Jordan Samuel Fleming sits down with Ari Page, President of Fund&Grow, to explore how real estate investors can access and leverage business credit as a strategic source of capital. Ari shares how Fund&Grow has helped over 35,000 businesses secure funding through a compliant and ethical approach to business credit cards, giving investors access to flexible capital for wholesaling, fix-and-flips, BRRRR projects, and business growth.

The conversation dives deep into the differences between traditional lending and business credit, practical ways investors can use 0% introductory business credit cards for gap funding and project expenses, and the importance of having clear entry and exit strategies when scaling a real estate business. Ari also provides real-world examples of how investors can reduce borrowing costs, increase liquidity, and create an “infinite money loop” by strategically combining business credit with other financing sources.

Beyond funding, Ari discusses the critical role of compliance, education, and long-term financial strategy. He explains how Fund&Grow’s consulting-driven approach helps entrepreneurs build stronger business credit profiles, avoid costly mistakes, and create sustainable funding opportunities for future growth. This episode is packed with actionable insights for investors looking to scale faster, access capital responsibly, and build a stronger financial foundation for their business.

About Ari Page

Ari Page is the President of Fund&Grow, a business funding and consulting company that has helped more than 35,000 businesses access over $2 billion in funding over the past two decades. After experiencing firsthand the challenges of securing capital for his own real estate investing business, Ari developed a system that helps entrepreneurs and real estate investors leverage business credit strategically and compliantly to fuel growth.

Under Ari’s leadership, Fund&Grow has become one of the most recognized names in business credit consulting, earning a place on the Inc. 5000 list for seven consecutive years. He is a strong advocate for compliance, financial education, and long-term business growth, helping investors understand not only how to access capital but how to use it responsibly to scale their businesses and build lasting wealth.

Important Links

Watch & Listen

• Fund and Grow — fundandgrow.com
• Fund and Grow Pre-Qualification Tool — fundandgrow.com (free, soft inquiry, no obligation)
• smrtPhone — the only phone system built for real estate investors
• Plastiq — plastiq.com (compliant business card payment service)
• Melius Payments — compliant business card payment service
• Bill.com — compliant business card payment service

I can tell you one thing. Technology is the single most important aspect of every business that is successfully scaled. It’s time for that real estate tech guy. It’s your weekly chance to explore how technology can help your real estate business explode. Each week, you’ll hear from real estate investors who have been there and done that and find out their favorite technology tips.

Listen in is Jordan speaks with tech companies and learns about new technologies and new ideas that will help you scale your business. And now join your host. Jordan Samuel Fleming, CEO of smrtPhone, for this week’s episode. Hey everybody, and welcome to this week’s episode of that Real Estate tech Guy. I’m your host, Jordan Samuel Fleming. And this week, I am delighted to welcome my friend Ari Paige from Fun and Grow to the episode.

Now, this is a great episode. For those of you who are looking to scale up your real estate investment business, because access to capital is always a challenge. And what’s really fun is that Ari. And fun and grow, they they have a they have a very specific method of capital that involves business credit cards. And more importantly, they have a very ethical education.

And compliant way of doing so. And this is important because, you know, like money funding, FTC, all these elements, you know, they’re important. And there are things that a lot of investors don’t really know much about. And that means that they can fall prey to bad companies doing bad things. Ari’s got a great company. They’ve helped over 35,000 businesses.

They’ve been going for 19 years at this point. And they’ve done, you know, absolute I can’t remember what he said, whether it was 100 and 180 or something like million dollars of I can’t remember exactly the funds. No, in this year, whatever it was last year. But the point is they have the pedigree, they’ve got the experience, they’ve got the compliance, and they’ve got a great opportunity that is tried and tried and trust, try to trusted Jesu

You tell guys, if you listen to this, that it’s been a long day, tried and tested in the real estate community. They work with a lot of our best affiliates and our best partners, people we trust, trust, fund and grow to provide a very special access to a compliant way of getting business credit cards to help meet some of those capital needs that you have, whether you’re wholesaling or flipping or whatever the model that you’re using, there’s a gap of funding that funding can help you do, and they’re a great company.

I’ve worked with them now. I’ve gotten to know their team, and they really are a fantastic group of people to work with. So listen to this episode, listen to how Ari’s company can help you. And I’m going to chuck the links that he talks about. There’s a very simple pre-qualification questionnaire that you can fill in to see what type of levels of, of credit you may be available to.

