Welcome to Issue #003 of The Outerchange, the weekly briefing for payment processing agents who want more leverage over their competition.

If you’re here, you already know how to work. The goal every Friday is simple:
Give you systems, habits, and angles that make you and your payments brand run better.

In today’s edition:

Let’s rock n roll 🚀

Most agents treat Facebook groups like a place to hunt for leads.

They join a few groups, scroll around, comment on posts, maybe post something about being able to save the group lots of money, and hope something sticks. Sometimes it works. Most of the time you just blend in with everyone else doing the same thing…selling. Queue the crickets even though you thought that chatgpt post was a banger :(

But I’ve been teaching agents and ISOs to look at groups differently.

To look at them as assets and real estate. Over the past 5 years, I’ve come to own 30+ small business owner and niche Facebook Groups (the funniest one being the Square users group 😂)

The ISOs I’ve taught this method to, and applied it, built whole pipelines off it in niches they worked (Vape shops, Local cities etc)

When you own a Facebook group, you’re not fighting for attention inside someone else’s community anymore. You’re hosting the room where the conversations happen. Your name has “Admin” beside it, which instantly changes how people perceive you. When you comment, it stands out. When you post, it gets engagement. When you message members, it doesn’t feel like a random cold DM. It feels like the admin welcoming someone into the community.

And that authority matters more than people think.

Owning the group also gives you freedom. You can start conversations that a regular member couldn’t. You can ask questions about business challenges, vendors, tools, or operations without getting flagged as spam. You can create discussion threads that surface problems merchants are already dealing with or run giveaway posts (my fav) which naturally leads to conversations and a ton of engagement.

The smartest agents and ISOs understand something simple: attention is leverage these days.

A Facebook group is essentially a free distribution channel filled with your target audience. Every new member strengthens the asset. Every conversation creates more visibility for your name and profile. And over time, the group becomes a place where people already know your name before you ever pitch anything.

Instead of chasing prospects, you build the place where prospects hang out.

That’s the difference between lead generation and owning the lead source.

This method has a lot more to it when you go bigger with it but we’ll save that for another time.

Most follow-up emails agents send after talking to a merchant are the same: long, technical, and full of industry language the owner doesn’t actually understand. Interchange categories, gateway fees, authorization costs… it quickly turns into a wall of text that gets booted to the trash folder.

A simple way to fix this is sending a 2–3 minute screen recording instead of an email.

Tools like Loom or Vidyard let you quickly record your screen while explaining something visually. Instead of writing a complicated breakdown, you can show the merchant exactly what you mean while walking them through it in plain English.

For example, you could pull up their statement and point out where the fees are coming from. Or show them how a POS feature works that could save them time. Or quickly explain the pricing difference between their current setup and what you’re proposing.

The key is to keep it short and conversational. Two or three minutes is plenty. The goal isn’t to overwhelm them with information, it’s to make the explanation simple enough that anyone could understand it.

Most merchants will watch a quick video explanation before they read a dense email. And when they hear your voice explaining something clearly, the conversation becomes much easier to move forward.

Before you go, just a few public service announcements: