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A life-threatening incident forced mortgage broker Tim Reynolds to re-evaluate his life goals and career path, and steered him into broking.
Mr Reynolds, the director and founder of Melbourne-based brokerage Accession Finance, has held a variety of roles across different industries, including area manager of fast-food chain KFC and store manager at Coles.
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It was during his tenure at Coles that he was confronted with an attacker, which compelled him to re-examine his life and his career goals.
Speaking to The Adviser’s Elite Broker podcast about the harrowing incident, Mr Reynolds said: “I was working within a store in Melbourne’s West. It was a pretty rough part of town.
“I was actually chased by a guy with a knife for two kilometres that he picked up from the fresh produce prep area while working at one of the Coles’ stores. Looking back at the footage, he was only seconds away from me at the time.”
Mr Reynolds said he took some time off work following the incident and pondered about how his life would have changed if the perpetrator had caught him.
“There were so many ‘what ifs’ that goes through your head in a situation like that, that made me really sit back and say, ‘what am I doing?’” he said.
Mr Reynolds said that while his previous roles were challenging, they provided him with the level of income that he desired, which convinced him to continue in those roles.
“It was never tough enough for me to throw in the towel and say, ‘I don’t want to do it anymore’,” he said.
“But this was the switch that allowed me to reflect on the fact that something like this did happen within a workplace that you wouldn’t expect it to.”
This led him to proactively consider the next step in his career and his life, which is when he stumbled upon mortgage broking.
Having worked in management roles before, where he was collaborating with a team of people to achieve common goals, Mr Reynolds felt that these skills were transferrable into mortgage broking.
“Although it’s slightly different from mortgage broking in the sense that the teams I was working with was 200 to 300 people, it still at its core had the same outcome,” he said.
“I mentioned mortgage broking to my wife who thought it was an amazing fit for me, and within the day had done the research and found providers that would do the Certificate IV (in mortgage broking), the diploma, and even researched some opportunities with aggregators and different broking models.
“That’s how the business really came about.”
Mr Reynolds also said that his wife, Natalie Reynolds – who works at Accession Finance in a finance and marketing role – assisted him with researching and choosing aggregators and associations, and “simplified” the process of choosing one for his brokerage.
Ultimately, Mr Reynolds chose the Mortgage & Finance Association of Australia (MFAA) as they required a higher qualification at the time, he said.
Elaborating on his reasons for choosing the MFAA, Mr Reynolds said: “I certainly felt [that] coming from a non-banking background and immediately needing to build trust with clients, having that higher qualification was something that I can certainly leverage on within my appointments.”
As for choosing an aggregator, Mr Reynolds said that this was a longer process.
“I sat down with a lot of the BDMs, and I ended up choosing Choice because of the immediate relationship that I built with my aggregator BDM, Tim Schneider, and I hit it off straight away,” he said.
‘Everything happens for a reason’
Reflecting on his life-changing experiences that led him to a career in mortgage broking, Mr Reynolds said that while he feels that he did not act in any way that could have triggered the attacker, the attacker may have had their own reasons for their actions.
He concluded: “At the end of the day, it wasn’t really anything that I did that created this situation to then [have it] happen to me.
“I’m a big believer that everything happens for a reason.”
To listen to the full Elite Broker podcast with Tim Reynolds, click here:
[Related: The accession of Accession Finance]
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