And then, of course, you can reach out to their team to take that forward. Fantastic opportunity for real estate investor. Fantastic opportunity to leverage a different type of capital and more importantly, to work with an incredible team that cares deeply about a long term partnership and is compliant. And I know this because I’ve gotten to know their team and I have a great deal of trust in them.

So for now, I’m going to shut up because clearly I can’t speak, and I’m going to put you right in the hands of myself and Ari Paige from Fund and Grow. And I’m live with my friend Ari Paige from Fund and Grow. Ari, welcome to the podcast. Give everybody a little bit of background on you and what fun and grow is all about.

Well, thank you for having me on, Jordan. Really appreciate it. So Fund and Grow is a company that helps businesses get access to up to 300,000 in 0 percent introductory business credit cards. We work together with a lot of real estate investors and real estate educators, and I originally got into this back in 2005 when me, myself, I was trying to get access to funding for my real estate company.

And so I was doing commercial and residential properties, fixing flips and buying holds and burr and what the problem I was running into was my funds were frozen in the last deal, and so I couldn’t move from deal to deal quickly. So it turns out that’s not just an Ari problem. That’s a problem with all real estate investors.

And this is also something that a lot of real estate educators talk about with their students, because it’s a problem that they constantly are dealing with. Well, absolutely. You raised such a good point. You know, there’s very rarely a conversation I have in this space where funding doesn’t come into the question because sooner or later, you know, the goal is to do the deals, do them quickly, get going, move, you know, grow, expand.

And to do that, you either have your own money or you’re trying to find some way of moving forward. So now in terms of the, you know, in terms of your model, I look at investors, as you know, there is sort of there’s this three kind of levels of investors. There’s top guys who have big teams do hundreds of deals and they’re really dialed in.

There’s brand new people who went to an education event and are excited about the possibility of leaving their W2. That’s great. And then there’s people who are really trying to build up a a real estate business and scale something a little, a little. You know, they’re really trying to push something forward and build an asset, a build a business themselves.

When you think about your type of funding, is there a specific type of investor or level investor that suits you best or that you’ve found benefits the most? So real estate investors are our core audience. About 80% of our clients are doing some form of real estate, whether it’s rehabs and fixing flips or it’s bur or it’s, you know, any, any variety of different real estate, different techniques in terms of buying and selling and holding.

And what we found is that they are the ones that need access to liquid, that they need bridge capital for in-between deals. They want to bring down the cost of their hard money loans. They want to bring down the cost of their private money loans, or even just regular bank loans. And they want to use unsecured funding. So although funding grow and a 0% introductory cards can work for any industry, we find that real estate investors need the most funding.

But we do have clients that are across all industries. We have lots of e-commerce, we have brick and mortar, and it really works well when a client needs access to bridge funding, and they are able to make their money back within that 12 to 18 months, because that’s the 0% time frame where it’s 12 to 18 months, then we’re doing card stacking, where we’re going for a second round of funding, then a third round of funding and just building them a large aggregate amount of funding over that 12 month term, which is how long we work with with our clients.

And when you say like when I think when I think of traditional funding, you know, obviously you say they can be hard money or whatever, but if you go to a if you go to a bank and take a loan out, then that is a specific type of funding that you know, you are taking a loan out, regardless of whether you’re using it now or you’re doing what you’re doing.

You’ve taken a principle out. You’ve got some element of repayment. It starts right away. You know, that’s all there is to it. But, you know, my understanding is when you’re dealing with these sorts of 0% business credit cards, of course, you’re only really pay it. You’re only really when you when you actually use the cards and put balance on is when you’re paying back.

It’s not a loan. If you’ve got $200,000 in business credit cards and you’re not currently doing a deal, you’re not sitting there paying back a $200,000 loan. That’s kind of a real difference, right? Yeah. So like, let’s imagine with a hard money loan, you’re going to pay 3 to 5 points up front. You could pay 9 to 12 to maybe up to 15%.

Interest is only going to fund maximum 80% of the deal, you know. And the same with private money, the same with banks. I mean, of course terms are all a little bit different, but you’re paying on that money right away. You use your HELOC now, you’re putting your house up. And the crazy thing is, is that the banks really favor this form of funding.

In fact, JPMorgan or Chase, they just announced about three weeks ago that they plan to lend $80 billion to us small businesses. You guys can Google this. Right now. They’re hiring a thousand bankers to facilitate the lending of $80 billion. And what is the number one prime way that they’re getting access to small businesses, business credit cards? They’re the easiest to get access to for a startup for a mid mid range company.

