Today’s Interview:

Joe Kerwin, Chief Marketing Officer at Lendistry, based out of Los Angeles, California.

Welcome to another episode of The Marketer’s Edge, a series designed to share senior level marketing perspective about marketer challenges, opportunities, and agency relationships. Today, we are talking with Joe Kerwin, the Chief Marketing Officer at Lendistry, based out of Los Angeles, California.

Lendistry is a minority-led and technology-enabled small business and commercial real estate lender with Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) and Community Development Entity (CDE) certification.

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Our goal is to help marketers learn from other marketers across different industries and to help provide perspective for agencies about the things marketers deal with every day, to help them better represent their clients and win new business.

What We Discussed:

In today’s interview with Joe, we discussed how Lendistry found a very unique and ownable space in the funding of underserved business owners.

We also talked about the challenges in presenting themselves as a legitimate player in their space given there are companies out there that are somewhat predatory in the way they loan to the underserved?  We talked about the ways they’ve managed it and how they’ve put themselves in a different space – the messaging and tools they’ve used.

We discussed the value of key partnerships and how they’ve been able to leverage those partnerships (e.g., mentoring and training) to be of greater value to their customer base.

We talked about how organizations like their builds awareness and interest among potential loan sources.

Joe and I talked about what they’ve done during the pandemic that they  see potentially carrying forward post the pandemic?

We talked about their use of in-house agencies and how that has changed over the years.  We discussed the advantages he thinks in-house firms provides him over bringing in agencies to help out?

We than asked Joe our final two questions of every interview:

Any advice you’d give to marketers thinking about bringing a new agency on board?

Some good perspective offered by Joe, who has spent multiple decades working with agencies prior to joining Lendistry.

And lastly, we asked Joe…if an agency was trying to knock down his door and attempting to win business from him, what advice would he give the agency?

Also, some great advice that’s sure to help many agencies!

Thanks Joe Kerwin for a great interview!

A little bit about Joe:

Joe is a graduate of the University of Tulsa and received his Masters in Arts at DePaul University.  Prior to Lendistry, Joe was employed by Wells Fargo for nearly 20 years.  He also worked for other Financial and FinTech companies.