Real Advice Beats a PPC Over Promise: Why Sorbus Finance Is Driving Change

We're Not Chasing the Click. We're Building the Relationship.

By Arran Turner, Managing Director, Sorbus Finance

Go on Google right now and search for business finance. Before you reach a single genuine broker, you'll scroll past a wall of paid ads promising the same thing in different words. Apply in sixty seconds. Same-day decision. No fuss, no paperwork, no friction.

That's not an accident of the market. It's a business model. Heavy PPC spend built around search intent, landing pages designed to convert a stranger into an application before they've had a single real conversation, and a cost-per-lead that only makes sense if the broker gets paid fast and moves on to the next click. The entire structure is built around volume, not relationship. Which means the entire structure is built around the moment you sign, not the years afterwards.

I want to be straight about this, because it's the conversation our industry doesn't like having about itself. A lot of business finance advertising isn't selling you a good outcome. It's selling you a conversion event. And once that application's gone through and the commission's landed, most of those businesses have no real incentive to know your name the next time you need finance, let alone to have understood what you were actually trying to build.

That's not how we work. And this piece is about why.

Why does every business finance ad promise speed?

Because speed is what converts a paid click into a signed deal before the prospect has time to compare, question, or walk away. That's the honest economics of PPC-led finance advertising: the advertiser has paid for your attention, and every extra minute you spend thinking is a minute where you might not complete.

There's nothing wrong with a broker being efficient. Good process, quick turnaround, no unnecessary delay: that's just competence, and clients deserve it. But when speed is the entire pitch, and the advertising spend behind it is built to manufacture urgency rather than earn trust, you're not being served. You're being processed.

What does it actually look like to build a relationship instead of chase a click?

It starts before there's a deal to do. Long before a client needs finance, we want to understand where their business is actually going: what they're trying to build over the next three years, not just what asset they need funded this month. A conversation about a vehicle purchase should also be a conversation about fleet strategy over the next two years. A conversation about plant finance should be a conversation about the contracts that plant is going to help win.

That only works if the relationship outlasts the transaction. A PPC-funded broker has no reason to remember your business six months after completion, because their whole model is built around the next click, not the next conversation. We're built around the opposite: clients we still know, still talk to, and still advise years after the first deal completed. If a client only ever hears from a broker when there's a commission on the table, that broker was never advising them. They were selling to them once.

Being genuinely invested when clients hit their goals

This might sound like a soft point in an article about finance, but I don't think it is. When a client we've worked with for years wins the contract that new kit was funded for, or opens the second site, or finally gets the fleet expansion they'd been planning for eighteen months, that matters to us. Not because it's good for the next deal, though it usually is, but because we were part of the thinking that got them there.

That's a different relationship to the one a PPC-funded broker has with a client. You don't stay invested in outcomes you never really understood in the first place, because there was never time to understand them. Understanding a client's goals well enough to genuinely care whether they hit them is what advisory actually means, as opposed to what most of this industry currently practises.

Building strategy with clients, not just processing applications

The best work we do rarely starts with "I need finance for X." It starts with a wider conversation about where a business is heading, and finance being one part of how it gets there. That might mean structuring a facility differently to protect cash flow through a seasonal dip. It might mean timing an asset purchase against a contract award rather than a arbitrary internal deadline. It might mean deliberately not doing the deal a client walked in asking for, because a different structure serves the actual goal better.

None of that is possible at the speed a PPC-driven application funnel is built for. Strategy takes a proper conversation, and a proper conversation takes more than the ninety seconds a landing page has allowed for before asking you to click apply.

Explaining the terms and conditions clients are actually signing

This is where speed-first advertising causes the most damage, because the pressure to convert fast is directly in tension with the time it takes to properly explain what someone's agreeing to.

Early settlement charges that catch clients out when they try to refinance ahead of schedule. Balloon payments glossed over as "just how the numbers work," without anyone walking through what happens if the asset's resale value doesn't cover it at the end. Personal guarantees signed as a formality when they're one of the more serious commitments in the whole agreement, because they can expose a director's personal assets, not just the business, if things go wrong. Default triggers that are more easily tripped than most clients assume.

None of this is usually hidden. It's disclosed, technically, somewhere in the documentation. But disclosure and understanding are not the same thing, and a broker racing to close a lead before it goes cold has no real incentive to close that gap. Explaining terms properly is friction, in the narrow sense. It's also simply the job.

Educating clients instead of standing between them and the lender

Here's a habit in this industry that doesn't get talked about enough: some brokers treat the lender relationship as something to obscure, not explain, because keeping a client dependent on the broker for every future interaction is good for repeat business. The client never really understands how the lender assesses them, what drives pricing, or what their own options are. They just learn to come back to the broker and ask.

We think that's backwards. Our job is to make clients more capable of understanding finance, not less, even if that means a client eventually understands enough to ask sharper questions of us and of any lender they deal with. Showing clients how the process actually works, what lenders are really looking at, and why one structure is being recommended over another builds trust that lasts. Keeping them in the dark just builds dependency, and dependency isn't the same thing as loyalty.

Why we work alongside solicitors, accountants and business coaches, not in isolation

None of this happens in a vacuum, and it shouldn't. We work alongside solicitors, accountants, and high-level business coaches as a normal part of how we advise clients, not as a referral arrangement bolted on for appearances. A solicitor needs to understand what a personal guarantee or a debenture actually exposes a director to. An accountant needs to see how a finance structure sits against cash flow and tax position. A business coach working with a director on growth strategy needs finance decisions that support the plan, not compete with it.

When we're embedded in that wider network around a business, the advice gets better, because the finance decision is never made in isolation from everything else going on. That's what advisory-led actually means in practice, not just as a phrase on a website.

The bottom line

Fast and easy has its place, and nobody should apologise for a good process. But when an entire industry builds its advertising, its funnels, and its incentives around getting to signature as quickly as possible, something has to give, and it's usually the client's understanding of what they've just agreed to, and the relationship that should have existed long before and after that signature.

We're calling this Finance, Properly Explained. It's the standard every conversation with Sorbus starts from now. If you want a broker who can get you an answer quickly, the market is full of those, and you'll find most of them through a paid ad. If you want an adviser who understands where your business is going, builds strategy with you, and is genuinely invested in you getting there, that's the business we've always tried to be, and it's the one we're building louder from here.