And it’s not just over the next year that they’re committing to do this. It’s literally over the next decade. And if Jamie Dimon, the CEO of Chase, the godfather of banking, if he says we’re going in this direction. What do you think Bank of America is doing? What do you think Wells Fargo is doing? What do you think U.S. banks do?

All of these banks are going in this direction. And the great thing about business credit cards is when you use compliance services, like there’s this company called plastic com, which is the word plastic with a Q at the end. Another one is called Melius payments. Another one’s bill. Com when you use these bill payment services you can actually convert your business credit card into a line of credit.

There’s a 3% transaction fee for those particular transactions. But you could find an escrow account with it. You could pay a vendor that doesn’t accept credit cards using your credit card. You can convert it into a line of credit, and you can do that in a compliant way, not in a way that’s going to get your card shut down or lose your 0% period of time.

And so these are all a part of what Fund and Growth teaches in terms of the consulting service. And we’re helping people get access to large amounts of this type of funding and then showing them how they can use it in any part of their business, even if the contractors, the vendors, the companies that are working with don’t even accept the swipe.

Wow. And I mean, compliance is a word that’s near to near in my heart because of of course, I’m I’m an FCC regulated, not an FTC, but an FCC regulated company or an FCC. But but and will you say compliant? I mean, to me, when someone brings up compliant, it means that there’s a landscape out there of fraudsters, scammers or people who don’t play by the correct rules.

And a lot of people, end users, customers of ours, customers of yours, they don’t necessarily know what’s good and what’s bad. They don’t know, legitimate or not legitimate. Can you speak a little about what it means to be compliant in this space or, or what it means to be not compliant? You know, like, what are the warning signs people would look for for someone who isn’t compliant and offering something that really they should be red flagging?

Yes. Great question. Important topic, not so sexy, but extremely important to keep you out of jail. So a lot. That’s pretty sexy. I mean, that’s pretty sexy. So there’s there’s a lot of real estate educators out there that speak to their clients about the 0% introductory credit cards and the companies that they’re promoting, the credit stacking companies that are similar to funding growth.

The companies that they’re promoting are in many cases, as I’ve reviewed them, wildly non-compliant. And let me explain some of the things that are doing. So when you see a business credit card stacking company, that applies for 0% introductory cards, and they are not disclosing that these cards are 0% for 12 to 18 months, then what the FTC says they’re doing is bait and switch, that it’s not clear and conspicuous that these are introductory credit cards, that these cards are not, because they’ll say 0% funding.

You guys have probably seen it on Instagram, 0% funding, but they’re not saying that these are introductory cards. Then they’re also not saying that these are business credit cards. They’re just saying funding. You may be saying business line of credit. They’re not explaining the difference how you can use it like a line of credit, but in fact it’s a credit card.

Notice how many times me and Jordan have talked about credit cards leading up to this moment? We’re not talking about a line of credit about funding a business loan. All of those would be a material misrepresentation of what we’re actually selling. That’s the way the FTC would see it. Then the next thing is a lot of these companies, this is the most common one.

They they promise that they’re going to get cash off of your credit card. Now, this is a major violation of the card issuers rules. The card issuers American Express or Bank of America or Chase. These are the banks that actually issued these business credit cards. When you tell the bank when you are advertising, like so many of my competitors, I go right on their website and their advertising that they will help you liquidate the credit card or get the cash off the card.

You’re now telling the entire world that you are using the cards and advising your clients to use them against the card issuers terms. This is the fastest and quickest way to have a major bank report you to the FTC. Now there is compliant ways of doing that. For example, you could use plastic. You could use million. You could use build.

We’ve all heard of that. And those services do not allow you to harvest cash. Instead they allow you to pay another vendor an invoice. So if there’s a company that you’re trying to pay their marketing company, you can pay the invoice. If there’s an escrow account that you want to fund for your real estate deal, you can fund the escrow account.

If anything, that you need to do with the funding virtually you can do. You can’t pay yourself. You can’t pay your wife. You can’t pay your own LLC. All of that would be considered cash advance. Advising your clients to do that can result in the credit card being shut down. They could you could do a $30,000 cash advance.

Then they shut the card down. You could lose the 0% interest period of time for the client. So another thing that a lot of these companies do is they don’t tell you what their fee is. You have to go through their gantlet of salespeople and opting in and doing this and that and the other funding grow openly on their website shows you what the fee is.

