Sell-Side Transaction Manager - manda

Job description

The company Small businesses move fast. Opportunities often don’t wait, and cash flow pressures can appear overnight. To keep going, and growing, SMEs need finance that’s as flexible and responsive as they are. That's why we built iwoca. Our smart technology, data science and five-star customer service ensures business owners can act with the speed, confidence and control they need, exactly when it's needed. We’ve already cleared the way for 100,000 businesses with more than £4 billion in funding. Our passionate team is driven to help even more SMEs succeed, through access to better finance and other services that make running a business easier. Our ultimate mission is to support one million SMEs in their defining moments, creating lasting impact for the communities and economies they drive. We're looking for a Sell-Side Transaction Manager to join the manda Deal Team! You will work with small business owners to help them successfully sell their businesses, across the entire M&A process. manda is where AI meets Mergers & Acquisitions, iwoca's new M&A platform. Over the last months we have built an unbeatable proposition for the UK market of buying and selling small businesses. As a result, our pipeline has been growing rapidly, and we’re now looking to expand. It is still difficult for business owners to sell their business or buy others in the sub-£10m EV market. Information asymmetry, lack of knowledge and low transaction amounts make it challenging. Many M&A companies shy away from serving this segment as they find it hard to do so profitably. Iwoca has a deep footprint into the SME economy, with 150,000+ business as customers in the UK alone. We enabled this success by iwoca’s ability to build clean, efficient, and automated processes, which manda will now leverage to build the only M&A platform in the UK. Your mission is to build and close a portfolio of seller mandates, sourced from three channels we already run: inbound from iwoca's 150,000+ SME customers, automated outbound to vendors matching live buyer mandates, and referrals from the searchers and acquirers in our buy-side pipeline. You won't be cold-calling from a list, but you will rigorously qualify a managed flow of warm leads. Your job includes challenges like establishing price realism and evaluating company sellability. Ultimately deciding which mandates are worth progressing and converting into completed transactions. The team You'll join the founding team building manda as a high-growth venture inside iwoca, with the autonomy and pace of a startup and the data, infrastructure, and credibility of a lender with 150,000+ SME customers behind you. Day-to-day you'll work alongside our first sell-side Transaction Manager, splitting the seller portfolio and trading playbooks as we figure out what works. You'll partner closely with our buy-side Transaction Manager, who runs a live pipeline of qualified searchers and acquirers, that's your buyer pool, not a cold market. You'll also work directly with the Venture Lead on positioning, pricing, and the bigger calls on how the platform evolves. The role You'll own the sell-side journey of your portfolio end-to-end, from intake through completion. What makes this different from a traditional brokerage seat: you're not hunting for buyers on the open market. manda runs a live buy-side pipeline of qualified searchers and acquirers, and we're piloting acquisition finance through iwoca, so the buyers you bring to your sellers are pre-qualified and often pre-financed. Your edge is a structured process, a captive buyer pool, and the ability to put financing on the table. Your job is to convert that edge into closed transactions. The requirements - 3+ years of SME M&A experience from a broker, advisory firm, or deal platform, with evidence of end-to-end deal execution under time pressure. - Ability to manage sellers with strongly varying M&A experience and impose price realism while maintaining trust and rapport. - Treat your portfolio like a P&L, you know which deals are moving, which are stalling, which to cut, and you make those calls without being asked. - Comfort with rapidly evolving processes and new tooling (including AI), with a high-output mindset and consistent delivery of iwoca-grade customer experience. - Fluency in UK SME deal structures, Share Purchase Agreement (SPA) terms, and payment mechanisms including earnouts and deferred consideration. - Comfortable interfacing with legal counsel, financial buyers, and accounting firms, coordinating between multiple parties through diligence and documentation. - Strong commercial instinct when working through incomplete information and maintaining deal velocity across a portfolio. - Comfortable being on the phone for hours a day, building trust quickly with business owners and reading emotional signals over the line. Bonus, but not required:- - Experience working with imperfect financial data and owner-managed businesses in the £500k-£10m enterprise value range. - Understanding of financial due diligence outputs and how to translate technical findings into actionable seller guidance. The salary We expect to pay a base range of £40,000 to £90,000 (OTE: £90K – £240K) for this role, depending on experience and location. Compensation includes a performance-linked incentive based on a fixed percentage of the transaction fees you generate. With this structure, performers typically earn total compensation between 1.5× and 2.5× base. We're open-minded, so definitely include your salary goals with your application. We routinely benchmark salaries against market rates, and run quarterly performance and salary reviews. The culture At iwoca, the best idea wins. We model our culture on independent thinking, challenging untested logic, and evidence-based decisions. We prioritise learning and growth, and give people the autonomy to develop in the direction that makes them most effective. We're a tech company and believe in the power of AI to help us work faster and better. We provide the infrastructure where every iwocan always has access to the best models and where those models have access to all of our data. We will help our people to learn how to use and grow with the new tools available to them. The offices We put a lot of effort into making iwoca a great place to work: - Offices in London, Leeds, Berlin, and Frankfurt with plenty of drinks and snacks. - Events and community-led groups, including running groups, padel, and monthly ping-pong and pool competitions. The benefits - Flexible working hours. - Medical insurance from Vitality, including discounted gym membership. - A private GP service (separate from Vitality) for you, your partner, and your dependents. - 25 days’ holiday per year, an extra day off for your birthday, the option to buy or sell an additional five days of annual leave, and unlimited unpaid leave. - A one-month, fully paid sabbatical after four years. - Instant access to external counselling and therapy sessions for team members that need emotional or mental health support. - 3% Pension contributions on total earnings. - An employee equity incentive scheme. - Generous parental leave and a nursery tax benefit scheme to help you save money. - Electric car scheme and cycle to work scheme. - Two company retreats a year: we’ve been to France, Italy, Spain, and further afield. And to make sure we all keep learning, we offer: - A learning and development budget for everyone. - Company-wide talks with internal and external speakers. - Access to learning platforms like Treehouse. Useful links: - iwoca benefits & policies https://coda.io/@iwocauk/iwoca-benefits-policies-uk