Welcome to Issue #009 of The Outerchange, the weekly newsletter for payment processing agents who want more leverage and more leads.

The goal every Friday is simple: Give you angles, outside the box ideas, tools, and ammo that help you close more deals without adding more hours.

In today’s edition:

Let’s rock n roll.

⚠️ The Friction:

If you're running a sub-office, an ISO, or just trying to clone yourself, recruiting eats your week. Indeed is blowing up your inbox with 40 resumes a day. 30 of them are garbage. 7 waste your time, 2 ghost the interview. 1 shows up, starts strong, and disappears after the first bad week of door knocking.

Meanwhile your recruiter (if you even have one) is spending 80% of the day responding to applications, pre-screening on the phone, and chasing no-shows on the calendar.

I had this exact conversation with Michael, an ISO owner on a Zoom this week. He's running an office with 10+ d2d agents, hitting real numbers, and he asked how it would look adding automation and AI to the mix.

✅ The Shift:

You don't need an ATS. You don't need a $600/mo recruiting platform. You need a dumb pipeline with 3 AI layers on top of it. Here's the mental model:

Every green agent goes through 4 stages before they hit the floor: applied → pre-screened → interviewed → hired. Right now you're doing all 4 manually. The first 2 should be 100% automated. The 3rd should be 50% automated. Only the 4th should require a human (and honestly, even that's up for debate).

Your recruiter stops being a gatekeeper and becomes an interviewer + process manager. Better role. Better output. Faster hiring.

🛠️ Build It:

⭐ The Outcome:

Your recruiter goes from managing 40 applications a day to actually interviewing pre-qualified humans who already know the job, already booked themselves, and already passed a quick screen interview over phone or text. Hit rate on day-1 shows goes way up. Cost per new hire goes way down. And you can run 2-3x more regional offices (if you scaled the same way we did in Canadian offices) with the same recruiting admin headcount because the machine scales without you scaling the team.

This is one of the best campaigns I've ever run and I still run it. Here's the whole thing:

Get custom-printed NFC Google review cards made with your logo or slogan on them. On the front: "Tap here to leave us a review ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ " with your logo. One card, big text, clean design. Tappable NFC chip inside.

Now here's the offer: free Google Review Card for every merchant who lets you run a statement analysis or signs up with you.

Not a sales gimmick. A real free gift. A barter if you will that gets you more statements or deals. My Rep in the field leads with this.

That's the whole move.

Why it works:

Every small business owner on Earth wants more Google reviews. Reviews = Google ranking = free local traffic. And nobody has ever offered them something this specific, this physical, and this useful in exchange for 5 minutes of their time. They've had 50 payments reps try to sell them. They've had 0 payments guys that year give them a review card for free during a conversation.

Now the statement analysis stops being the ask. It's the price of admission for the gift. Completely flips the energy of the conversation.

And after they sign up? Same play. Welcome gift = another stack of cards, this time bigger. You become the rep who shows up with presents. Nobody cancels on the rep who shows up with presents.

The cost of entry:

NFC cards cost about $1 each. For a signed merchant worth hundreds or thousands in residuals, that's rounding error in your favor.

Get the NFC cards (credit card size) from Alibaba for pennies in bulk, design the card and get a printer or have them printed by a LOCAL SHOP (keep it local 🙂).

I know I don’t really share “corporate industry news” but this one makes sense to because you can leverage it for pitching. Visa officially killed the Level 2 interchange program last week (April 17). If you've got merchants accepting commercial, corporate, or purchasing cards, a lot of them just got downgraded to higher rates and don't know it yet. The new CEDP program requires invoice quality Level 3 data to qualify for the best rates. If a merchant's system isn't submitting clean data, they're paying up to 40% more in interchange on every B2B transaction.

Your big processors aren't calling these merchants to explain this. They're not calling because (a) they don't care and (b) the merchant probably isn't paying enough attention yet to trigger a support ticket.

That's your opening.

The play:

Build a cold outreach campaign around one hook: "random question, did your processor happen tell you about the level 2 program being deleted last week?" That's it. That's the opener. It works on LinkedIn. It works on email. It works on a cold call. It works on a door knock. They’ll most likely answer “what?” and that’s your excuse or foot in the door to explain it (concisely and casually. Don’t go full pitch breath. Act cool bro).

You can make it easier by using LinkedIn Chip or Cold Email Chip

Why this works right now:

Before you go :