This again, falls under clear and conspicuous marketing standards that the FTC lays out that should things shouldn’t have to be high pressure. You should be able to go and see what the cost of the services right from the get go. Then a lot of these companies, once you sign up for them, if they go and they apply for cards without you approving or declining each individual card, without you seeing the terms and conditions and the disclosures that are present at the bottom of every credit card application.

If the company they you sign up with them and they just and after you’ve signed up and you’ve paid them and they’re moving forward, you filled out the portal of their information. If they just go and apply for cards for you without you seeing each individual, one without you personally seeing those disclosures and those terms and conditions, then they have just literally bypassed the very rules that were put in place for the banks.

The banks are required to show you the terms and conditions. There are required to show you the disclosures at the bottom of the application. The client has to see those. You can’t bypass that just because someone signed up for your service. Am I making sense here, Jordan? Yeah. And what’s what’s what’s what’s can kind of what’s scary is I will bet you that there are a lot of people who have no idea about any of this.

And all they see is the is is here’s an easy way to get you some money. Like, and that’s a, that’s a and what an easy way to slip into a a it’s a situation that is going to potentially really hurt you and potentially expose you to you acting in a way, you know, you unwittingly, suddenly are breaching an FTC rule.

And there’s consequences to these things, just like those consequences to breaching the FCC rules. Yeah. So another thing that we see all the time is these credit stackers. And keep in mind, we’ve been doing this for close to 20 years. And five months from now, we’re going to be 20 years old. As a company, we’ve served 35,000 clients.

We’ve been on the Inc. 5000 list for seven years in a row. We are A-plus on the Better Business Bureau. And so we’ve been doing this for a long period of time. While we’ve seen countless companies get shut down by the FTC for exactly these things. So these things, although they sound like they’re kind of minor, they are major, major companies that were doing huge revenue, were completely shut down for this, and they were shut down for things like, for example, claiming to have a relationship with the credit card banks.

I can tell you right off the top of my head, multiple companies that are doing what we’re doing that claim to have relationships with the banks. So they imply that if you work with them, they will get you an approval with the bank that you couldn’t get by going directly to that bank. This is complete material misrepresentation. There is no credit card stacking company fund and grow, or any other that could get a bank to give you a different approval than what you would get if you went on your own.

Now, there are lots of things that we’ve learned after doing this for 20 years, for 35,000 clients, where we could say, if you do this, this and this ahead of time, you have a higher likelihood of getting approved. Our strategy is going to greatly increase your odds of approval. But there is nobody at the bank that we could call to override a decision that the bank has made.

We can point you to speaking to an underwriter where you can have something reconsidered. But these are two completely different things. There are companies out there that that imply that their relationships with the bank will get you approvals. And this is simply not true. Any person can call into the bank, speak to the underwriter, ask for the account to be reconsidered.

If it was declined, you know, for a specific application for a 0% card. If it was declined, you can ask for it to be reconsidered. You can say, I want you to reconsider this, and I will send in any documentation that you need. I’ll verify who I am, which is verification. Sometimes is the biggest reason as to why they want to prove.

Then you can ask for higher credit limits. You can merge your old interest bearing credit cards into the new, like if it’s from the same bank into the new application. All those things are things that anyone can do. Our strategies walk you through how to do those things very easily, quickly, but to imply that funding grow has relationships is a complete violation.

And then another big one. A lot of these companies, they’ll just go ahead and apply for personal credit cards. If they don’t think that you apply for business cards in order to retain your business, they apply for personal credit cards. And so now you might think, well, why would applying for personal credit cards be an issue? Well, the FTC is deemed that when you are a business and you are applying a client for personal credit cards and then directing them to spend those credit cards, perhaps within real estate or within any industry, what happens is there’s this utilization ratio called the 35% utilization ratio kicks in.

So if I have a credit card, a personal card, it’s going to show up on my personal credit report. If I then start putting a balance on that card, the utilization ratio goes up. The higher the utilization ratio, the lower my credit score. So when a real estate educator is telling their clients to go to a credit stacking company, and that credit stacking company is applying for personal credit cards, and now in the using of those credit cards, it pulls their scores down.

The FTC says you have harmed a consumer. They shut these companies down. The simple act of helping your clients get a personal credit card violates the Croatia the Credit Report Organizations Act. How crazy is that? You think playing for personal credit cards, that’s exactly what it is. And so these small things are major things when it comes to you as a real estate educator recommending your clients to a service you could be recommending, recommending them to a service that ends up harming your reputation and harming that client fund and grow works completely differently.

