Joseph Khal

Q. What made you consider moving to broking?

Becoming a broker was never really on the radar for me. I really loved being at AFG, I was there for a long time and grew within the business and then moved into the state manager role and running NSW. At no point did I say, “I’m going to be a broker in the next few years.”

But you know, things happen, things change, life changes, and your perception of certain things changes as well. The opportunities come up. When you’re a BDM, you meet a lot of brokers and you always get asked the question.

One day. I was thinking, “What does the next two/five/10 years look like. What does the future look like for me and my family if I’m self-employed? What I can build?” And [becoming a broker] was pretty appealing.

Q. Why did you decide to join The Lending Alliance?

Keegan Rezek [director of The Lending Alliance] and I have been good friends for a long, long time. The opportunity to go in and be a partner in that business – which is a good strong business with a really decent size book, a great team, and processes already built – [it] was like the cheat code going in, as a partner in that business. I was able to just hit the ground running.

Q. You set yourself some pretty lofty targets for your first year in broking. What were they?

I set a pretty ambitious goal. I said to myself, “First month in business – $3 million. $3 million is going to be lodged.”

My business partner Keegan [Rezek] went, “You’re off your head. No one does $3 million in their first month!”

But I was like, “I’m going to do it. I’m going to do it.”

Q. Did you manage to hit the target?

I didn’t do it, but I did $2.8 million. I was very, very lucky though. Extremely lucky. It consisted of six applications for three different clients, so they had two each. It was as ‘vanilla’ (if we’re allowed to say that word still because it doesn’t really exist anymore) as they come: PAYG, sub-60 per cent, each one had two investment properties.

It was an absolute walk in the park – all six of them went formal within 24 hours – a testament to how good our back-end team is as well.

They were pretty simple, but I think I had a bit of punishment for the following six because they were tough deals. I went from six PAYG clean deals to six self-employed deals with trusts and multiple trusts and commercial components!

Q. What tools do you use to make life easier?

Quickli is an extremely powerful tool. What I say to anyone that was a broker prior to Quickli being created is, “I don’t know how you did it!” To go through and do multiple servicing calculators back and forth!

Quickli is an amazing tool. It really, really is. And we use BrokerEngine as well. Again, I don’t know how anyone operated as a broker without it! It just makes life so easy. Whether it’s collecting data, documentation, even the communication with the customer back and forth, setting all that up.

The client should never have to reach out to you. You’re always talking to them. You’re always communicating with them every step of the way. That’s what the systems do for us.