Every client you have ever won, you went out and got yourself.

You have a business built entirely on your own arm.

In 25 years, D.E. Bottom Line has been sold three ways: cold outreach you personally run, referrals, and renewals from clients who were happy with the delivery. That is a real business, and it is also a business with no third source. The organic side has produced no leads at all.

Both channels that do work are attached to you. Outreach runs when you run it, referrals arrive at the pace your existing clients happen to talk. Neither one compounds while you sleep, and neither one can be turned up without more of your hours. You are ramping outbound properly again now, which is the right move, and it will hit the same ceiling it hit before.

Nobody in cost recovery is famous. There is no recognisable face in a category that hands companies back six and seven figures. That opening is the whole opportunity here.

Two things are missing, and this document proposes building both.

1. A demand engineLong-form video that makes you the recognised authority in cost recovery, so that work arrives without you going out to find it. Positioning, strategy and direct weekly work from Elias.
2. The infrastructure to convert itSegmented landing pages, a diagnostic, tailored lead magnets, nurture, and a pre-call process that puts a warm, educated buyer on your calendar. Built and operated by Nathan.

The commercial structure is a €15,000 build fee, then a share that only starts once you have collected your first €15,000 of attributable revenue. Section 08 sets it out in full.

Four gaps, and what each one costs you.

Everything below comes from your own account of how the business has run for 25 years, ordered by what it costs to leave in place.

The Ryan Serhant of saving money.

Serhant was a competent broker in a city full of competent brokers. What separated him was published volume, and the brand that came out of it now feeds the brokerage. Deals arrive because he is the person people already think of when they think about the category.

Cost recovery has no such person. There is no face attached to a service that hands companies back six and seven figures, which means the position is sitting open in a category with real money in it and no incumbent holding the ground. We think you should take it, and we think the raw material is already there: 25 years of findings, a delivery record that generates referrals on its own, and someone who is comfortable on camera and has already published 471 times.

The target is that people in your verticals already know who you are before you ever email them.

What that changes commercially is the direction of the relationship. Today you open every conversation, so you carry the burden of proof from a standing start. When the prospect arrives already knowing your work, the call stops being an argument about credibility and becomes a discussion about scope, which is a shorter call, a higher close rate, and materially less pressure on your rate.

Building that is one half of the work. The other half is making sure the attention has somewhere to go.

The conversion infrastructure.

Owned end to end by Nathan. Everything between the first click and a sales call you no longer have to open from a standing start.

A prospect has to travel from not knowing you exist to trusting you with their vendor contracts. That journey is made of small steps, each easy on its own, and your current path asks them to take all of them at once.

Make Your Name Big, built by our head of marketing. A still does not carry it, because the site is heavily animated, so it is worth 30 seconds at makeyournamebig.com. Included as a reference for the production standard we hold ourselves to, not as a template for your funnel, which has a different job to do.

• 3 segmented landing pages, one each for nonprofit, manufacturing and professional services, written in that industry's vocabulary and against its specific spend categories.
• A short diagnostic on the page. Name, email, organisation, plus 3 or 4 questions on spend categories, approximate annual spend, vendor review process and biggest known pain. Short enough to avoid friction, sharp enough to be useful to you before the first call.
• A library of 5 to 10 lead magnets. Their answers decide which one they receive, so what a nonprofit CFO gets is not what a plant manager gets.
• Immediate redirect from opt-in to booking, because the visitor is at their highest intent in the seconds after they submit. The booking page carries a short video from you covering who you are, how the model works, and why you come in below the larger firms.
• A pre-call process that does the selling before you arrive. Between the booking and the call the prospect gets your objection and FAQ library on camera, the proof relevant to their industry, and a preparation step that has them bring their actual spend detail. The questions you answer on every call get answered once, in advance.
• A nurture sequence per industry for the people who did not book, plus long-cycle reactivation so a lead is never spent after one attempt.

Two loops, running at different speeds.

The first loop is the fast one and it runs on outbound you are already sending. A prospect gets your email, looks you up, finds substantial long-form work instead of a thin profile, and replies. Same volume, better reply rates, better close rates, more cash collected. It starts returning within weeks because it needs no new audience, only something worth finding.

The second loop is the one that changes the business. Long form brings people who were never on any list, the segmented page and diagnostic capture them, the nurture warms them, and the pre-call process delivers them ready. It is slower to arrive, it has no upper limit once it does, and it is the only route to a business that generates clients while you are delivering for the ones you have.

Paid ads sit on top of both, once the organic conversion is proven. Running them earlier buys traffic for a machine nobody has validated yet.

What actually happens, and when.

The half of this we cannot do for you.

Nathan's half runs with almost no load on you. The content half needs you in the room, so here is exactly how much.

Most of what we earn only exists once you have already been paid.

What this looks like at three outcomes

If nothing lands and attributable revenue stays under €15,000, your total cost is the build fee alone, you keep everything you collect, and no share is ever charged.

The honest version of the margin question

At the 85% to 90% margins you described, a 20% share moves you to roughly 65% to 70% on attributable revenue. That trade is only worth making where the revenue would not have existed otherwise, and on inbound it demonstrably would not, because you have none today. Repeat business is a different case. When a client comes back for a fourth or a tenth project the reason is your delivery rather than our funnel, which is why the rate halves to 10% from the second engagement onward and stays there.

Two people on this, and you deal with both of them directly.

Elias Müller, Pace Collective

Positioning, brand architecture, long-form strategy and the weekly work with you directly.

Nathan Jeeves, Pace Collective

The funnel architecture, the operations and the pre-call process, from the first click through to the call.

Those first 3 come from information-product and agency businesses, where the buyer and the sales cycle look nothing like yours. They are evidence that the method has been run repeatedly, not a forecast for cost recovery. Samu is the number closest to your situation, because it shows what a single asset does when it is engineered for one specific buyer rather than for reach. Figures are stated in each client’s own currency.

Stripe, 20 January to 20 November 2025. NZ$41,660 across the preceding period against NZ$2.26M succeeded across this one, with the steepest part of the curve in the closing weeks. Shown unedited, including declined charges and refunds, because a panel with the awkward numbers left in is worth more than a headline figure with nothing behind it.

You have been sold to before, so we will state the downside ourselves.

• No revenue guarantee. Outcomes depend on the market, on your delivery, and on whether the cadence holds through the quiet months.
• No promise on views. Views are the wrong metric for what you sell. Cash collected is the number we will both be looking at.
• Little from the content in the first 30 days. Building a category-defining brand is a long process and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. The infrastructure half moves faster and should be converting inside the first 6 weeks.
• No ads until the organic conversion is proven. Amplifying something unvalidated is the fastest way to burn budget.

The genuine variable is consistency held over months rather than weeks. You already have the subject-matter competence, 25 years of stories worth somebody's time, and the ease on camera, and 471 published posts says you are not the sort of person who stops. Where obstacles come up, and they will, we solve them together, which is the whole reason the majority of our compensation sits on the other side of your revenue rather than in front of it.