We operate completely differently. We’ve been doing this for a very long time. We haven’t had so much as a inquiry from the FTC or from the CFPB, because we do things compliant and we spend an inordinate amount of time and resources to be the cutting edge side of making sure that we are compliant. And on the cool side, Jordan, we’re actually setting up an association called the Association for Credit Card Stacking Standards, and we’re going to be helping self-policing our own industry so that companies that are doing this stop getting shut down.

So many of them are getting shut down because they’re doing this the wrong way, that it doesn’t look good on our industry as a whole. And so I can’t wait until we finish finalizing all this. Our compliance attorney. Excuse me. Our compliance attorney who’s been in this space for a very long time, they are going to be sitting on the board.

I’m going to be sitting on the board. We’re going to have a couple of other companies that do this that are going to be helping direct this, and we’re going to help direct all of its the smaller credit card stackers in order to to teach them. Well, it’ll be more the compliance attorney that’s going to do this, to teach them how to be compliant so that they stop red flagging the entire industry as a whole.

And by the way, I could go on. There’s a list of other things your credit card stacking companies that promise credit improvement, like, hey, we’re going to help improve your credit by going through our program that again. Now you’re violating the Credit Repair Organization Act. It’s insane how how many things there are that the FTC will get you on.

And when a company starts out doing this and they’re just a small company, it’s not likely that the FTC is going to look at them. It’s only as they grow, as their clientele grow, as they start working with bigger and bigger affiliates, it’s usually the affiliate, the real estate educator. They are the ones that are more likely to get in trouble because the real estate educators tend to be bigger in this space than these small little credit stacking companies.

Fund and grow is very well known, but there’s a lot of these smaller credit stacking companies that have just kind of gotten into the industry. They started it, they saw it as a trend. And so our our new job funding grows. New job is now teaching all of these smaller companies how to be compliant in order to clean up our industry.

Now, I’m sorry to interrupt this amazing conversation, but I wanted to make sure you knew that smrtPhone, the only phone system built for real estate investors, connects to the best in class real estate investment CRMs. And because as it’s my show and I am co-founder and chairman of smrtPhone. I got some great deals for you. Click the link and take advantage of 5000 minutes free calling with smrtPhone.

The only phone system built for real estate investors. Click and call close. More leads back to the show. Wow I know. So let’s let’s pivot here. This two things I want to I want to zero in on. And that is you know I think I want to first I want to zero in on a a really good use case of, of your, you know of this type of funding.

And I want to take you to a real personal level. Right. So you know, so when I, you know, a lot of our customers will a lot of our customers will have done maybe 1 or 2 wholesale deals, gotten a taste for it, gotten an understanding, you know, because everybody starts out new and you’ve got to find your way and you got to kind of, you know, figure out how things work and all that.

But inevitably, there is a growth period. Now, as you pointed out earlier on, growth is where most people get a ceiling because they just don’t have the funds to grow. So in a case like this, if I can, if I can work with you and I can get a and I meet the criteria to get, let’s say I don’t know what like a $60,000 business, I don’t know if that’s appropriate first level of funding, but a $60,000 business credit card through this process.

You know, if I’m a wholesaler, I’ve got a deposit now for quite a few properties like I can. I’m not sitting there going, geez, here’s three deals that I’d love to get, but I don’t really want to stick my hand in the savings. You know, I don’t really want to to risk my money here, but suddenly I’ve got a $60,000 pot that if I want to you, if I see a good deal, I can go ahead and get in there, right there, knowing that from that wholesale point of view, I’m going to get my my assignment fee within a month.

And, and so that I’m able to to then and presuming and this is me presuming you know how I vow always dealt with credit cards is, you know, I put money on it and then I pay it off. Yep. And if I do that when you’re using it. Yeah. And I’m and I’m keeping that there because I’m not using.

But it’s freeing me up to make that purchase or whatever that I need to do now and then and then I’m paying it off. And so that’s where the power of, you know, the speed of this sort of capability. I think, you know, if people are listening and wondering, how can I really apply this type of funding to me?

I think of it as just even simple terms like that of, man, I’ve got four deals I want to go after. My choice is to take the profit from my last deal and roll it into these new deals, or to keep that profit in my pocket and use a facility like yours to, you know, credit cards through those credit cards.

