own, because for the first stretch, it is.
12.5x
revenue growth in 12 months
$40K → $500K/ months
moving company partner
12 months
from launch to scale
One partner. One playbook. The same engine we run for every operator we work with.
The two costs
Building a real marketing engine.
It isn’t the work. Most operators we meet could run a much bigger business than they do. What stops them is money — two costs in particular. The first is building a real marketing engine: the brand, the website, the systems that turn strangers into booked jobs. The second is feeding it: the ad spend that keeps the leads coming once the engine is live. Both are too big to swallow out of savings, and both come due before the growth shows up to pay for them. We cover both. Here’s how each one works.
THE BUILD
The 90-day build comes at our cost. You don’t pay for any of it up front — not the design, not the development, not the strategy, not the team that runs it. Built right, a full build like this runs into six figures. You pay none of that. We cover it because we’re betting on the business we’re building with you: if the growth doesn’t show up, that’s our money gone, not yours.
THE AD SPEND
Building the engine is one cost. Feeding it is the other — and it’s the one that floats most operators right out of the game. You put up nothing. We do.
During the ramp
The first stretch — call it the first 90 days, while the engine is being built, launched, and tuned — the ads are still finding their footing. Some weeks they'll spend more than they bring back. During that ramp, the shortfall is ours. We don't pull a dollar from your working capital to cover it. That's part of the build, and the build is on us.
We finance your ad spend on our own credit — agency credit lines and business cards in our name, not yours. The cash that goes to Meta, Google, Local Service Ads, wherever your customers actually are, comes from us. You never front it.
At steady state
Once the engine is producing steadily, repayment settles into a cycle: you pay us back out of the revenue the ads generate, on a 30-to-60-day clock. We set the cadence to match how fast your vertical turns a lead into cash — a moving job that closes in a week repays faster than a MedSpa membership that builds over months. You're never paying us back ahead of the money coming in.
Day 90 isn’t a finish line — it’s when the engine goes live and the cadence kicks in. The ads keep running and scaling after that. We just stop carrying the whole tab and start getting paid back from growth that’s actually showing up.
No personal guarantees.
Here’s what that credit structure means for you: because the ad spend rides on our lines and not yours, there’s no personal guarantee attached to it. You aren’t co-signing the spend. If a partnership ever winds down with ad costs still outstanding from a ramp we misjudged, that exposure sits with us, on our credit — not with you, on your house. The usual fraud carve-outs apply; short of those, the float is our risk to carry, not yours.
RAMP · ~90 DAYS
Summit absorbs shortfall
STEADY STATE
30–60 day repayment cycle from partner revenue · calibrated by vertical
Day 90 marker = engine launches (NOT a finish line). The line is the handoff from "we carry it" to "the cycle settles in."
THE AD ACCOUNTS
Here’s the part that catches some operators, so let’s put it on the table: during the partnership, the ad accounts run in our name. Meta, Google, Local Service Ads — they’re set up and held by us, not you. If you’ve been burned before, that can sound like a grab. It isn’t. It’s a function of who’s fronting the cash. We’re the ones funding the spend on our own credit, so the accounts that spend it have to sit with us — that’s what makes the financing possible in the first place. An agency that put the ad spend on your cards every month could "let you keep your accounts." We’d rather carry the money and own the accounts that move it. What happens to those accounts when the partnership ends is a fair question — it’s the first one in the FAQ below.
YOUR SIDE OF THE CAPITAL
We've been clear about what we fund: the build, and the ad spend. Here's the line on the other side of it. As the engine fills your schedule, at some point you'll need more capacity to keep up — another truck, more equipment, a bigger space, more people on the payroll. That capital comes from your side, not ours. We fund the engine that grows the business; you fund the business it grows.
This is normal, and it's the good kind of problem. It doesn't hit on day one — it hits after the engine is producing, when the work is already coming in and the revenue is already climbing. By then you're funding expansion out of a bigger, more profitable business than the one you started with: most often from the profit the growth is throwing off, sometimes from savings or a straightforward equipment loan. We don't write that check. But we don't leave you guessing about it either — clean books and real numbers mean you see the capacity crunch coming with runway to plan for it instead of scrambling. Scaling capacity costs money. We'd rather say that plainly than let it surprise you.
WE FUND
YOU FUND
WHY THIS STRUCTURE
Add it up and the order of the money is the whole point. We put up the build. We float the ad spend through the ramp and carry the shortfall while the engine finds its feet. All of that leaves our account before a single dollar comes back to us — and a dollar only comes back once the growth is real enough to pay it: repayment on ads that are working, upside on profit above your baseline. We put the capital up; the capital comes back only if it worked. That’s real skin in the game — the kind most agencies won’t put up — and it’s exactly why we’re careful about who we put it up for.
COMMON QUESTIONS
These are about how the money moves. Screening questions are on the Apply page, the partnership mechanics are on the Overview, and the build itself is on The Growth Playbook. Here we’re just talking about the capital.
What happens to the ad accounts when the partnership ends?
We work it out so you’re never left stranded. The accounts ran in our name to make the financing possible; when a partnership winds down, the goal is continuity — your campaigns keep running, your lead flow doesn’t go dark, and the assets that should travel with the business go with you. The exact handoff — what transfers, how, and on what timeline — gets spelled out in the partnership agreement before anything’s signed, so it’s settled up front, not improvised at the end. We’d rather you grow than feel trapped.
Does the ad-spend financing show up as debt on my books or touch my business credit?
No. The credit lines and cards that fund your ad spend are ours — opened in our name, carried by us, paid by us. None of it shows up as debt on your books or on your business credit. That matters if you’re planning to finance a truck, a building, or an SBA loan while we’re growing you: the ad spend we’re floating won’t be sitting on your credit report competing for that. What you owe us is repayment out of the revenue the ads generate, on the cycle we set together — a normal payable between partners, not a loan against your business.
What happens to repayment if I hit a slow season?
The cycle has room to flex. Repayment is tied to how fast the ads turn into paid jobs, so when a slow stretch means leads convert slower, the clock has slack built in — we’re not going to demand repayment your slow-season cash can’t support. The point of the 30-to-60-day window is that it breathes with your business instead of fighting it. (That’s separate from how your profit-share baseline handles seasonality — the baseline gets recalibrated against your own seasonal history, which we cover on the Overview page. Two different mechanisms, both built so a slow month doesn’t punish you.)
Who decides how much gets spent on ads each month?
We set the budget together, and it scales with proof. Early on it’s deliberately measured — we’re not going to torch cash on an engine that’s still being tuned. As the numbers come in and we can see what a dollar of ad spend returns in booked revenue, the budget grows to match. You’re in those conversations the whole way; nothing about your ad spend happens behind a curtain. And because the money is ours until the ads are working, the risk of pushing spend too fast sits with us, not you — which keeps us honest about scaling it at the pace the results actually justify.
We bring the build, the ad spend, and the playbook. You bring the business. Let’s see if we’re a fit.