Lead generation is about the right people and proper follow-up, not just more names. Alex Shvarts and Brett Rosenblatt break down what business owners get wrong before hiring a lead-gen agency.
Welcome to Unbankable, the podcast for entrepreneurs who won’t take no for an answer. I’m Alex Shvarts. Today we dive into lead generation, not just any leads, but the kind that convert into paying customers. You can have the best product in the world, but if you can’t consistently generate quality leads, you don’t have a business.
My guest is Brett Rosenblatt, founder and CEO of BizConnect, who has generated over 5 million consumer leads in financial services since the late 1990s. Most businesses that banks won’t fund struggle with one thing: consistent, predictable revenue, and Brett builds the lead-generation systems to fix that.
On the biggest mistake businesses make: most marketing has moved digital, specifically social media, and people who try it themselves often don’t know enough and burn hundreds or thousands of dollars before realizing it isn’t working. The other trap is hiring a self-proclaimed young ‘lead-gen expert’ who has never worked in alternative finance, charges upfront, and keeps telling you to ‘just keep spending’ while pushing the goal line further. The real issue is usually lack of the right guidance, not that social media doesn’t work.
On how the process works: it starts with a conversation to map the plan and define what a qualified versus unqualified lead looks like, then concepts, copy, and images or videos approved by the client. Generating a lead is the easy part; separating qualified from unqualified is the hard part. They use a funnel like a flowchart, each question routes people left or right, which both gives the client better leads and feeds the profile of a ‘winner’ back to Meta so the platform learns who to target.
On targeting under Meta’s restrictions: to prevent discrimination, financial-services, housing, and education categories can no longer target by age, gender, or tight geography, the minimum is now a 15-mile radius. BizConnect’s edge is data: over 13 years they’ve amassed huge pools of business-owner records, so they upload a custom audience (say 200,000 plumbers), Meta matches who’s active, and they serve ‘we fund plumbers’ ads only to known plumbers, then send clicks to a matching landing page. It’s like old-school direct mail where you already knew who was on the list.
On why campaigns fail: rarely the ad itself, because there are countless levers to adjust. The usual broken link is the client’s back end, leads that aren’t auto-emailed, auto-texted, assigned immediately, or called fast and repeatedly. Without automation and a workflow in place, even great leads die.
On ROI: it varies by industry, financial services often see 3:1 to 5:1 over time, boosted by renewals from past clients that carry no new marketing cost months later. Bigger-ticket categories like doctors and dentists may see a larger return up front.
On why you keep seeing the same ad: Meta buckets users by behavior, so when you stop, click, or comment on something like a debt product, you’re flagged as interested and everyone targeting that interest starts serving you. Brett noted the copycat ads under different company names are usually other sellers imitating something they see running, assuming it must be working.
On social media versus traditional media: in the old days you’d spend $10-20K to produce a TV or radio spot plus more on airtime, then wait two weeks to learn if it worked. Social lets you test many variations simultaneously on a tiny budget ($5-10 a day). Cost is based on CPM (cost per thousand impressions), which drops when your ad is relevant, baby-stroller ads shown to expecting mothers get clicks and a low CPM, while the same ad to 80-year-old men gets ignored and costs far more.
On staying relevant as an experienced operator in a young person’s field: Brett hires young staff (most under 25) who know the inner workings of the platforms, while he brings 30-plus years of seeing not just the marketing side but the back end of running real businesses. Many talented young marketers can drive a low cost-per-lead yet miss why it’s still failing inside the business; that full-picture judgment is what separates a seasoned agency, and younger clients respect that knowledge base.
On budgeting: treat it as an investment, not instant gratification. BizConnect spends slowly at the start to build a predictable, scalable pipeline, so a client knows roughly how many leads per day and deals per month to expect, and scaling later just means adding fuel to a built foundation. Anyone thinking they’ll drop $200-300 on a few ads and close three deals is, in Brett’s words, in la-la land, you’re building a pipeline.
On AI: BizConnect uses it heavily, feeding winning creatives in to find the common thread and generate new variations, and feeding platform data in to validate why something is succeeding or lagging. But AI still needs human input today; it does the thinking once a human tells it what to extract, it isn’t running itself. As I put it, AI is processing in 30 seconds what we spent a lifetime building.
On choosing a lead-gen provider: research the company and make sure they know your industry’s front end and back end. Then prioritize accessibility and communication, how often can you talk, can you book a weekly call, are they reachable in an emergency, or will you be handed to a junior. When communication breaks down, or when you can’t pinpoint the right audience and message, that’s when to part ways, ideally before getting too deep into it.
On Brett’s origins: he started at a small traditional ad agency (print, TV, radio), moved into mortgage banking in the late ’90s generating 6,000-7,000 inbound leads a day, built CRMs before CRMs were a thing, and around 2012-2013 shared office space with an alternative business lender who asked if he could generate leads on Facebook. He said ‘let’s try,’ and that became the business. Ads worked then and still work now.
On what keeps him up at night and what drives him: the things outside his control, a universal Meta change he must adapt to fast (being a badged Meta agency, he often gets the information early). His worst days are technology outages, when one broken cog cascades. What drives him is seeing clients happy and creating something from nothing, taking a company from $5-10K a month to $300-400K from the platform he builds. I closed with my own answer: every day is my best day, the chance to do what I love with passion and energy, and my hardest days are people-related, when you put everything into trusting the wrong person; both can happen the same day, and that balance is what keeps me steady.
Founder & CEO, Biz Connect Ads
Buying more leads without qualifying them or following up, the failure usually happens after the lead arrives.
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