And, and then I can pay recoup the money with the fees and and and scale up my business. Is that a pretty kind of. Is that a relatively kind of normal wholesale model? Yeah. That’s great. In fact, let’s let’s add another example onto that. So let’s add on the burr or the fix and flip strategy onto that. Because you always need to have your entry strategy.

And then you need to have your exit strategy. So in most cases the entry strategy is going to be using hard money. Private money. It’s you know, maybe some some mixture of cash. But let’s say for your by for like in the burr with your brr RR. So you’re, you’re going to purchase using perhaps hard money along with perhaps using your business credit card to fund your the additional escrow that you’re short on and in order to reach your 100% financing.

So because you can use it for gap financing and so you’ll use it for your down payment, so you use it in your purchase, you use business credit cards in your purchase along with another loan, such as a hard money loan, as an example. So now you have your your property. Now you’re ready to rehab. So once you rehab, you would then continue to use business credit cards to be able to do your rehab rather than using a hard money loan that’s going to require draws and timetables and, you know, your firstborn.

And so you can pay your contractors, your materials, your permits, everything with your 0% cards. Then you’re either at that point, once you hit your after repair value, the property’s finished. It stabilizes either through an exit through your sale, you’re going to sell it and pay off all your credit cards for your fixing flip, or you’re going to rent it.

Then the property stabilizes and you get your desk loan, your debt service credit ratio loan, which is based off of the rental value and off of that ratio. And once you get your DSR loan, that’s your way of cashing out where you’re going to pay off your hard money loan, you’re going to pay off your credit cards. Then you’re going to repeat this is what we call the infinite money loop.

So whether or not you are doing a fixing flip, whether you’re doing a bir a and you’re holding the property. Either way, you have your exit. You’re either selling the property and paying off the cards and the hard money, or you are doing a loan, and then you can pay off your cards and pay off your hard money loan.

You pulled your money back out and the 0% cards. Now sit there ready to use. And when you’re using the 0% cards, you don’t have to. I mean, think of how many of these fixing flips or buy and hold you can do in an 18 month period of time, remembering that there’s always that exit. You’re not holding it with the credit cards.

So within 12 to 18 months you can do so many of them. And then when you need to use the cards again, you’re not putting 2 to 5 points up front. You know, 10 to 13 points or a percent in interest on the hard money. You got to use your least expensive capital first. And we’re all about stacking capital.

But in your capital stack, you’re going to use your least expensive capital first. Then you work up from there. And so that’s your entry strategy, your exit strategy, whether it be a burr or fix and flip or wholesale. We just give them some great ideas right there on how to use the intro cards for your real estate business.

Well, I mean, those are great. I mean, those are great examples that I think will resonate with anybody who’s kind of getting, you know, either getting into this game or trying to scale up their the real estate business, like the genuine, tangible examples that will resonate with anyone. Let’s close out by there’s another bit of your business that I’m really fascinated by because I think, again, you know, one of the things that comes across when you speak in you and I’ve known each other now for a little bit and I’ve heard you speak and I’ve, I’ve listened to the passion that you kind of bring you and your team.

You’ve got an amazing team of people that I had now dealt with and worked with, and everybody has been phenomenal. One of the things that I’ve always been fascinated by you guys is a lot of times you think of, you know, if I think of, of of companies that can help me access capital, I usually don’t think about them as people I want to talk to very often.

Right. Like, like, you know, normally. But you guys, a your team is different, but you also have you’re not just you’re not just about that. You also educate people. You help people understand you’ve got programs and education and knowledge to really, you know, help people get better at this. Can you speak a little bit to, you know, you’ve you’ve given us a good sense of the type of, of, of, of funding that you guys offer, but you also offer a lot of real valuable information and kind of and, and, and education.

Can you speak to a little bit about how that works and, and why that matters so much to, to your customer base? Yes. And this is a great point because and it also comes down to a compliance thing, which I’ll explain. So it’s more accurate to call funding and grow a consulting service than a credit stacking service. And the reason is, is because we work with a client, regardless of how they pay us, whether they pay our discounted membership fee, whether they do the pay as they go model.

Either way, they’re getting the same program, which is a 12 month consulting service where we’re working with the client for an extended period of time, helping them with all of their questions surrounding how business credit works, how they can utilize it. We teach them how to use the business credit cards, similar to a line of credit. Using the compliant payment services, we we help them with their corporate credit building, which is establishing a strong done in Bradstreet profile because that’s your final exit.

So there’s a whole nother form of credit that we haven’t talked about on today’s podcast, and that is using corporate mortgages, corporate vendor lines, corporate trade lines. And so those are a much more lucrative long term form of financing, like when I bought the funding road building and a variety of different commercial buildings, I bought them using corporate credit, not using the business credit cards.

I used the business credit cards to rehab them, but I used the corporate credit to purchase them. That’s another thing that we teach within our program when when someone gets started with us, part of our consulting is to help them with their entity. You’d be surprised how often their entity, they have not kept up with it. With the Secretary of State, it hasn’t been paid.

They switched their industry. At some point. A lot of business owners tried more than one thing, and so their Nikes codes are completely wrong from what they originally registered their entity as to what it is today. And so we’re helping them with a variety of different things. Now, the very fact that funding grows a consulting service and works with the client long term does not just work with them through an application process, then charge thousands of dollars in fees.

The fact that we work with them long term, that is another thing that sets fund and grow apart from the other credit stacking companies. The FTC has this thing that they call the questionable value doctrine. They say if you are if a clients are paying you to fill out credit card applications and you’re only working with them for that period of time, it’s indefensible.

They will shut your company down regardless of the fee structure, regardless if you charge up front or on the back end, it doesn’t matter. What is defensible is to be a long term consulting service that works with a client for 12 months or longer, where you’re giving them expert education, strategic coaching, ongoing financial management that produces results that they could not achieve on their own.

That is the difference. And so when funding growth pulled our data from 2025, we had generated around 175 million in funding, 175 million in business credit cards. Now, on the initial approval, when we applied for the client last year, we generated $48 million at the time of the application. So out of the 175, only 48 million at the time of the application.

Then we stacked on top of that 48 million, an additional 126 million. By walking the client through our negotiation process, which is to teach them how to communicate with the underwriter, how to verify themselves, how to ask for the higher limits, how to merge their old interest bearing credit cards from the same bank into the new applications. And that generated 126 million.

That 126 million is 72.4% of all the funding that we’re generating. So another way of saying this, Jordan, is that 72.4% of the time, the client would not get this outcome without our consulting services. That is substantial education. Our program is a comprehensive program teaching business credit strategy, financial management, long term growth. And that’s the primary value and knowledge of our program, not just the applications.

And so and that comes through I’ll be honest to interrupt you that that really comes through in, you know, in your approach, your team’s approach in how like I’ve now spoken to so many in your team and and it comes you know what what I immediately caught on to as a differentiator that I could see is when I think when I would think of a normal company that I may look to for funding.

I’m looking at them. I’m not looking. They’re not I’m not thinking. They’re there to help me. Quite honestly, I’m not, you know, I’m not thinking they’re there to help me. I’m not thinking that they give about me. Quite honestly, I think that they’re going to run some numbers and then, you know, and make some decisions, and that’s all there is to it.

But what really stuck out for me was that, you know, the emphasis that you guys have on this, you know, on on empowering people with the knowledge of how to do, do better because a lot of small businesses, you know, and quite honestly, going, I’m not going to dwell on any more on the compliance bit, but a lot of small businesses make mistakes not because they are trying to do something wrong, they just don’t know any better.

And like a lot of small businesses, you know, you look at a landscape, you I don’t know how I could I wouldn’t know that I could roll over this credit card into this because it’s the same bag. You know, I wouldn’t know that I can ask this question, or I wouldn’t know that I can benefit from this, or I wouldn’t know that I’m doing this the wrong way.

Right? I’m not doing it on purpose, I simply don’t. It’s not my business model to know. And what I really loved about your guys approach and what I’ve loved, you know, as I’ve gotten to know the company so well, is not only do you have a very transparent model that never tries to hide anything, right? There’s no sort of sneaky bit of bullshit that you see sometimes, but also you have such, you know, it’s so clear that you’re going to go through this journey with the customer and try and get them in the knowledge and head space and opportunity to thrive in a way that I don’t think I’ve seen before.

Well, thank you for that. And we work very hard to to create that transparency. And we want to earn repeat customers. We’ve we’ve had affiliates that have worked with us for at this point, 18 years. We literally ran into them in in the second year of us being in business. And they’re still they’re still promoting us to this day.

There’s so many people out there that that were businesses out there that talk about the day of a lifetime affiliate referral program, that your client will be that your client, and you’ll get paid on them every time they sign up, and then they’re out of business in a year from now. And so we’ve had affiliates where they refer clients to us, and they’ve signed up every year for like five, six, seven years in a row or every other year.

And the affiliate keeps getting paid over and over and over again. And one of the one of the things I want to say real quick is that in today’s day and age, so many people are falling into what I call the AI trap. They think that you can use AI to get business credit, and business credit is not something that you’re going to be able to get through consulting with AI.

AI is great. I use it all the time. I love AI and I love it like your service. You know, in terms of the the way the AI can be used in technology, it’s absolutely amazing. It can be used in marketing, it can be used in response. There are so many things that it can be used in. But one thing that it can’t do is it can’t tell you how a lender is likely to evaluate your profile.

It can’t build a sequencing strategy that is based off of the last 30 days of approvals and declines. That’s actively looking at credit reports and then seeing what the results are that Chase Bank and Bank of America and all the rest they’re actively approving right now. It can’t replace the critical thinking behind 35,000 clients and 2.1 billion in funding that we’ve done over the last 19 years.

And so that’s something that sometimes we have people come to our sales department. They’re like, I put my information into ChatGPT and we’re like, what? You put your personal information into this public platform. And they’re like, yeah, now I have like 30 inquiries and I didn’t even get any approvals. And so that’s something that we’re that we’re desperately warning people about right now is watch out, AI can do a lot of amazing things.

But, you know, with this is one thing you kind of want to be careful with. I know I, I’ve actually just I just finished a book that I wrote on AI, agent AI and particularly how to, to build, you know, to, to bring a gentle AI into your business. And I just actually got the edit back from the editor today, and I’ve been reading her edits and, you know, to your point, a lot of what I say in the book is like, you know, the power of AI is unquestionable, but with great power comes great responsibility.

We learned that when we were kids from Spider-Man, you know, and and it’s still true. And the people who are just throwing their IP and confidential information. And I talked to a guy the other day who was like, oh, man, it’s great. I checked my whole customer registry. You know, my customer listened to ChatGPT and they and they came up with all sorts of insights.

I was like, yeah, so do you pay for do you have to cordon off? You have a secured all that. And he’s like, no, no, it’s just the free version. I was like, oh you idiot. So I think your point is well put. Let’s, let’s close this episode. I mean, I think there’s so much interesting things here. There’s such an opportunity for people to have a new and broader understanding of where they can get not only the credit opportunities with your company, but also the education.

How do people find you, like like how do people best benefit? What are the best ways for someone who who listens to this and goes, God damn, this sounds good to get in touch with your amazing team. So the best way is to go to funding. Com and you will see that there is a pre-qualification link. So if you pre-qualified now of course you could just call our call our company.

You’ll find our our phone number on the website. Or you could go through the pre-qualification tool. And in this tool you can, through a soft inquiry, determine how much funding you may be able to receive right away. So like, how much funding could I get in my first round of funding? What could I get over the life of the program?

And so the pre-qualification tool, it’s free. No obligation, no hard inquiry to determine what you might qualify for. And so it’s really easy. We make the process super simple. And that is the fastest, quickest way to see what you qualify for. You can also click to add a credit partner. And then you could do you and your husband or wife or your business partner or a family member.

And then that way you could see what you would get on on a full membership. So going to fund and grow and doing the pre-qualification is the easiest and quickest way. Fantastic. You know what I’m going to do. We’re actually just about to launch a new dashboard inside a smrtPhone. Inside of our product. I’m going to make sure that we put on the new dashboard.

We’ve got a little section where we can showcase, you know, podcast episodes and things we’re doing. I’m going to make sure we have a banner, a showcase of this fun and grow of the pre-qualification link so that on smrtPhone, you know, anybody listening will be able to actually just go inside a smrtPhone and click that link and take them straight to the pre-qualification questionnaire because it’s easy, it’s simple, it’s quick, and it’ll open their minds and eyes to what they can achieve.

That’s awesome, I love it. Well, listen, Ari, A it’s just a great pleasure to speak with you. Always a great pleasure to see my you, my friend. I’m grateful that we’ve been able to get to know each other and that I’ve been able to start to work and get to know with your team. And I’m so grateful that you come on today to to give people in smrtPhone community the, the, you know, a new insight into how they can leverage your company for education and for access to, to capital.

So thank you so much for having me on today, Jordan. I really appreciate it. Have a great week, everybody. Thanks for listening to another amazing episode of that real estate tech guy. Head over to that real estate tech guy. Com to check out all episodes and get special discounts on tons of awesome real estate technology platforms.